This Teacher’s Journal: Blog Post 11 | March 29, 2025
This week, my classroom shifted mode again.
Monday marked the start of what I refer to in my seasonal model of a unit as the “harvest season” – a high-stakes examination for my Year 9 and 10 students. While ‘the harvest’ title for this season on the unit might sound oddly poetic, I can’t shake a sense of it as being something a little more dystopian in undertone. So often this time of a unit has an atmosphere that is emotionally and pedagogically charged.
A small yet significant number of students – especially in my Year 10 class – arrived to their examination room this week not just “on edge,” but frayed. Not with the edginess of the focused, high-performing mindset I hope for before a major assessment, but rather with signs of a deeper disquiet: a tension, an anxiety, a tired look in their eyes. It was as though they had spent the weekend memorising lines for a script they hadn’t yet seen. Their examination was unseen, and source-based, and not content oriented as is typical of a QCAA-style short response to historical sources examination. But what I observed in this group of wasn’t the result of appropriate study and revision – it presented as exhaustion resulting from pre-emptive scramble to beat the exam at its own game. And that tells me something important.
Many of these students seemed to believe that they were unprepared to think critically on the spot, in real time. They were trying to outguess, out game ‘the system’. Not because they’re lazy – not at all – but because I suspect some of them have been taught, in the past, that high-stakes assessments are traps. That exams are opportunities to be caught out, not chances to shine. That the system exists to expose what you can’t do.
That’s a culture of mistrust.
From a ‘culture of mistrust’ to a Pedagogy of Preparation
When students approach learning this way, we need to ask: what has conditioned them to expect that assessments are adversarial? What kind of pedagogy cultivates that mindset?
Students I’ve taught in previous years have often walked into the exam room with calm resolve to achieve. Some even looked eager. Most importantly, they trusted me -and they backed themselves. There was, underneath the usual appropriate nervous energy, a confidence that the assessment would measure something real, and that they had the tools to respond.
That trust doesn’t come from content drills and rote learning.
It comes from what I’d call a pedagogy of preparation: soft scaffolds, intellectual stretch ggoals, and the belief that an exam should show what students can do – not what they can’t. All of this is predicated on the belief that students can and should exercise their voice and agency… and that its the teacher’s role to liberate that voice and agency.
A crushing weight of performativity
There was one student this week who particularly caught my eye – an outstanding student, genuinely conscientious, hardworking and sincere.
They presented to the examination room in a way that was close to looking – but not quite looking – distressed.
This was a student who had already demonstrated on multiple occasions to me that knew her work.
I’ve known this student for some time.
Her affect suggested to me the crushing weight of performativity.
Perhaps somewhere in her world, the grade had become the goal. Perhaps somewhere in her world she had been conditioned to equate achievement and compliance with self-worth.
And while I am confident that that pressure didn’t come from me, it walked in with her, and it sat with her during the exam.
This is incredibly sad.
Regimes of agency, resilience, and risk-taking.
After the assessment, the tone changed. Students said they’d found the exam fair, even if not enjoyable, as an opportunity to showcase their skills. They felt stretched, but not broken. They appreciated the chance to show their thinking. I’m glad. But I’m still reflecting on what their anxiety revealed – not just about the exam, but about the broader culture of learning.
We talk often about “agency,” “resilience,” “risk-taking.” But what kind of learning environment actually fosters these? Not one dominated by performative assessment regimes, that’s for sure.
We can’t ask students to be bold thinkers if the system teaches them to fear mistakes more than they value insight.
This week reminded me that performativity is not just a classroom issue – it’s a cultural one.
And it’s antithetical to the kind of agency teachers like to say that we want to nurture.
The tyranny of perfection
There’s a gendered layer here, too. My students are, on balance, privileged young women – supported, well-resourced, ambitious. But they’re also navigating an exhausting double bind: to be assertive but not aggressive; to be successful but not intimidating; to do well but to make it seem effortless; to succeed highly and never to risk error. They carry a thousand contradictory expectations.
This is closely linked to what some feminist theorists describe as the “tyranny of perfection” or “patriarchal perfectionism”* – a term used to capture the impossible and often internalised standards young women are expected to meet. They are urged to be high-achieving, agreeable, attractive, and modest – all at once. This pressure is not just cultural; it is structural. And for many students, it becomes a silent script they are constantly performing.
Freire wrote for the oppressed. Dewey wrote to reform the education of the elite. Perhaps my students, paradoxically, inhabit both worlds. They need a pedagogy that helps them not just to succeed, but to self-author – to claim their voice in a world that often scripts it for them.
An opportunity?
A critical, Freirean, Dewyan inquiry-led, AI-enhanced pedagogy might not yet be scalable for every teacher in every school. It may not even be desirable. But maybe it is most possible and desirable for me. I am blessed to work with learners who are ready, if guided well, to turn uncertainty into insight.
That’s the possibility that the seasonal model revealed to me this week: that each stage of learning has its time, and that the harvest shouldn’t have to be about judgement. It should be put within a wider context. While assessment may be necessary in many educational contexts, it can be about more than measurement. It can be about growth.
If we centre trust – between teacher and student, between learner and self – perhaps the examination room can become less like a proving ground, and more like a place of emergence.
Because in the end, our job isn’t to catch students out. It’s to help them find their voice – and use it well.
* These terms are part of broader feminist critiques of how young women are socialised to meet contradictory, gendered expectations – to be smart but not too smart, assertive but not aggressive, accomplished but modest. A particularly relevant framework is from psychologist Dr. Lisa Damour, who has written about “overcontrolled girls” – those conditioned to equate achievement and compliance with self-worth. This intersects with Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex”, and more recently, with scholars like Soraya Chemaly (Rage Becomes Her) and Peggy Orenstein, who explore how societal expectations can hollow out girls’ sense of authentic agency and replace it with performative success.
Disrupted History 