Oh, they didn’t get it: Misconceptions in English

It is interesting how my approach to teaching has varied over the years. At the start, I was more interested in teaching stuff – regardless of whether that was useful and meaningful. Towards the middle, I tended to focus on stuff that would have a meaningful impact on what students could do. Now, the more I think about things the more I think we need to spend more time on misconceptions in English. For all the talk about what students need to know, there isn’t enough talk around misconceptions for my liking.

The question we tend to apply to English is:

What do students need to do or know to be to succeed in this task?

Then, we go away and plan a series of lessons building up to the final task. Each lesson will, in part, focus on one of these nuggets a student needs to supposedly achieve or master. We might practise a task to see if they have mastered some elements. The problem with this is that you largely don’t understand the issues until after the event. The post task analysis highlights all the problems they had made and what didn’t and what did stick. Wouldn’t this level of understanding be valuable in the first week of teaching or planning? Yet, we don’t formalise or build on it. Instead it is saved for next time the class do a similar task.

Let’s add another question and a question that is possibly more important for success:

Where do students go wrong with this task?

We all address mistakes on a microlevel, but we rarely look at mistakes on a macrolevel in English. When given a text to teach for the first time, we buzz with excitement over the things we can do and things we can teach. We are joyful about what they could learn from it, yet we never engage on the danger zones or the areas of misconception. Any thought of those are not concerned until we reach that bridge. Precision is what makes students better in their reading and writing, yet we don’t always have that level of precision when approaching texts. We don’t start with the mistakes. We don’t go here are the major mistakes with this question.

Take the novel ‘A Christmas Carol’. There are a number of areas for misconception such as context, plot, analysis and writing. Each one brings with it it’s own set of issues. Let’s just take the plot as an example. Look at these points:

·       Scrooge is evil.

·       Bob Cratchit is an example of the poor.

Whatever text you study there are a number of these plot misconceptions that students pick up somehow when reading the text. When you identify these misconceptions, you can explicitly teach them alongside the text. As you read the Stave 1, you question students about Scrooge’s evilness. Is Dickens presenting him as evil? No. Building misconceptions into teaching English, helps informs and makes learning precise. You address the misconception and attack it in tandem with what you would normally teach. Some misconceptions are collected well before the students read a text. Take ‘Frankenstein’ and ‘The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde’. They need addressing and challenging at the start. For these two texts, I’d always check and address a student’s prior knowledge of the text. It is amazing how many students think Hyde is bigger than Jekyll.

So, how does this apply across the rest of English and exams? Well, I think misconceptions should be part and parcel of what we teach. Take the Paper 2 GCSE English Language paper for AQA and the summary question (Question 2). The following are misconceptions around answering the question:

·       You just reword the text in your own words

·       You spot differences between the texts

·       You need techniques to support you ideas

·       There is a set number of things to find so it is best if you can spot everything you can

 

Once you understand the problem areas you can address these in your teaching. We are teaching X because Y is wrong.

 

You just reword the text in your own words  - no, you must make an inference

You spot differences between the texts – the difference needs to be an inference

You need techniques to support you ideas – only need a quotation so wasted time talking about techniques

There is a set number of things to find so it is best if you can spot everything you can – about the quality of explanation and not the number of things spotted

 

At KS3, we have more of a collective emphasis. Misconceptions around aspects that affect all year groups. Two things I am working on this holiday are comma splices and inferences. Both areas that affect a large population of students and need finetuning if students are to improve. The key thing, however, is making the misconceptions visible and talking about them. Other subjects do misconceptions so much better. They spend large chunks of time on addressing them or repeatedly revisit them. I think English teachers can learn a lot from other subjects on how they deal with mistakes. Unless we adapt our teaching around mistakes, then students are going to endlessly make the same mistakes again and again.

Mistakes, errors and misconceptions shouldn’t be the post assessment discussion they should be the grammar of lessons. Students need forewarning of the traps, the tricks, the slipups and the confusions. Without them, how do we expect them to get better? An assessment or task should be an opportunity to shine and show off and we need to do more than give them the skills and the knowledge. We need to give them the common mistakes. Firstly, we need to tell them the mistakes.

There’s a sense of irony about the name of this blog. Learning from my mistakes. If we don’t build structures around the learning gained from mistakes, then we will continue to keep making them. The better teacher is always one that can pre-empt problem areas. That’s what we should be building up in staff at all levels. What are the problem areas? Pre-empt them.

Here's a question to take back to departments:

Does your department list the common mistakes students make in a topic and area?   

Thanks for reading,

Xris

 

 

Diet poetry and the problems with the poetry anthology

 I enjoy teaching poetry but I do find the idea of an anthology of fifteen poems for GCSE such an overwhelming prospect for students. I have been around long enough to seen how the various poetry anthologies are used. Rather than have students engage with poetry and exploring how language is used, we end up, largely, having poetry translation and memorisation of random facts in the hope they can be strung together.

The obsession becomes about ‘knowing the poem’. What ever ‘knowing the poem’ means? Single poems are studied over several lessons until the teacher feels the students know the poem, which usually means the teacher has informed student about everything in the poem. We aren’t happy unless the student has an highlight annotated copy of the poem in their book and twenty spurious facts about the poem, like Duffy has an aversion to the colour red, in their brains.

