Assemblies can be nerve wracking. I know of teachers who have spent decades avoiding having to deliver them, I also know of staff who relish the opportunity to share experiences and share expertise. Last Friday I witnessed one of the worst assemblies I have ever seen. Ultimately, no matter how experienced you are, never take assemblies for granted – you MUST prepare, if you just bumble your way through without enough thought it can lead to a terrifying, toe curling experience for your students, and their carers.
Expect the Unexpected
As an assistant Head of Year 10 – 300 students – one of the responsibilities was to deliver assemblies. The title I was given was ‘Expect the Unexpected’. The advice from a seasoned assembly deliver was that you need it to be exciting enough not to totally bore your audience where they fidget and become restless, and not make it too interesting so that they get overexcited – pitch it on the right side of boring. Also, as you deliver you must draw an imaginary M in the air, this gives the impression that you are talking to everyone, and avoids you focusing on just a couple of students, as this can be unnerving for them and you lose the rest of your audience. As part of the ‘Expect the Unexpected’ he suggested I opened the assembly with a song the students would never expect – I chose ‘Pretty Vacant’ by The Sex Pistols – it went down well enough, but my underlying memory of this is when one of the Deputy Head stopped me later and said it was difficult to take the exclusion interview with parents and student when ‘Pretty Vacant’ was blasting out. He seemed fine about it – I think…I then went on to tell a story in a broad Geordie dialect – I doubt they actually understood that much of it, but my Head of English who I had the ultimate respect for said it was great – so it must have been, otherwise she would not have said it.
Personal Experiences
I have a story for every occasion, much to my friends’ annoyance, but it is a useful skill in teaching English. I once had to observe a Vice Principal who had been on a course that had said you had to share your experiences with the students to get their respect, and to get them to engage. I totally agree, and English teaching naturally gives you opportunities to do this. Nevertheless, his interpretation of this was to talk us through his holiday photographs in his motorhome in the South of France. It was like being trapped in a 1970s sitcom where the neighbours turn up with a slide show of their holiday. If you are sharing your experiences, make them relevant, and slightly interesting.
ROTATION
If you are going to repeat an assembly, make sure the students haven’t seen it. There was one senior teacher who would whip out a photograph – only for the kids to groan ‘not this one again’ by year 10 it was the FOURTH time they had heard it – and it was dull every single time.
Michael Gove’s infamously boring speech to a school assembly always raises a smile:
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https://youtu.be/1qQL5L31-1E
Take a look for instant advice about how not to deliver an assembly to students.
The Sermon – the worst yet!
I sat through an assembly last Friday with my head literally in my hands. It was to a Junior school – year 3 to year 6, and the Head announced that instead of a prayer, he was going to have a thought for today. He then went on to describe the incident where the 10 people who were on the sacred mountain in Malaysia had stripped off and taken photographs, despite being told not to by the guide. These photographs then made it on to social media, and led to some arrests. There are many angles that you could have taken as a moral message to the students, but he went on to describe how ‘it wasn’t a full frontal picture, you only saw their backs, and they turned their faces to the camera, but you couldn’t really see anything’…I could go on. Awful! The teachers watching were frozen to the spot – some stared out of the window, some at their feet, trying desperately to block it out. Based on his interpretation of the event, the thought for the day was ‘Don’t bare your breasts on a sacred mount’ – although not his actual words, it was the strongest message we could muster from this ‘thought’ that to add further insult was in replacement of the end of assembly prayer.
A Final Thought
A message to all teachers, and for that matter everyone who delivers presentations; make sure you plan, prepare, know your audience, make it relevant – and most importantly make sure it is appropriate. You don’t want to be remembered for delivering the worst ever assembly. This assembly would have been on safer territory if it had genuinely been linked to the Sermon on the Mount, instead of some ridiculous interpretation of an incident on a sacred mountain.