What word is missing? Knowledge retrieval in English is ______________ and it isn’t all about quotations.

 “The sweetest honey is loathsome in its own deliciousness. And in the taste destroys the appetite.” 

Let’s be clear: English has a funny relationship with knowledge and knowledge retrieval. Pick any two English textbooks and you’ll see what I mean. They are never alike. They don’t have the same topics, terminology or even approaches to the subject. The knowledge taught will be vastly different. That’s why schools rarely teach English through textbooks. We cherry pick aspects because the rest of the book doesn’t do it how we see fit. 

Look at how Knowledge Organisers were used by English departments, when they were all the rage. They focused on plot, key characters and some contextual background. They were useful to ensure that everybody knew the plot, but I’d argue you aren’t teaching the text properly if the students can’t recall the plot or the key characters. That is the beauty of narratives. They are instantly stored in memory. I can remember films I watched decades ago. The same applies to books. Our brains are stored for retaining narratives. It is just the rest of it that is the problem. My Year 11 can recall the plot of ‘Romeo and Juliet’. Mostly the rude bits and the death scenes. But, nonetheless, they can remember it. What they lack, like most students, is the knowledge of subtle aspects in the play such as the writer’s intent, the audience’s reaction to certain moments, less dramatic moments, characters with only one line, and  the reasons behind choices. Yet, we boil knowledge in English to quotations. If they can remember quotations from the text, they can write well. 

Now, the knowledge monster has developed a new head: knowledge retrieval at the start of a lesson. Across the land, leaders are insisting that lessons start, including English, with some knowledge retrieval. English teachers across the land are responding with comments akin to Harry Enfield’s ‘Kevin the Teenager’: WHAT? THIS IS SO UNFAIR! English doesn’t lead itself naturally to knowledge retrieval. Mainly, because we pull on lots of knowledge domains that don’t actually appear in English curriculums. I’d use a student's understanding of fishing to explore a poem. I’d use a student’s knowledge of plants to understand what an image means in a play. I’d use a student’s knowledge of Brighton when reading a piece of nonfiction. We don’t read texts in isolation. We knit threads, connections and webs between things. If we taught things in isolation, then my SOW for Romeo and Juliet might run something like this: 

Lesson 1 - Learn about Italy. 

Lesson 2 - Learn about Verona. 

Lesson 3 - Learn about the culture of Italy. 

Lesson 4 - Learn about England's attitude towards Italy in Elizabethan times.  

We don’t work that way. Texts don’t work in neat, pretty ways. They work like spider webs. They sit in the middle and we look at how they connect. We work from the centre to the outside. Not from the outside to the middle, which is what other subjects do. To know A, we need to cover X,Y and Z. Instead it is messy. 

The other problem with English is the transient nature of the things we teach. Yes, we teach novels, but that isn’t really ‘powerful knowledge’ (copyright Ofsted). The knowledge of Long John Silver having one leg is of limited value. It’s of use when studying the novel in Year 7, but will they be able to use that knowledge when looking at another text in Year 8? Not really. That knowledge does not have longevity as it is only needed for that text. It ‘might’ be of use if there is direct reference to the character in another book. This is what makes knowledge retrieval problematic in English. Yes, I could make some knowledge retrieval questions at the start of a lesson on the text we are studying, but it serves very little value in the wider picture of learning.

Everybody loves terminology and it seems that knowledge has got its own set of words around knowledge.  The problem is that these only over complicate things. For me, there are three areas of knowledge in English - knowledge / skills / experience. Now, I think it is important that we see English in three areas. The webby nature of it means that everything is connected, but they can stand on their own occasionally. The ‘knowledge’ is a large part. That might be the knowledge of what a simile is and what not a simile is. The ‘skill’ is the ability to replicate a simile in their own writing, which will demonstrate their knowledge but also their ability to manipulate it. The ‘experience’ is the area that is always missing, I think. That is the experience of seeing multiple examples in various contexts. The ‘experience’ is the key element of this triangle, which I think has been missing for a long time from discussions. Everything has been clumped together and ‘experience’ has been neglected. 

