Poetry: Thanks for the Annotations

Annotating things in English is the equivalent of breathing. We do it all the time and it is almost second nature to what we do when teaching. It even bites us on the bum when the copy of a short story we want to use again and again with classes is stribbled with annotations because a student thought that was what we’d be doing.

Annotations on a text are not a good proxy for learning. I can tell you of loads of examples of students who had brilliantly annotated copies of the texts, but that didn’t translate into grades. Equally, I have seen students with slim annotations exceeding my expectations. Just because a student has a page full of scribbles, it doesn’t mean they know or understand the poem. Annotation gives us false security and hope. Phew, I have done my job because I have evidence of it. Nobody can criticise my teaching, because look - it is all there for you to see it.  

Overteaching is something we need to be mindful about with English teaching. The beauty of English Literature is you can study a novel over a term or for months. Yet, we often have a worry of letting go of texts. I just need another week with the poem and then I will be satisfied that they have learnt it well. Poetry is the one area where I think there’s a lot of overteaching of the poems. Why spend two lessons looking at the poem when you can spend two weeks on it and ensure they really know the poem. 

When you look at any GCSE or A Level essay, the amount of techniques and terminology needed to form a strong essay is quite small, yet when teaching we ensure that students are aware of every technique or device employed by the writer. The cognitive load for each poem, then, is phenomenal. Students focus on learning the techniques rather than focus on ideas and meaning behind the poem. That is why students continuously write and crowbar techniques into their essays. Not because of a weakness on their part, but because when teaching a poem we have placed emphasis on this knowledge. Yes, we might have done some lovely stuff about context and intent, but that space in their brains is eaten up by the knowledge of seven similes and something interesting about the volta. 

The problem is poetry. Now before you start throwing poems at me. Hear me out. A poem is a dense piece of writing. Like a fine piece of art, you can look at a small aspect and spend ages exploring how it relates to the rest. When looking at art, you don’t pick up on every brushstroke. You spot interestings things and explore them further. Yet, for poetry, we obsess about every brushstroke. In fact, annotating is ‘brushstroke thinking’. It isn’t meaningful exploration, but an obsession of the components rather than the ideas. When we are asking students to explore the idea of glory in war, they can tell me about some techniques, but they can’t tell me why and what the poet is saying. Without the key idea of the poem, techniques are just brushstrokes. They don’t relate to the whole. Or what’s hidden behind. 

I think we have to be realistic about what we want students to learn from and about a poem. If we want students to learn the fifteen named poems in the anthology, then we need to think about it in a clever way and think about the cognitive overload. The mental entropy of knowledge happens so quickly with poetry. How many times have we heard - ‘which poem was that one, again’’?  Newsflash, I have to remind myself of the fifteen poems before I teach them and I have taught them for years. Why do we think a student can retain those fifteen techniques you highlighted in the first stanza in Term 1 of Year 10 at the end of Year 11? What is the benefit over annotating every line and stanza when they only need four or five techniques to form a strong discussion? 

Over the years, I have withdrawn from annotating poems heavily and focused on a few key devices in the poems. Enough to form ideas but not too many to drown their own thinking, which is a tough one to gauge. Instead, I have worked on developing key ideas and explanations of the writer’s choices. I’d rather have a student explain why a poem uses repetition effectively than seven techniques spotted and not explained. 

Explanation of devices is what students need more knowledge of and that’s what I have been doing recently. With each poem, I pick one device to explore the reason for using said device alongside some examples from the poem. Therefore, the knowledge worked on is beneficial to more than one text and I am not spending two weeks on knowledge that might or might not be used once in a 45 minute essay in the final exam. We are working on knowledge that connects to other texts.  

Effect is something we, as teachers, need to put higher in the student’s minds and in our teaching, yet it is largely overly simplified or rushed. That’s why I have created a few PowerPoints around the choice of certain literary devices. I am using them with a poem, when teaching, but when we, later, spot the device used in another text I will have the slide to hand, reminding them of the reasons behind a writer using a device with a timely reminder of where else they have seen the device before. I’d rather have a student see that Dickens, Shakespeare and Tennyson use repetition, but with differing effects, so that, when faced with repetition in other texts, they have that bank of knowledge to recall rather than disparate bits of knowledge. 

