Term 4 can be a traumatic time of year for language teachers. Teachers of compulsory subjects have little understanding of the pressure that teachers of elective subjects are under. Nobody enjoys the wait to hear whether their subject will run as an elective in the coming year.
The goal of many teachers is to lure approximately 20-25% of a Year 8 cohort into the year 9 elective course, in order to guarantee a class. Some states are lucky and have guaranteed classes until Year 9 or 10, but inevitably the elective challenge arises at some point.
Regardless of whether you managed to get an elective class or not, term 4 is the most important time of year as it is the perfect time to plan for next year’s direction. So what do you need to do now to ensure long term success and growth?
- Befriend the administrative assistant who enters the students’ elective choices and ask to see how many students picked your subject prior to the final lines being established. This will let you know how successful you were attracting students prior to other factors tainting the results (such as line clashes, students leaving the school etc).
- Keep a record of how your department is going regarding electives across several years, and annotate factors that may have impacted your numbers both positively (eg changing textbooks or purchasing new resources) and negatively (eg teachers on leave, new subject being offered in competition etc). You are aiming for a steady increase.
- Now get access to what students picked for their other electives. What are the most popular subjects in your school? This is valuable information as it can provide you with an overview of trends in your school community. You then need to consider what aspects of these popular subjects you can tap into, to enhance your course. For example if PASS (a sport based subject) is popular, they you may like to include sport based incursions such as kendo or karate lessons into your Stage 5 program. When “MasterChef fever” was as its peak, we introduced a pop-up restaurant assessment task in the schedule.
- Start planning your assessment and incursion/excursion activities for next year with this data in mind. Often it is just a matter of tweaking what you already do to better market your course. We know what we do is awesome but unfortunately many parents and students don’t realise this until it is too late.
- Don’t let it wear you down. What you do is incredible. You just need to ensure more people realise this through reflective practice, use of data and strategic planning. Good luck!
