Homework in English

Not only is there the oversimplification of ideas, but there is an oversimplification of expression. In English, we don’t just work with ideas but we work with how we express those ideas. Therefore, there are often two things at play. What is Scrooge feeling at this point in  the story?   Scrooge might be sad, miserable, under the weather, lonely, melancholy and so on. All the same idea, but expressed differently. In fact, the expression adds nuance to the idea and changes it so the idea is the same, but slightly different. Find me a computer algorithm that can pick up on that subtly. It will simply look for words like sad. You didn’t use the word ‘sad’, so you have got it wrong.  

Homework in English tends to be either practising or learning. Practising writing or reading. Or, learning knowledge. Somewhere along the way, maybe, due to pressure and demands, we have lost the exploratory element of English. The thinking. The exploring. Everything starts with ideas in English, yet we don’t put enough stock on idea forming or initial responses.

This term, I have been studying ‘Romeo and Juliet’ with a Year 10 class and ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ with a Year 9 class. Homework around a Shakespeare text is always difficult because students don’t always have the tools to access the text. I wanted, however, to work on the student exploratory relationship with texts and I didn’t want to confine it to the classroom. The best students in English are the students who take a text and run with it. They dig, explore and question things. They naturally explore a text. A lot of time in English lessons, we are presenting students with a poem or extract and reliant on the reaction from the class.

I have been using Microsoft Forms to look at how we can get students to explore the text and the ideas in the text more. Very easily, I take a small part of the text and create four or five questions. The questions are not GCSE exam style questions. They are not even fancy questions, but they are questions around meaning and ideas. Students then have a week to respond to them. We then start a lesson looking at the extract and I share their ideas on the projector. Ummm - no marking.

Here’s one simple example:

 

 

 

 Here are some of the responses:

 

 

As a group, we annotated the extract with these ideas and then built and extended on things further, searching for patterns, trends and connections.

Exploring a text takes time and this was a five minute homework, which students could do at their own pace and leisure but actually increased the level of exploratory talk because they had spent time thinking about things. If I am honest, alongside knowledge homeworks using Carousel, this type of homework is my default homework when studying Shakespeare. None of this deciding what Romeo’s playlist will be in his car or researching the number of lost buttons in duelling incidents in Elizabethan Italy. Homework built around idea forming or expressing ideas. The thinking is happening inside and outside the classroom.

But, also, it creates new avenues for discussion or opportunities for addressing misconceptions. Look at this one for when we explored Romeo meeting Juliet for the first time:

 

 Several things came out of this such as:

# Is the extract really a sonnet?

# Is Romeo ‘lustful’?

# Why is ‘starstruck’ such a good word to describe Romeo at this point?

Every lesson can be a metaphorical ‘blank page’ when teaching English. We start with an extract and build meaning. This approach for me has made me see what opportunities there are for exploring Shakespeare in and outside the classroom using Microsoft Forms. In an ideal world, we want students to be thinking about our subject outside the classroom. This way students are thinking and exploring outside Period 3 on a Wednesday. We are building confidence and at the same time exploring the text studied. Homework is supporting the learning and not being a byproduct of it or simply a process that needs to be done because the powers that be say so.

Homework in English is tricky, but I think exploring texts, whether they be fiction, non-fiction, plays, poems, should always take priority. We need students to be good at forming ideas and working on their expression of those ideas and, if we are honest, 10 minutes in the classroom is not enough practice for them. They need to be regularly forming ideas and expressing them. Why should it be once a lesson? Why not all the time? That, after all, is what they need to do in the exam. Yes, they might need knowledge, but they need to do something with that knowledge. 

Five minutes it takes me to create  this homework task. Twenty minutes or more I use in lessons to feedback on the responses. Zero marking. Hundreds of ideas.

Thanks for reading,

Xris