All the talk about knowledge has meant that we have largely focused on the what and not the how. How are we going to support and build knowledge in English? For a start, rethink how we annotate texts. Yes, annotate a poem, but not so you pindown every part of it. After all, nobody is asking students to reconstruct a poem line by line in an exam, so why do we insist on deconstructing a poem line by line.   

Thanks for reading, 

Xris 

P.S. This is a work in progress and I am slowly tweaking and creating as I go along. 

Models for reading - supporting vocabulary knowledge and building inferences

Last year, I was part of a project with a research school on reading. We were looking at transition from primary to secondary school with a focus on developing reading. For the project, we decided to focus on Geography. How could we support reading in Geography? 

Two things we felt needed building on were vocabulary and inferences. Students lacked these, at times, and we wanted something that would support them in both areas. Therefore, we came up with a model for approaching things. It followed a clear structure: 

[1] Step 1 - Stimulus 

We decided to focus on an image, for Geography, because it helped to start the thinking for the lesson. At this point, we just wanted the student to think about the picture and, internally, see if it jogged their memory of something.   

[2] Step 2 - Vocabulary 

Often, when it comes to vocabulary, we often ask students to generate the words to describe the text. However, rarely is there a level of precision in the language used and even more rare is the use of precise subject specific terminology. It's a beach! Often, the teacher uses questions to draw that terminology out. We wanted to build a model for students to use when faced with a stimulus. Rather than a random ‘pin the donkey’ approach of word retrieval, we build precision in the words to be used. By providing students with binary options, we helped students to be precise in their description of the topic. What we noticed was that students were quicker and more articulate with their explanations.

In one example, we have the option of flora or fauna, which then led to some interesting discussions on plant and animal life. The pair of words became a lense to focus the thinking. From the beginning, students were making inferences around the topic and these words were the source. 

[3] Step 3 - Elaborating inferences 

The problem often isn’t the attachment of words to describe an aspect, but elaboration. Therefore, we decided to share a small text to work as a springboard for thinking. Students would then expand on the word / inference by using possible reasons in the text. There’s lots of flora because …. It is urban because… One thing students don’t often use are cohesive inferences which refer to the whole text (Global Inferences). Largely, students focus on local inferences in one word or phrase. So, we used the combination of text and image to help build those elaborating inferences.   

[4] Step 4 - Rationalising 

The next step involved rationalising. This is an area that can really lift an explanation. What are the causes, the consequences or reasons behind it? Working out the cause of something takes knowledge from outside the text  and inference from the text. What has caused the area to be urban? We used the ‘The Writing Revolutions’ use of ‘because / so / as’ to frame this level of the explanation.  

Overall, this is how it looked. We revealed the sections one step at a time. 

We also explored how it could be used in other subjects, such as English. 

In English, we used a text rather than a picture for the initial stimulus. What we noticed with the English is that we could frame the words around opinions or interpretations of the text. This allowed us to channel the exploration of the text to where we wanted to go. 

Overall, we found the level of vocabulary and inferences improved with the groups because they were building familiarity with the words but building an internalised model for reading a text. When faced with another picture or text, they were using those internalised words. Questioning is always cited as an aspect of reading that good readers do, but that relies on students asking the right questions. All too often, the emphasis is placed on Who / What / Where / When / How. The questions in the head when reading need to be stronger questions. Think about how we read a novel. There is a lot of orienting in the initial stages of reading. Male or female? Present or past? Honest narrator or secretive narrator? That’s what good readers do.    

Vocabulary is really important, but I do feel we are getting to the stage where we are getting vocabulary bloat. We found that working on a few select words to help create inferences was much more effective than providing glossaries of words. By selecting a few words, you are looking at the relationship between words and ideas. It is all about connections and relationships. Words need anchoring, connecting and sticking to ideas and thoughts. Otherwise, teaching would be simply reading through the dictionary every lesson. 

