The GCSE English Da Vinci Code

There are a lot of problems with the current exam specifications, but one main problem is that they don’t allow for freedom in our subject. There seem to be so many hidden things you have to do on them that you end up doing students a disservice, if you go, ‘I’ll teach everything but the exam paper.’ The summary question wants you to make inferences, even though nowhere in the question does it say so. The structure question wants you to talk about how the structure adds to the story’s themes, even though the question doesn’t ask for this and simply states that students have to talk about what they find ‘interesting’. Asking a teenager what they find interesting and not interesting is worlds apart from what a chief examiner finds interesting. . 

GCSE English exam success is based on a student’s ability to complete a Krypton Factor assault course. Jump through this hoop. Climb under this netting. Skip up this hill. It is a marathon task and it is no wonder some students leave papers and answers blank. One of my favourite meetings with SLT, is showing them the difference between an English Language paper and another subject. On this page students have to write 2 paragraphs. On this page they write 3 paragraphs. You can easily see how so many students struggle with it. It isn’t skill and knowledge that gets you grades, but endurance. If you can write at length for one hour forty-five minutes, then you’ll get a grade. 

For years, we’ve taught the exam paper as a whole entity. Yes, we might have taught separately the reading and writing section, but we’ve taught them as discrete units. Then, it moves to becoming endless repeats and a challenge for teachers as we try to teach the same thing in a slightly different way. The problem is that by the time you get to Question 4 on an exam paper you and the students have lost the will to live. It is tough and boring. 

This year, we have tried something differently. We are breaking the GCSE exam papers across the year. In Year 10 we focus on Paper 1 and in Year 11 we focus on Paper 2. 

Year 10	Year 11
Paper 1 Q1 and Q2	Paper 2 Q1 and Q2
Paper 1 Q5 story writing	Paper 2 Q5 - structure, introduction and Tone
Paper 1 Q3 and Q4	Paper 2 Q3 and Q4
Paper 1 Q5 descriptive writing	Paper 2 Q5 -strengthening and developing an argument, conclusions

Instead of spending whole terms looking at the paper, we spread the teaching of it so that we are regularly revisiting the elements and building spaced practice. Yes, you could teach the whole paper in one go, but with that approach you don’t get time to practise and hone skills. In between them we read literature texts, short stories and non-fiction. 

For example, with Paper 1, we are spending three weeks looking at reading the text properly and how to answer Paper 1 Q1 and Q2. Getting them attuned to these first is important. How many times have we rushed into the next question, before ensuring things are embedded? We get some questions right before moving on to the next two. 

When we teach Paper 1 Q3 and Q4 later in the year, we will start with a practice on Q1 and Q2 to space out the practice and to ensure things are committed to memory. I hate the idea of GCSE being endless exam papers. Therefore, I think it is important that we break up papers and do interesting things and different things all the time.   

To show you how these units go, I have included two of our first booklets. 

Paper 1 - Q1 and Q2 

Paper 2 - Q1 and Q2 

Building this structure around the papers helps us to address the monotony of the exam papers but also build up that knowledge. All too often, we walk students through papers expecting to remember how to answer each individual question and by the time it comes to their go they have forgotten what to do with Question 1 and 2. Plus, with interleaveing the questions like this, it allows us to build in more opportunities to look at shorts stories. We are not obsessing on getting to Question 4. Stop. Pause. Explore.

Thanks for reading, 

Xris   

Activating prior knowledge in reading

A student doesn’t read a text in isolation. They never read something new, because they are bringing something to the table when reading any text. They are bringing their knowledge, experience, opinions or prejudices to a text at any one time.

I always find the opening of a novel such a disorientating experience. Where am I? Who am I? What are the rules of this world featured in this story? By about chapter 2 or 3, I am a bit happier, because I have orientered the story and built a mental model in my brain. Paper 1 Question 3 is like my nightmare. Instead of giving us a complete story, we have the opening chapter of a novel. Students have to orientate it quickly and say something clever about it. That’s why Question 3 is a nightmare. It asks students to orientate the opening of a story and explore the subtext of something unformed and incomplete. Writers don’t convey big ideas, in novels, through their opening pages. 

Activating prior knowledge isn’t something that we explicitly teach or that students are particularly good at. As teachers, we might show a photograph of something or give a small explanation or description of something we feel students need, such as what an eel is.  Prior knowledge tends to be sporadic or left to chance. But, little bits of knowledge help the reader to orientate what is going on. These breadcrumbs are important. You cannot just work things out in isolation. Supposition has its place in fiction, but we need something concrete to build a mental model. We work with the knowledge that we have. 