English is largely about experience. We give students multiple experiences - novels, plays, similes, images, sentences, words used in different contexts - and this is what makes the subject so rich and beautiful. We are about the experience and the danger with emphasis on knowledge is that it neglects skill and experience. The reading of ‘Treasure Island’ is an experience that I want students to use when faced with another text. There may be something small that resonates, echoes or contrasts with ‘Great Expectation’ in Year 8. I don’t want them to recall everything about the plot, characters or quotations for retesting in following years because it doesn’t have that much value. The knowledge of the experience is the important thing. That knowledge isn’t testable. You cannot test it. It is an experience. Part of that experience is building knowledge, but it is a snowball effect rather than a discrete thing that can be tested and retested. 

Our relationship with knowledge needs to be reasserted for English. Yes, do knowledge retrieval at the start of the lesson, but it needs to be integrated into the skill or experience elements within English. We don’t just do knowledge; we do other things that are reliant on some form of knowledge. The retrieval should be about building webs or connections and not reliant on spurious knowledge that isn’t connected. I think that there are some people who think that everything has become about knowledge in English and I don’t think that is the case. It is a part of the lesson but it doesn’t dominate the lesson - and that’s what we need to be mindful of. The sweetest honey is loathsome in its own deliciousness.  We need to work on building a healthy relationship around knowledge and developing an appropriate balance. Other subjects can bathe in knowledge, but we in English sprinkle it around like holy water. It is part of the ceremony, but we use it sparingly, because it is blessed.  

We’ve been using Carousel to help with our knowledge retrieval in English and in particular KS3. The great thing about the Carousel system is it allows for a lot of freedom from an English teaching perspective. Unlike other systems, it allows for students to write free text, which means that multiple interpretations can be accepted or explored. There’s no expectation that English has to fit down a simplistic binary ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ route. In responding, students can provide different examples and they can be assessed as correct. English is a subject where there are several right answers and not simply one.  

Plus, as with the new questions for GCSE Literature texts they have released, there is scope to work on the ‘webbiness’ of knowledge in English. The questions are not simply about recalling answers parrot fashion, but about connecting parts of texts with each other or effect with techniques. A lethal mutation I have seen with knowledge retrieval in English is a complete focus on quotations to the point that students are reciting quotations and just that. English is the subject of thinking and not recalling. If we make all the knowledge about quotations, then we are not arming them to think. Most GCSE essays need ‘several’ quotations or references to the text. Only ‘several’. If we make knowledge retrieval just about quotations, we are just filling up buckets. We need to make knowledge retrieval around quotations draw attention to the webbed nature of English, as Carousel has done with their questions. See more about Carousel here.

As a school, we’ve been looking at how we can use Carousel in other ways. So, for each year group, we have a bundle of questions related to the powerful knowledge taught in previous years and that year so that we can revisit, revise, and connect different bits of knowledge together. When visiting Macbeth in Year 8, we can use the questions from Year 7 on Shakespeare’s theatre as part of our knowledge retrieval. We have even used it for the knowledge around exam papers. See below. 

 

But, on a day-to-day basis, you don’t always want to have clear knowledge questions. You might want to have skills or experience based questioning. That’s why we have played around with knowledge retrieval. Are there things that I can do with knowledge retrieval that is less so much about the knowledge aspect and more about the skill or the experience? 

Retrieval around word meaning 

We have a bank of words and we can start with students defining the words. Students are then primed for doing this on a text they haven’t read before. Gets them thinking about word meaning from the start.  Or, they look at creating a sentence based on these words. Or, if you are studying a text, see if they can use them to describe aspects of the text. 

Retrieval around syllables 

We’ve placed emphasis on students’ knowledge of syllables, alongside work on phonemes too, so we have a bank of words. Students are testing their knowledge of what a syllable is, but also working on the skill to identify the syllables in a word. Yes, I could have created questions around ‘what is a syllable?’ but that doesn’t address the ‘webbiness’ of English. Here we prime students so they can look at rhythm in a line of poetry or a line from Shakespeare. Or, their own poetry writing. We also mix it up with knowledge around stressed and unstressed syllables. 

