DRAFT PAPER 3 "Pretty scary! An account of research on how pupils and students experience answering questions and presenting in whole class contexts, with a focus on what coping strategies they employ."

Powerpoint presentation by Dr Julie Anderson

Please do not quote without permission from Julie Anderson

Presentation by Dr Julie Anderson at the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning (ISSOTL) Conference 2007.

Introduction:

On reading John Holt’s book How Children Fail in the 1990s when still working full time as a school teacher of Year 5 pupils, I was taken aback by his description of the fear and anxiety pupils told him they felt when being asked questions in his classroom. He came over as a caring, supportive teacher - so why were the children so nervous? So began work on an issue that has occupied me ever since and taken me from working with Year 5 school children in a NW England school - to Masters students at the University of Bristol. A very different group of learners and yet, as it turned out, sharing much the same experience.

“Pretty scary” was the response from a year 4 (8/9 years old) pupil in a school in North West England when I asked her how she felt when a teacher asked her a question in class.

I was talking to her as part of what became my doctoral research into how primary pupils perceive answering questions in front of their peers and teachers and her response was typical. What I also found in that particular study was that not only did almost every pupil in her mixed ability classroom find answering questions stressful to some extent, they were also commonly employing coping strategies that were both sophisticated and subtle. My concern was that this could not be enhancing their learning.