Cold calling has, for me, had a funny place in my lessons. I agree it has its benefits, but all too often things are thrust towards the English department's direction. We are left with trying to fit the new approach around how we do things. I discussed this with knowledge retrieval and knowledge before. My problem isn’t with common approaches, but a draconian aspect that it must be done this way or no way at all. For the uninitiated, cold calling is simply picking students to answer a question or to respond to a task. It stops the same four vocal students speaking all the time and it stops a large population daydreaming and twiddling their thumbs. The problem I have is the very nature of English. Sometimes, in a lesson we aren’t recalling quick facts or processing a formula to produce a fact. In fact, English is a very different kettle of fish. It is about opinions and experiences. I often say to students that English is the subject of opinions. We discuss the student’s opinions and we explore a writer’s opinions on a topic or idea. In fact, in any given lesson, we are looking at an opinion in English. And, this is the rub. The fuzziness of opinions is at the centre of English. What is interesting about the poem, Henry? What is your opinion of Macbeth at this moment? What is your favourite word in the line? What stands out in this section? Do you think the writer is effective at getting her message out? Why is Dickens not so critical about the poor here? All these questions might have a smidgen of factual basis but they largely employ an opinion of some form. There is a personal aspect that the student has to connect to. They aren’t just repeating or recalling facts. They are doing something extra which doesn’t quite sit well with throwing a question out to a sea of faces. Let’s take a question like this: What is your opinion of competitive fly-fishing? For a start, I don’t even know if it is such a competition. But, with that one question, you have to check your memory bank of fly-fishing, competitive sports and knowledge of sports to form your opinion. Like most of us, we haven’t got an opinion already stored in our brains. You’ll have some people who will have a clear dislike, like or indifference to the sport. Or, some will be clueless. To achieve an opinion, there are lots of little processes involved, which I find cold calling doesn’t help with. I would say that cold calling in English can be akin to solving quadratic equations without a sheet of paper. There are too many microprocessors for it to be an internal process for most students. For this reason, I worry that cold calling being the dominant process in lessons is dangerous, because it doesn’t work for opinions. Our opinions are funny. They are the combination of knowledge, experience and ‘the force’ or midi-chlorians. There’s something else deep inside. Yeah, Chris. You can cold call opinions, don’t you know? You could, but like most things it forces students to simplify. Like or dislike. The nuance is missed. The exploration is missed. Like all things, I think as a tool it has its benefits, but I also think it should be used with moderation. And, it should be used with caution with English lessons. Its use forces us down a fact driven way of perceiving our subject. Exploration is at the heart of our subject. Forming opinions and developing opinions needs to be a thrust of what we do. I do think English as a subject needs to kick back at some of the systems or processes that are being imposed. I think that there is an English version of these systems, but we need to find and explore it. We need to be exploring how they can work in our context rather than simply accepting them. Thanks for reading Xris
Sunday 12 November 2023
Sunday 15 October 2023
It’s all ‘bout that quote, ‘bout that quote, no ideas!
Quotation learning is a poor proxy for literature revision. There, I’ve said it. The problem I have with it is that a quotation can only get you so far with exploration of a text. In fact, it stops the flow of thought and ideas. Students mould the thinking to the quotation rather than the quotation to the thinking.
Over the years, I have seen quotations, plot (I take no prisoners on this one) and context become the juggernauts of revision. Students feel confident if they know some quotations, they know the plot and they can throw in some contextual facts into an essay. In fact, they have become the markers for revision. But, this is where the rub comes, they generate a level of false confidence. They give the appearance of knowing the text well, when that isn’t the case.
Revision in English has become very knowledge led. But, the knowledge is limited to quite a narrow field. The knowledge of quotations. The knowledge of plot. The knowledge of context. If we are honest, these are the easiest bits of knowledge related to our subject. They are the things we can easily teach, text, and repeat in lessons. This ‘easy’ knowledge spills into how students revise. They revise these ‘easy’ knowledge elements and because they are more concrete than other types of knowledge there’s a sense of accomplishment. Students feel a sense of achievement in a largely abstract subject because they have learnt something concrete. Teachers feel a sense of accomplishment because they have taught something tangible and concrete - and easily measurable.