The cognitive load of the anthology is massive and it is a worrying aspect for us as practitioner. For novels and plays, you have narrative framework which holds knowledge together or at least structures it in some way. Fifteen poems loosely linked together by a theme lacks this structure and this natural cohesion that plays and novels naturally have. Then, let’s look at the poems themselves. Densely packed texts with a multitude of ideas, messages, themes and techniques. The richness of poetry for some is the cognitive overload for others.

When you marks essays based on the anthologies, you get a clear divide. Those that can remember everything a teacher said about a poem. Those that can form their own opinion on the poems. Those that just repeat parts of the text. Sadly, even after spending weeks looking at the poems, some students are not able to form their own opinions. Part of the beauty of poetry is that anybody should be able to offer an opinion on a poem, spot some interesting things about the poem and offer some reasons about why they think a poet wrote it. Poetry should be the one thing students should be able to do easily without understanding  Shakespeare’s language or without knowing the plot of a 350 paged Victorian novel.  The way the anthologies are taught I’d argue add to the cognitive load of students. We are adding to the load rather than supporting and helping with the load. We have a large number of our students who are overburdened with poetry that when it comes to assessment that freeze-up and write waffle.

We need to look at the process of how we teach these poems. We need to be aware of the cognitive load related to the learning the poems. Students think they need to know everything about the poems. That in itself if problematic but it is something we need hit head on. We need to aim for confidence about a poem and not complete knowledge of the poem. Now, don’t you go thinking this is  knowledge rant; it isn’t. But, I feel that the relationship between knowledge and confidence needs exploring. Knowledge does give you confidence, but confidence in poetry can come from very little knowledge and from the personal knowledge of the student. Ideally, we want confident and knowledgeable students, but at the moment we do have students who lack confidence because the knowledge is overwhelming. They need the knowledge is a way that helps them build their confidence. We need to address the extraneous load so that students get more confident.

So, where is this going? Well, we, like others, had a problem with lockdowns and students isolating. We had studied several of the poems during lockdown, but when it came to revisiting them the students struggled to recall or discuss the poems they had previously studied with confidence. Therefore, we needed to revisit the poems in a way that ensured knowledge retention and confidence, so I did something a bit controversial. For this, I know I am going to visited by the ghosts of Blake, Plath and Tennyson begging me to change my ways. Bah, humbug! I presented a diet version of the poems in the anthology. This is how we started ‘War Photographer’.

 

In his darkroom he is finally alone

With spools of suffering set out in ordered rows.

 

Home again

To ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel,

To fields which don’t explode beneath the feet

Of running children in a nightmare heat.

 

He remembers the cries

Of this man’s wife, how he sought approval

Without words to do what someone must

 

From the aeroplane he stares impassively at where

He earns his living and they do not care. 

 

Students copied the diet version in their books and then together we explored the meaning behind the poem. Students spotted patterns in the language and together we explored their ideas about the poem and the poet’s message. The great thing was that students felt they knew the poem and they readily offered ideas about the meaning of lines and phrases. All annotated on their handwritten copy of the poem. The beauty of writing is down was that spotted things in the writing which are largely hidden from sight unless you write things down. Word order. Structure.

But, you’ve taken some of the best bits of the poem out? Yes. I had. On purpose. The problem often with poetry – and the beauty of it – is that you have lots of images that add to the overall mood and tone, but detract from the overall meaning. We get it, because we are attuned to dealing with a collection of images, yet students don’t. They overload the student. Why is it a Mass in a dark room? The concept of the darkroom isn’t clear in the student’s head when another image is thrown into the mix. That’s why a lot of poetry teaching is working through the poem line by line. Decluttering.

We hadn’t even read the whole poem yet students had a confident grasp of what the poem was about, the choices made relating to language and structure and some understanding of the poet’s message. Confidently, they could talk about the poem. We did this repeatedly with five of the other poems and their confidence increased. They had a grounded understanding of the poem which was a mixture of exploration and discussion, rather than us go line by line through the poem.

Then, when we looked at the poem, we were able to look at how other components worked.

The only light is red and softly glows,
as though this were a church and he
a priest preparing to intone a Mass.

 

This next bit became incredibly fruitful in terms of discussion. We were able to look at what this sentence added to the meaning of the poem. What was the effect now of comparing it to a church and a Mass? How did the mood change? Why at this point? We did this repeatedly with the poem. Seeing how each element missing from the diet version slots in. Building their knowledge when they were confident to start with at the beginning.

All too often we look at the whole and zoom in on a word or a line, but this changed things for us. We were looking at the cohesion between parts of the poem. How things fitted together? Exploring the reasons and the ideas. Bringing new elements to the poem helped increase their knowledge of the poem, but with a real sense of confidence. We could even throw Yygotsky in there and say that I was working on the concrete and building up to the abstract elements.

Confidence in talking about poetry is something we need to actively work on. Yes, there’s a lot of poems to get through and so little time, but if we can get students more confident about talking about a poem in their first lesson with the poem, then that will only add to their confidence when they write about the poems later down the line. All it too was a little unburdening of the cognitive load when faced with the poem for the first time.

Thanks for reading,

Xris