One of the unalloyed pleasures of teaching is the opportunity to pass on passion for one’s subject. For just a moment, put aside the pedagogical imperatives of metacognition, the urge at each step to reflect on the process of learning itself or to attend to lesson planning, and instead reignite the fire that drew you to your discipline, and fan the flames of enthusiasm in others.

The summer solstice has passed. You’ve stopped prepping Year 12 students for the exams, keeping them focused on syllabus, question types, mark schemes and assessment criteria. In the short time before term ends, you want to raise their gaze to a broader and more distant horizon. Yesterday you kept them from straying beyond a narrow brief. Now, with Ucas in view, you want them to put down deeper roots. They have a few short months to evidence their abiding love for the subject they want to study at university…

Recommended reading

This invites the pleasure of recommending reading that will - you hope - ignite in your students the same pleasure that you felt in exploring ideas in depth, making connections and drawing conclusions, untrammelled by exam requirements. Given the opportunity, and a student’s initial interest, what do you recommend?

My own favourite, for several years after its first publication almost 20 years ago, was Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel. (History, written by a physiologist turned geographer.) It was something that I could recommend with confidence to anyone thinking about further study of social sciences, history, geography, economics or indeed biology and environmental sciences. It was an early example of what has subsequently come to be called “big history” - global in scale, bringing together several disciplines in an attempt to explain why some parts of the world have developed more rapidly than others.

Besides the subject content, the challenge was getting students to commit to a whole book (this one had more than 400 pages of text), and to engage with an extended, complex argument - albeit one with a very clear theme and a strong argument. The added interest was in the scope for discussion of the book’s approach, assumptions, line of reasoning and conclusions.

Conflating the journey with the destination

Of course the gist can now be googled (the book has its own Wikipedia page), but this would be to miss the texture, the richness of the argument, and the detail in the supporting examples. To take the intellectual shortcut would be to conflate the journey with the destination.

In many ways, Curriculum 2000 and the advent of AS made more difficult the job of encouraging off-syllabus, expansive and engaging reading - it had to be crammed in after the AS exams, when students were emerging, exhausted, from their exam-induced tunnel.

Now, with a return to linearity, there must at least be some hope that breadth can be built in earlier and in a more progressive way.

Before term ends, give students something substantial to see them through the summer.

Dr Kevin Stannard is the director of innovation and learning at the Girls’ Day School Trust. He tweets as @KevinStannard1

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