The opening letterbox, as I call it, from the exam paper is probably one of the most important pieces of information for students to understand the extract. It has a number of different points of knowledge to activate. 

 

• What do you know about the beginning of a story? What should it do? 

• What do you know about the early 1900s? 

• What do you know about the name Rosabel? 

• What do you know about being lower class? 

• What do you know about hat shops? 

• What do you know about being a girl who has to work in the 1900s? 

All too often, students will gloss over the letterbox for the sake of the story. It is like some sort of addiction: move out the way, while I highlight every simile and adverb in sight. They read the text in isolation. Therefore, the understanding is largely in isolation. 

I would say my lessons are always about activating prior knowledge, but I am not always explicit about the process. Tom - Where did we see this in the last topic? Dalip - what is a toffee? Where would I find one? The knowledge we retrieve in English cannot all fit onto a sheet. We are the subject that uses so many domains of knowledge that you cannot possibly put them down on paper. Instead, students have to use what existing knowledge they have to build a mental model. 

But, if you look at the questions above related to Rosabel, you can see that some relate to History. Who studies History as part of their options? What can you tell me about the 1900s?  

But some of the others don’t need precise knowledge but more about pulling on their experience. I wouldn’t expect students to know the meaning of Rosabel. Beautiful rose. But, students can articulate that they haven’t heard of the name. It sounds exotic. Unusual. Different. Or, they might make the connection with the flower rose. Either way, they could pick up on how her name doesn’t quite match to her lower class status. 

Then there is the hat shop. An interesting one. On the surface, it looks simple. A shop that sells hats. This is where the knowledge around shops comes in. Are hat shops common today? Where would we see a hat shop today?  Why do people buy hats? What kind of people would buy hats?  This, of course, is relational knowledge, based on their experience. They look at hat shops in relation to other shops.  How are hat shops different from shoe shops? 

Sometimes, it is hard to recall prior knowledge around things, because the students’ brains have a lot of things to search through. One of the easiest questions I find to unlock prior knowledge is this: Is it a good or a bad thing? Is being lower class a positive or negative thing? No. Why? Sometimes, we have that prior knowledge, but we don’t know how to articulate. But, we have that emotional knowledge. We know if something is good or bad. 

As you can see, before we even read the text we can form quite a bit of context for the story by exploring what knowledge we have, exploring our experience around the subject and  exploring our emotional response to something. 

What do you know about hat shops? 

• Not common 

• Rich use them for special occasions 

• Better than other jobs - selling a luxury item 

• Dealing with rich people all day 

We are being asked to do knowledge retrieval at the start of lessons, yet in English we do it all the time and, actually, in different ways. From the 5 questions based on the letterbox, we are recalling precise knowledge, recalling feelings and recalling experiences. Then, based on those they are building relational facts, their own opinions and their own opinions.  

What activating prior knowledge does is help frame the context for events. The Alex Cold extract employs prior knowledge that is a little closer to home. 

What is it like to live with your parents? 

What is it like to have two younger sisters? 

What is it like to live in a small American town?

What is it like when your mother becomes ill? 

Then, there is another question we can ask to understand the context even further: How would a typical boy deal with all those things? 

I genuinely think we undersell and underuse prior knowledge during lessons. We use it for high end things like techniques or general understanding, but we don’t use it enough with formulating ideas and thinking. We leave a lot unsaid. Students need to grapple with unseen reading texts and working with what they do know helps to secure understanding of what they don’t know. They are tent pegs to hold things together. Without exploring the student’s prior knowledge, we don’t know what we need to teach them. 

What is your knowledge of …? 

What would you feel in that situation…? 

What do people think of …. 

What would we expect to see when …? 

What usually happens in this situation…? 

I see that often teachers preload students with knowledge around a text, when actually there isn’t a great need to. Exploratory thinking is needed initially and throughout the reading. If we want students to be active readers, we need them to think and recall knowledge actively. Before we start, what do you know about X? 

I would argue that the first part of reading a text is the hardest. It is where we lose students. If they don’t have a clear grasp of a mental model, no matter how simple or complex, they can progress further. That can be an emotional model - this is a bad situation. Or, it can be a finely precise model. Either way, the student is building something in their head. Their knowledge of the context is key. Therefore, we need to help them build these contexts and show them how they have the knowledge to do that. 

Picture books offer students a context and a ready formed mental model to build the story around. They can see it. They can see what Winnie the Witch is doing as they listen / read the words. They have a clear context for the story. Text without pictures don't have that context. Students have to construct the context themselves. And that is why prior knowledge is so important. Prior knowledge is about context.

Thanks for reading, 

Xris