Teaching poetry at KS3 – why we need more chat in the classroom.

 When did written assessments become the sole way to mark a student’s understanding of a text, idea or concept? The sad thing is that in an attempt to develop students and praise the God of Progress, we have ditched some useful, handy, and relatively easy, ways to judge an assessment. Instead of getting students to explore texts in depth we are stuck on a pretty limited way of analysis.

Three years ago we ditched all written analysis of poetry at KS3. When students were writing essays about Shakespeare and essays about novels, it becomes tedious when you add another essay or essay style writing. We stopped completely. We, well I, felt that all we were doing was repeating the assessing stage and not repeating the idea forming stage. We were obsessed on the marking rather than the thinking. Were we getting students to think of interesting ideas in the poem? No, we were rewarding those interesting ideas in writing, but were we working heavily students learning the ideas and not necessarily coming up with their own interpretations.

There was another important reason for ditching a written assessment on poetry was the workload problem. At different points in the academic year we have Year 7, 8 and 9 not having a written assessment for a term. This alleviates the pressure points of mock marking. The time when teachers mark mocks is a real pressure point, because suddenly a normal workload is increased by 100%. You’ve not just got a pile of work to mark for each class, but now added to that, because it is the educational equivalent of the Easter Bunny leaving a brown treat, you are left with not just one piece of work to mark but the work like bunnies has replicated themselves several times. So, you are left with four essays per student, because it is ‘fun-time mock season’. That’s why we place the spoken assessments at this point. The last thing you want hanging over your heads is another set of marking, when you have thirty Year 7 essays hanging over your head.

So, how do we use poetry? We have an anthology of poems selected from various times, poets and styles and we link them thematically. Then, we work through the poems one at a time. At the end, we get students to compare two poems and make an interesting comparison. Usually, the talk will comprise of the student selecting two lines from the poems and exploring their ideas and their observations. Finally, we assess the talk for performance (pass / merit / distinction) and then for quality of ideas. We have two levels of assessment. The key thing for us is getting students to talk about poems and explore. And, if I am honest this unit involves lots of annotating and lots of talking. Talking is good. Talking is great. Talking is easy. We talk about relationships in Year 7. We talk about voices in Year 8. We talk about setting in Year 9.

For me, the emphasis on raising the quality of discussion is far more productive than the identikit written analysis we were doing before and I talking too of the awful APP units too. We talk before we write. And boy isn’t that the problem with KS3. We write before we talk. ‘Write down your idea before we share it,’ is a phrase often said. Our emphasis is on the written communication. The forming of sentences. The capturing of thoughts on a page. How many teachers fear having a blank page in exercise books at the end of the lesson? 

Ideas need space to form, develop and grown and that happens verbally. One of the things I often say to students is the need to talk in English. Argue. Chat. Disagree. Question. Challenge. Persuade. If a student can talk about something, they can sure as hell write about it. I love being challenged. I had a lengthy debate with one student over the colour of the lighting in An Inspector Calls. He was challenging me and I loved it. I even went to Twitter to seek support. He apparently did a poll with the students on another social media platform. Some might call it a ‘spark of interest’. Another might call it ‘engagement’. I’d call it the exploration of an idea.    

Boys can cope with challenging and complex texts, but has the process of how we do things had a negative impact?  I was that loud mouthed boy at secondary school. I’d talk about anything and everything. Get me involved in a conversation and I was hooked. Give me something at that age and ask me to write about it and I would struggle. I’d struggle because I hadn’t bounced the idea around in my mouth and in the air around me. I hadn’t heard the sound of ideas and heard that one thing sound better than another thing else I had said.  

Again, the problem is the nasty loathsome GCSEs spoiling everything. Because there is a large unseen element of the exams, we have internalised that exam process in planning ideas for lessons. We give students a task and expect them to treat it like an unseen text. Think of an idea on your own and write it down. We don’t go and get them to talk about it first. This process is repeated endlessly in lessons and classrooms. We know boy’s engagement is an issue, but is that engagement something simple like the use of communication skills? Is it our emphasis on writing that is hindering boys’ ability to communicate? We talk about looking for the quick fixes, but could it be as simple case of us using the writing process as the dominant way in rather than the spoken process. We spend half our time telling boys to be quiet, when maybe that should be the thing that we promote. Talk boys, but make sure it is about what we are focusing on in lessons.

Now, I am not advocating people get debates and formal discussions in lessons. In fact, far from it. A debate is probably the last thing we need. I do, however, think we need to explore how we use chat and discussion in lessons. How could we use it to engage students with the ideas, content and texts? Are we turning everything into writing? Do we want English to be the subject that is solely known for writing? Wouldn’t it be better if English was the subject where students felt they thought about things?

Right, here is one such thing I did with some poetry. I revealed the poem ‘Stealing’ by Carol Ann Duffy one line at a time. I then gave students this grid. 

Deeper meaning ·         I think the poem is really saying… ·         For me, the poem is teaching us… ·         On the surface the poem is about … but under the surface it is about…	Comparing to the other poems ·         This poem is a bit like …because…  ·         The poem is the opposite of … because .. ·         I think this poem shows an alternative perspective to … ·         This poem focuses more on … than	Pick on a word and explore ·         The word ‘…’makes me imagine… ·         The word ‘…’ makes me think of … ·         The word ‘...’ reminds me of... ·         The word ‘…’ make me feel …
Feelings ·         To make us feel _________, the writer shows us… ·         To make us feel _________, the writer uses the image of … ·         To make us feel _________, the writer uses the combination of …. and …	Symbols ·         The writer uses …. to be a symbol of... ·         …. is usually a symbol of … but here it is used as a symbol of… ·         … is symbolic of the relationship between … and …	Connections between aspects in the text ·         The use of … and … makes us… ·         There is a pattern of … across the text… ·         The writer seems to be repeating…
An alternative way of looking at things ·         Another way to look it is … ·         It could also suggest… ·         Someone else might think that…	Developing / Increasing / Decreasing ·         As the poem develops, the …. increases because ….  ·         There’s a marked decrease in … as the poem progresses ·         I notice that … develops in the poem	Changes ·         The mood changes when… ·         The writer changes the tone of the voice when... ·         The turning point in the pome is when…

Students had to share ideas and explore the poem using the sentence openings. Each time they shared one with the class they ticked it off. I didn’t get through the poem. In fact, I only made it to the second stanza with them. The discussion was relentless. I had boys exploring how the snowman might be a metaphor for a man dehumanising a body after killing a person. Another, kept seeing patterns in the words. Another spotted subtle changes in the tone. We, together, explored the choice of taking the head first, exploring the fear of eyes looking at the stealer / murderer.

Did all the boys contribute? No. Did all the girls contribute? No. The majority did. A few didn’t. And that’s simply because not everybody is the same. These students, and I know them to, would prefer to write their ideas down rather than share them with the class. Some of these students like to absorb the ideas and then come to their own idea as result of hearing the others talk. Next lesson, we’ll see what they come up with.

There is no one model that fits and suits all students, but do we have a model for teaching that hinders a part of the school population. Balance is key. Maybe the balance has been shifted too far one way. If I asked those students to write about the poem, they’d do so with aplomb. That process is needed to help them get to a point of independence. KS3 isn’t the wasted years. It is the idea forming years. We need it to be a time for forming ideas. And that starts with talk.

In the beginning, I learnt to talk and I did that before I started to learn to write. Before all writing, there comes talk.

Thanks for reading,

Xris