Cast your mind back 10 years: Blair was out and Brown was in at No 10, Pluto had just been stripped of its “planet” title (in science, if not in our hearts), and Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat was. A. Big. Deal. Ah, simpler times. 

It was then that head of English Rebecca Foster was training to be a teacher. This week, she took to tes.com to share the, uhm, let’s say, more memorable aspects of training in 2006-07:

Lesson hooks

Engaging kids is easy: studying a detective novel? Mock up a crime scene. Reading the final lines of Romeo and Juliet? Whip out some candles and dim the lights. Recalling these teaching practices, Foster wonders: “Did they remember what I taught them or that I got wax on the carpet and set off the fire alarm?”

Relevance is key

Expanding horizons? Why bother? Foster was taught to make everything relevant. How do you make Shakespeare relevant to 14-year-olds? Easy: turn a scene from Much Ado into an EastEnders episode.

Discrete skills

Students need to develop their “thinking skills”, Foster was told. For example, you could start a lesson by asking: ”What colour is Tuesday?” There may be no right answer and it’s got sod all do to with anything else, but it’s good practice. Because students should be better thinkers, right?

Don’t tell students things

Heaven forbid you should spend more than a few minutes explaining anything, Foster writes: “Far better to allow students to come to understanding with minimal guidance from you. In fact, whole lessons in which the teacher didn’t talk at all were lauded.”

If all else fails? Arts and crafts

Not sure how to make your lesson more engaging? Just create a poster, build a sculpture or design a puppet.