Retrieval around techniques 

Students never need to repeat a definition of a simile, metaphor or personification in their writing for English, yet we constantly ask them to define them. Here, we present examples for students to identify. They have a one in three chances of getting it right, but it helps us to understand if they know the concept. It provides them with the experience of others but also a starting point for writing their own. Which one is best? Which could you easily improve? Which one could you expand on? Which one could you add more to the sentence?  We are testing their knowledge retrieval but we are working on their skills and experience at the same time. 

Knowledge retrieval isn’t that hard to do, but it can become meaningless if it isn’t done with thought or understanding. It is so easy to write questions about defining techniques or filling the blanks of quotations, but will it improve their English skills? No. I have known hundreds of students who could give me a crystal clear definition of a simile, yet their own similes in their writing are rubbish. If we focus too much on the knowledge, we miss out on the skill and the experience part of the subject. Where is your skill retrieval in the lesson? Where is your experience retrieval in the lesson? Knowledge connects, but it is like a web in our subject. You cannot focus on it alone. There is room for all three parts - knowledge, skills, experience - and English teachers need to ensure there is a balance between all three.

English teachers are the spiders of the knowledge world. We spin our webs all over the place and we wait for some unsuspecting creature to become ensnared in the web. We listen for the vibrations on a thread. We knit connections where are none. 

Thanks for reading, 

Xris 

You cannot simplify English!

I’ve been around long enough, in English teaching, to see the hydra that is PEE shape, reform and grow another head. As soon as you chop one form of it down, another takes its place. The problem lies with the fact that analysis is not a natural form of writing. Whilst expressing our thoughts and feelings is natural as too is telling stories, the close analysis of an idea or aspect of a text is purely alien. When eating a curry, we don’t pick out a grain of rice and study its taste, colour or composition, yet in subjects like English that’s what we are doing when analysing. Picking out the grains of rice. 

We have a knack in schools in oversimplifying the complex. Sometimes, things are complex that they cannot be simplified. The problem with PEE is that it is deceptive. It presented analysis as something simple, easy, stepped, logical and easy to judge. Any new reiteration is likely to fall down, because it doesn’t acknowledge the complexity of analysis. When exploring complex mathematical problems you don’t look for a simple easy route. You look for a stepped approach to solve the problem. Our problem with PEE, or any alternative, is that it doesn't address the components behind writing an essay. 

If I was honest, it took years to write decent essays, because I wasn’t taught what to do. I learnt largely by osmosis. And, if we are honest, that’s where a lot of teachers learnt to write analytically. Through osmosis. It was through the constant exposure to essays and constant critiques of my own writing that got me there. There were no simplistic frameworks. No easy mnemonics for me to sing as I write. And that’s fine for a percentage of students. They have that ability to absorb or soak stuff up, unaware they are doing it. 

We’ve been drilling down at the elements for teaching an analytical paragraph. What is it students need to do to form and develop an idea? We developed this resource for teachers. It is a work in progress, but it gives you an idea. 

I wanted something to help teachers guide improvements in analysis. A way for teachers to see what their priorities should be when guiding a class on literature. Because literature is endless, you need some starting points. The emphasis on knowledge means that we often put the stress on the knowledge of text rather than the way students write. If students are doing badly in literature it is somehow viewed as being a knowledge problem, and not a writing problem. Or, if the writing is seen as the problem, things are viewed in terms of adherence to the set structure. Or, simply a case of adding ‘features’ to the text. The best analysis is always concise, crisp and clear. It is never weighted down with adverbs or tentative phrases. The emphasis here is on forming, developing, supporting and building ideas and not a checklist. Analysis is checklist proof. 

The problem with structures like PEE or its alternatives is that there is no through line. There is an assumption that the P, E and E are connected, but rarely do students do this effectively. The parts are there but they are often untethered or floating around. We wanted to put the opinion at the heart of the focus. When writing, you are taking an opinion and shaping it and forming an argument around it. 

With a group recently, I’ve been working on developing ideas in the opening few sentences. They struggled with adding depth to their analysis. They’d repeat things that I said and attempted to crowbar it into their writing. There was no developing and extending their own opinion. So, we looked at how they could contextualise or tether their opinion somehow. 

We explored how there were three ways to tether their thinking: 1: a contextual piece of information. 2: a piece of information around the writer and their intent. 3: an idea from another domain of knowledge. We presented students with three ways to develop the opinion. 