There is some value in learning quotations, plot and context, but in the English classroom these should not be the drivers. Sadly, they are, which in turn converts to the idea that in English, all you need to revise is quotations, plot details and contextual facts. They are foundational things rather than exploratory and cumulative things. If you don’t believe me, then check out the examiner’s reports. I have yet to see one that says that students need to learn quotations.
The knowledge of ideas. The knowledge of concepts. The knowledge of the writers’ feelings and thoughts. These are generally left behind with this concrete knowledge revision focus. We don’t see revision built around these. The complexity of the subject is the main reason. The plurality of ideas means that you cannot easily mark these sorts of things. You cannot easily tick or cross them. You cannot boil them down to a quick true or false task. You cannot summarise them easily. We don’t factor this complexity into revision and so revision doesn’t focus on the complex. Yet, what we expect students to do is get these complex ideas naturally armed with quotations, plot details and contextual knowledge.
For this reason, I’ve been playing around with revision with our Year 11s. They are preparing for their first mock in November and I thought I’d explore different ways to build and develop a level of complexity in the revision. So, each Friday, we set the first ten minutes on answering these questions about a character studied. Not a quotation really in sight.
I wanted them to think big and exploratory but also think like they would under exam conditions. They aren’t writing in full sentences, but bullet points. Then, I reveal what I would reward on an online version of the document. The idea is to score as many points as you can.
Interestingly, students throw out ideas. I’ve used fatherly, is that ‘parent-like’? If they have an idea that I haven’t included, then I add it and add a score to it. This week I gave one idea 5 marks, because it was so good. The idea that the Friar links to the theme of rebellion. Cue more students trying to outdo that 5 marks.
What I noticed was a real engagement with ideas and characters. Exploration and ideas were at the heart of the revision. It wasn’t just knowledge recalling, but idea forming… and exploring. It is quite easy to do but the key thing is showing a hierarchy of ideas. That’s where we can help make something abstract seem concrete. The categorising of some words or ideas being better is often something we say but don’t actively work on in lessons. Yes, some words are better to describe a character than others. Some words are precise and some words are general when describing things.
The texts are massive banks of quotations. Seeing texts as disjointed entities is the problem here. Our obsession on quotations is warping how students interpret texts. They are thinking around the quotations and not thinking around the text. We need to reassert that distinction in lessons. A student that can think around a text writes the best essays.
Ideas are the interesting things in English and we have a duty to make sure that our subject isn’t all quotations and extracts. If we are not careful, students are interpreting the subject as being all about the quotes and not the ideas.
Thanks for reading,
Xris
Sunday 8 October 2023
Which one crossed the road first? The poet? Or the idea?
Poetry analysis can be both one of the easiest things to do and one of the hardest things to do. What is the poet saying about X? It sounds like an easy question, but it is so much more complex than we think. When we explore things in literature, we are getting students to make a number of inferences:
# Inferences for character / topic (the character is jealous);
# Inferences for the reader (the reader would be shocked) ;
# Inferences for the writer (the writer is highlighting the lack of power women had in society).
It is no surprise that students are good at making inferences about characters because they are doing it every day with their and other’s body language. Inferences around feelings are hard because it is about their own reactions. A teenager is a bag of mixed emotions and they can rarely pinpoint their precise emotion let alone others.
The problem we have in English is that the drivers for lessons tend to be the texts and not the people. That’s why it becomes hard when we are analysing texts, because students see texts and they don’t see living (well, they were living at one point) person behind them. The writer becomes the afterthought and therefore so removed and disjointed from the process. When you’ve spent several week’s looking at the story and the character of Scrooge, it becomes jarring when the emphasis switches to the writer. I don’t know why Dickens did it. He just did it, didn’t he?
Forming a picture of writers is something we actively have to do. Shakespeare the person. Dickens the writer. Stevenson the author. Owens the poet. We need students to infer something about the writer’s personality. Their opinions. Their perspectives. Their hopes. Their fears. The problem is often bogged down with the factual knowledge of the character rather than the inferred personality of the writer. Students focus on the historic figure rather than the human person. My favourite questioning around texts goes like this:
Who does Shakespeare really like?