Below are the models we played around with and developed over time. Feel free to adapt and share any adaptations you make. 

Thanks for reading, 

Xris 

Model 1 

Model 2 

Model 3 

One word drafting

Drafting is a very tricky aspect of teaching. Rarely do students draft effectively. They are usually in one of two camps. ‘The tickle brigade’ likes to dot an i or add a comma or apostrophe in one place.  ‘The blunderbuss gang’ likes to scribble everything out and start again. There’s no happy medium. It is either all or nothing.  

I find the process is problematic as a teacher. What do you do? Do you give students a list of things to check in their writing? Or, do you show it as a stepped process? Right, people, let’s start by checking we have used capital letters correctly!  Rarely does the process of drafting link to effect and impact. The drive is always on making it look or sound better, but it is never on making the impact better. 

For that reason, that’s why I have been focusing on one aspect of drafting: one word to improve a sentence. Very simply I give students a sentence and they have to add /change a word to lift it or make it better. Basically the same thing. 

Example: The mist surrounded the gravestones. 

I am not a fan of purple prose and, in fact, I’d rather read concise, crisp prose than anything else. Drafting always focuses on turning writing into purple prose. Add a simile. Add a list. Rarely, does it ever focus on reducing and condensing. Good writers do that. They say so much in one sentence that there’s no need for a paragraph. Students, on the other hand, say one thing but use fifty sentences instead of one.  

The example sentence can become one of the following: 

[1] The mist swallowed the gravestones.  [A sense of power and something destructive]  

[2] The mist silently surrounded the gravestones. [A sense of unknown danger] 

[3] The cold mist surrounded the gravestones. [A negative atmosphere] 

What I love about this is that as soon as it becomes focused on one word, the student is focused on meaning and effect. Students don’t often think about the effect when adding a technique like a personification. They don’t go: I need to add a piece of personification because I want to create an unsettled atmosphere. They just throw some personification at the text with the hope that it will work. 

Focusing on one word helps them to get under the bonnet and look at the mechanics of the writing. All too often, the techniques are the drivers for improvement and rarely do they do much in a piece. No English teacher has gushed over the use of alliteration, but they have gushed over an interesting choice or word or combination of words. If we want students to be better at analysing language, then we need them to be better at using language themselves. In the beginning was the ‘word’. 

Look at how the approach can be easily used for non-fiction. 

Example: Taking a holiday in Britain has its benefits. 

Taking a holiday in sunny Britain has its benefits.   [sarcasm]  

Taking a holiday in Britain has its rewards.  [emphasis on positivity]  

Taking a cheap holiday in Britain has its benefits. [emphasis on money]  

Taking a vacation in Britain has its benefits. [makes it seem better than it is] 

So you can see with one word the meaning can be changed and the impact of the text changed. This thoughtful exploration of word meaning is valuable for students to get better with language and language analysis. All too often, we focus on the techniques and not the word choice. Everything, for me, begins with words. 

Students already have this thoughtfulness to language composition. We see that when they message their peers. They know that the wrong word in a sentence can destroy a relationship. Because the consequence is largely immediate. With writing in lessons, the consequence isn’t immediate. The teacher isn’t going to have a strop if the wrong word is used. That’s why I think we need to attune students to drafting the word choice. We need to teach them the importance of considering and pondering a word in a sentence. We know they can write, but the best writers consider and ponder the words they use. They don’t throw everything in. 

Thanks for reading, 

Xris 

P.S. Here are a few sentences we are using with students this term. To get them in the ‘zone’, we are giving them these sentences and asking them to lift them up with one word. And only one word! 

[1] Light appeared through the cracks in the door.  

[2] He paused for breath. Unsure what to do. 

[3] The footsteps could be heard upstairs. 

[4] Light fell from the window and revealed a figure in the corner. 

[5] The scratching started behind the door. 

[6] The silence was painful. 

[7] The shadow moved slowly. 

[8] The trees slowly tapped the window.