They then had to look at how the two sentences could be developed or be linked. 

• Dickens presents Victorian society to be cold and solely focused on business and money. 

• Dickens felt that Britain was broken and that it had forgotten to feel emotions and care for those less fortunate. 

• By presenting society as cold, Dickens is able to highlight how money has corrupted society. 

What this allowed students to do was thread ideas into their writing around the writer’s intent or context without bolting it on. It was part of the discussion. It wasn’t just part of it, but at the centre of what they were writing. When they continued writing, they were able to refer back to what they said. They echoed the phrase ‘Britain was broken’ when talking about Scrooge and his symbolism, which they then developed further in the comparison with Tiny Tim’s death. Students were forming throughlines in their writing. 

Students need permission to explore. When we rely on simplistic approaches, we don’t give them permission to explore. PEE or What / How / Why don’t allow for exploration. It isn’t built into the structure. That exploration is missing. The structure doesn’t give permission. We need to give and show permission to explore. That’s where the beauty of the subject comes from. The ability to explore a thread and go off at a tangent. We need to give students the permission to do that. It isn’t natural. 

If we are going to get students better at analysing texts, we need to stop looking for shortcuts. I think we should focus on how we teach the components of essay writing. To do that, we need to be collectively clear about what those components are. Stop trying to make purple prose essays and get students to form and develop analytical arguments. 

Thanks for reading, 

Xris 

Putting on those context spectacles

Context is such a tricky aspect of English teaching. Too much emphasis on context causes students to offload spurious facts and details. Too little emphasis on context and students make random statements and lots of misconceptions. How many times have we seen students proclaim that ‘all’ Victorians felt or thought something? The idea that society is just one collective thought and feeling is slightly chilling.   

I don’t deny that contextual knowledge is useful and helps to frame understanding, but its problem in English usually stems from the concrete nature of things. If we are thinking of knowledge in English, then the easiest knowledge students can secure is knowledge around context. The problem for English is that a lot of English is forming inferences. The key inferences we ask of students in English relate to three areas usually: 

• Inferences around the writer’s intent;

• Inferences around the reader’s reaction; 

• Inferences around the characters in the texts. 

Yes, you do need a lot of knowledge to form those inferences, but the thinking isn’t quite ‘concrete’. There’s a lot of supposition, guessing, and relating to past knowledge. A lot of the knowledge surrounding this stems from experience rather than direct teaching. This reminds me of a book I read and in it the character reacted the same way.  Contextual knowledge often sounds good in the students head but doesn’t relate to the inferences needed in most English essays, inferring the writer’s intent, the reader’s reaction or the character’s thoughts and feelings. That’s why we get knowledge dumps in essays. 

The other alternative has been to focus on the text as the source of contextual information. The text is simply a product of its time. This tends to be the way the exam board prefers, but it doesn’t make things so easy. If students are not used to exploring the text as a product of its time, then they don’t see it as that. Put any old show or film before a student and they’ll notice the dated effects, fashion, technology  or language. They don’t really explore the people and how attitudes towards gender or class have changed. Exhibit A: they all remember the word ‘squiffy’ in ‘An Inspector Calls’. Astute students can spot the aspects that reflect the time, but that’s a minority. 

I personally think there is a balance to be had. Students need some knowledge, but not too much and certainly not knowledge that is going to over complicate and problematise understanding. What do I mean by knowledge that problematises understanding? Take, for example, Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Often, students are informed about the contextual history surrounding homosexuality in the Victorian age. This then, for some students, warps their understanding of the text. Instead of it being one possible interpretation of the text, it becomes the glue that links all ideas together. We can do more damage with some pieces of knowledge for some students. I think there should be a greater discussion of problematic knowledge in the same way we talk about misconceptions. They have the power to override all thoughts. 

It is the relationship that this contextual knowledge has with the writer and the text that needs to be at the forefront of the teaching. And, we need to work on making the writer a person and a concrete aspect. More concrete than the knowledge related to context. 

So, how, in theory, do I introduce context and make the writer seem concrete when discussing texts? 

Step 1 - The basics 

Firstly, I get students to watch a video as homework. I ask them to watch it before reading the text. I inform the class that I am going to test them on what they learn from the video. 