How do you know he likes them?
Why do you think he likes them?
I like the route of this question because it is about the person and the personality inferred from a text. The best work I have read always has their grasp of the writer’s personality. They pick the stitching and unpick so much. The great thing is that students see so many different things. Mercutio because of his joy for life. The Nurse for her bawdiness. Juliet because she defies social norms. The ability to form an opinion about a writer is such an important aspect of English.
Writers are like us. They laugh, breath, cry, make jokes, use sarcasm and find things boring. Students don’t see writers as people. They are ghosts. They are ghostly apparitions that the English teacher holds seances in their classroom to communicate with. Knock twice if you used that alliteration to highlight the extreme nature of war. Knock once if you didn’t think about it all when writing.
I have never been a fan of giving students a load of verbs around the writer’s intent. You end up getting sentences with verbs in a sentence around the writer’s intent. You don't have the students working to build an opinion of the writer, their personality and the reasoning behind things. Instead you get lots of nice words.
Students are pretty good at spotting language features in texts. That isn’t the problem. To be honest, it never has been a problem. The problem has always been the reason why. The writer’s reason why. We have largely told students the writer’s reason as fact. We haven’t really taught students to build those inferences themselves when reading the text. Look at how our writing structures Point Evidence Explanation / What How Why place inference around the writer’s reasoning at the end. We leave inferences around the writer towards the end. It is an afterthought. We don’t put the writer’s personality in the driving seat. We hide it in the trunk and we wait for a suitable place to dump the body.
Therefore, there is a duty for us as English teachers to resurrect these dead / alive writers. There’s a reason why in academic and degree essays we write about writers in the present tense. The analysis is when we see them as alive. They become alive. They breathe in my lessons. Shakespeare is the guy who would probably drink me under the table but has such a subversive humour. Dickens is the well meaning guy but does go on a bit. Austen will probably laugh at my jokes and then go to critique me in her writing. We the teachers bring them alive and the students help us to build the inferences around their personality. We co construct a person around the reading of a text. Anyone get the sense that Dickens is bored here? Shakespeare’s up to his old tricks again, isn’t he? That Stevenson! You would see Dickens do it like Stevenson, would you?
Now, before you start dedicating a lesson a week to finding a writer’s personality lessons, we don’t need to do much to change this emphasis. Simply tweak our way of questioning and exploring. This week I spent some lessons looking at Exposure.
[1] We read a small section of the poem and explored what we thought the writer felt and thought.
[2] Next, we read the full poem and explored anything else we noticed.
[3] I then shared this with students to decide on words to describe the writer’s perspective on things. Often students lack the words and the precision of words. We put too much stock on their vocabulary in the first instance. Students need to build those connections up between writers and thoughts.
[4] Student then took a whole page and wrote this sentence down in the middle. As a class, we decided what was wrong with it. Together we changed the words and phrases. At this point we are exploring and refining inferences and rewording them accordingly. I think this is a skill we largely undervalue - the selection of the words to enable precision. X isn’t the right word, by Y is.
Wildred Owen's positive and simple poem 'Exposure' highlights the bravery of the soldiers fighting in WW2 and how they feel valued and appreciated.
[5] Then for each part of the sentence we explored where we could see it in the poem. What did the writer do with language to show that idea? We wrote them down and where possible we looked for more than one device to show those ideas. This was all on a spidediagram around that original sentence.
[6] Finally, around the outside we wrote our inferred reasons for the writer thinking or feeling this way.
Not positive but emotionless - ‘nothing happened’ / ‘ice in their eyes’ - Owen’s bleakness as he doesn’t think things will change
Students then did the same for Charge of the Light Brigade.
From the start, we were looking at forming inferences around the writer’s thoughts and feelings. That was the focus and not the techniques. Structuring the analysis around the person then makes the choices more personal.
We like to think English is about characters, but I think we undermine the subject if that’s all we discuss. It is more about personality and personalities. Maybe, we need to make the subject more about the people and less about the texts.
Thanks for reading,
Xris
P.S. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead or actual events is purely coincidental.
Saturday 16 September 2023
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.
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.
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
Sunday 10 September 2023
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