An Inspector Calls

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fXw8lWWtlA

A Christmas Carol 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xRonangfz0&list=PLQTtyDJWDJDZns579hi1OGlYtktiFwstn&index=6

Then, I start the next lesson with a test. The link is below.  https://www.dropbox.com/s/mehkq1sxgncziiq/11%20Homework%20Questions%20to%20Context%20Video.docx?dl=0

This document is used repeatedly over the course of GCSEs. It forms revision and works as a constant reminder of key threads in the story. Initially, we throw the first copy away as students get quite a few wrong on the first go. The next time we do it, about a week later, I get them to make it neat as it will be the one that stays in their books. 

I start with this approach rather than use lots of exploratory texts, because students need a grounding of knowledge in the first instance. Whilst I think it is lovely and nice to show a few texts related to the period, it is rather ‘pin the tail on the donkey’. I could spend a lesson exploring hoping students would pick up attitudes towards class or I could tell them that attitudes towards class was an issue and then get them to explore how that idea is developed, explored in a painting or text. 

Step 2 - building the writer 

Unless you routinely get students to salute and bow to an image of the writer, the writer is a ghostly presence in the room. Some can see him/her. Others cannot. English teachers need to help students form a construction in their heads of the writer. They need a construction of the writer that makes them seem like a real person. Someone with an active presence in the text and the lesson. We are reading that writer’s manifesto. 

To construct that writer, I use the context sheet. If this was the world you were growing up in, what would you think? What would you want? What would you do in your writing to make society change? 

From this, we are able to construct ‘a construct’ of the writer. Of course, we are making inferences. 

Dickens was… 

• Protective of children and saw children as losing their childhood 

• Lost his childhood and so didn’t want others to lose theirs 

• Angry that there were very few options for the poor 

• Felt that the government wasn’t doing enough to help the weakest 

• Conscious of how money affected society 

• Felt that money controlled all aspects of our lives 

• Angry that the rich were profiteering from the poor 

• Interested in politics and read government reports 

• Aware of how easy and quickly someone could become poor 

• Aware of how people are determined to stay rich

From this, we had constructed an idea of this person. Students had an idea of who Dickens was as a person. They had this mantra for the book: 

Dickens thought Britain was broken and saw that his book could be the message to fix it. 

It became the default response when reading the text.  

Why does Dickens make the setting cold and foggy? Because Britain was broken, Dickens wanted to suggest how cold society was. The fog symbolises how they couldn’t see the problem and so there was no sense of things improving.  

By securing an initial understanding of the writer, we have something to frame ideas around. Therefore, their inferences developed and extended throughout the reading of the text. They’d start understanding that Dickens cared for the poor, but notice how he wasn’t really against the rich. But, what they had was a starting point to build inferences around the writer’s intent, which they can use to build and create their own. If students have knowledge of the primary intent, then they can explore secondary intentions. 

We spend so much time on character construction that we fail to address the biggest thing we want students to talk about - the writer. 

Step 3 - exploring the text 

Now that we have some threads to work with, I return back to this sheet and the construct of the writer routinely when looking at the text. They have a compass to guide their thinking and to work with. We put a lot of stock on their memory, but whilst reading a text we need to keep working on building connections. After reading a section, I will get students to link to the context or construct somehow. Or, I will start the reading with the idea from the construct: We know Dickens was political and supportive of the poor so what is he trying to do in this section? Politically? Socially? 

We talk about the writer as a person we are familiar with. As if he has just stepped out of the classroom and we are talking on his behalf. There is a presence in discussion. He isn’t an afterthought, which the teacher has to keep returning to when analysing the text. He is a fully rounded person to them. 

How we use knowledge is important in English. However, I think we need to use it carefully. Knowledge can build more knowledge, but we need to think more about how that knowledge builds. We need to work on demystifying the writer and we need to help students to form and create inferences on their thoughts, feelings, ideas and perspective. The biggest problem students have is talking about the writer’s intent. That’s because they have no concept of writers as real people. Let’s start helping students to see writers as real people, even if they might have been dead for a few years. Inference works on knowledge and we have to work on the two aspects in lessons.

Thanks for reading,  

Xris