Comprehensive comprehension questions

I have always had a sense of cynicism about comprehension tasks. I suppose it stems from my mistrust of textbooks. My PGCE course subtlety trained me to start from scratch every lesson. Therefore, textbooks always seemed like cheating, when they are far from it.  Likewise, comprehension tasks had always nestled in the forbidden zone of my teaching toolbox, due to their close association with text books. I might have occasionally used them in a moment of weakness, but I had always insisted that students wrote longer, lengthier pieces of responses to a task. Respond to this question. Find an example of this.

Recently, I have been playing around with comprehension tasks and… have started to really appreciate their usefulness. I take my hat off to you, if you have constantly used them as the foundation of your teaching. My previous wariness has been caused by a fear that I am practically guiding students too much in their analysis. At times, I have thought that if I gave students a comprehension task it was like me writing the whole thing for them. I always thought it as akin to an Art teacher giving a student a colour in by numbers sheet or a Music teacher giving a student a karaoke DVD.

I have been preparing some classes for the GCSE English AQA paper. On the higher paper, the questions are like mini-essays. Getting students to find the right style and approach to each question is difficult. Less able students often struggle with the vast nature of the task. The vagueness of the question doesn’t really help students to write precisely too. In fact, you need a number of different thought processes in your writing at once. One single question doesn’t help you.

Take question 2: Explain how the headline and picture are effective and how they link to the text.

Students read this question and often zoom in the word ‘effective’. The following answer becomes an experiment of how many times the word ‘effective’ can be used in a short space of paper so that the word loses all sense of its meaning. Unfortunately, the question needs more from students – some of it not even hinted at in the question. The most able of students do this without any fear, but the less able struggle. Enter the comprehension task.

1.     List three emotions the reader feels when reading the headline and subheading. (3 marks)

2.     Pick two words from the headline that the writer has chosen to interest the reader. (2 marks)

3.     Give a reason as to why the writer chose one of those words. (2 marks)

4.     Find three quotes in the text that show that the Tyrannosaurus is fearsome or something to be feared. (3 marks) 

5.      Explain why the writer chose that picture to go with the headline. (5 marks)

 

Start your writing with the sentence: The writer selected the picture to show…

6.     What do the following things in the picture show / suggest / symbolise?  (6 marks)

a.     The people

b.     Teeth

c.      Bones

Use the phrase: The ----- suggests that …

7.     Explain why the writer did not use a cartoon dinosaur for the main picture. (2 marks)

8.     Pick a quote from the article that best sums up the picture. (2 marks)

9.     Explain why the quote from question 8 links to the picture. (2 marks)

10.                        What words best describe the tone of the article? Pick three words to describe the tone. (3 words)

11.                        Describe what the reader is supposed to feel / think during these three points.  (6 marks)

a.     When they see the headline and the picture

b.     When they read the text

c.      After they have read the whole text

This example refers to the exam paper about Sue the Tyrannosaurus Rex. The great thing, for me, about using this with students is that I can see what aspect of the question they struggle with most. In fact, they can see where they struggle the most, because each question links to a different part they have to include in the final ‘big’ question. Usually, I give them the exam question and watch them get it wrong. Or, I give them a great example and show them what it should look like. Both are difficult for students.  

I used the above with a class recently and I found it very interesting. All the class got to question ten and then they struggled or stopped. Why? Well, they had found the idea of a newspaper having a tone difficult. Then one student piped up: What words can I use to describe the tone of a newspaper? I usually have to look at the carnage the whole class produces before deciding on what to teach out of the long list of things they all got wrong. It is like Pandora’s Box: once you start the task you are working to constantly fix everything.  This approach to the question helped me from the start to pinpoint the weaknesses and strengths. Plus, I didn’t need a silly APP grid to spot that they had issues with offering suggestions about the lack of cartoon or how the struggled to see the symbolism of people in the picture.

The next task with these comprehension questions is to turn the comprehension answers into a full exam response to the question. Students are going to turn that into a piece of writing. They have the components and now their skill is to weave them together. Or, look at how other students have weaved things together.  The comprehension task is part of the planning which necessary for students to have the meat on the bones in their writing. I am planning on using this ‘comprehension then write’ approach for essay writing on a novel. Too many times we plan the majority of writing for students. I am all too guilty of saying the following: Of course, you can plan it whatever way you want, but, if it was me I’d plan it this way. It is to be hoped that this approach allows me to direct the thinking without actually providing the content.

What is the defining moment in the novel?

What lead up to the moment?

How has the writer presented the moment in a dramatic way?

What does the writer want us to think as a result of these consequences?

At a recent conference, someone asked me about getting students to think for themselves.  All too often I have used collective planning for writing. I have shared ideas. Students have shared their own ideas. Then, students have been able to plagiarise the ideas. In fact, I think there are large swathes of students that plagiarise their way through school, because things are handed to them on a plate. And, maybe, I have been part of that problem. I am certainly going to use comprehension tasks to build original ideas and thought. If students know that they have to comprehend first, then write second, they might just build into independent thinkers. If they don’t get a point, then the questions point that out to me and I can direct my teaching.

Things to think about with comprehension questions:

·         Start with a find question first to engage students. It is usually easy and it gets the students to read the text.

·         Pepper the list of comprehension questions with several find question throughout. It provides students with several questions they can do and it avoids the usually thing of questions getting harder and harder.

·         Manipulate the question so that there isn’t a clear gradient. Think about how students will approach things. If they know things get harder, they will probably stop completely when they get to a hard question. However, the opposite is the case with very able classes. It becomes a challenge to them.

·         Start with precise question and move to general questions, so you move from concrete thinking to abstract thinking.

·         Reflect the complexity of the question in the marking and not in the position of the question in the list.

·         Allow for a general mop up question. An opportunity that allows a students to point out something else they might have found and you haven’t thought of: What else is interesting about the extract?

·         Provide opportunities for students to offer opinions.  

·         For less able students, offer example sentences or phrases to help develop their explanation.

·         For less able students, write how many sentences needed for the answer.

·         For less able students, use a PowerPoint slide for each question and help students to time their thinking and writing time.

Oh, and on a final note. Look at the answers students provide. The following is a question I used for some revision of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’. To ensure students revise the book at home, the class are having a weekly reading test. A quick comprehension task based on the weekly reading at home of five chapters.

What is the first item found in the tree by the children?

Answer: two pieces of chewing gum

Incorrect answers: a toy, a marble

I have always stressed to students that they must examine the writer’s choices, but that one comprehension question has allowed me to explore the writer’s choices with the class. Two pieces of gum highlights how Boo wants to be friends with both of them. The gum relates to the mouth and it can stop people from talking. Gum is often disliked by parents so it is slightly rebellious. Look at the other items suggested by the class. Why didn’t Harper Lee select those items? They are all items that a child can play with on their own.

Talking of Harper Lee, I must plan a lesson for tomorrow.  

Thanks for reading,

Xris

Blooming Bloom's Taxonomy

I am in the process of fine-tuning a workshop I am giving next weekend and I am thinking about a recent piece of CPD I have had. I always think a good sign of a good piece of CPD is the amount of thinking that takes place after the session. For years, I have sat in numerous sessions in various schools. I have led, participated, listened and watched. I have written on post-it notes, sugar paper and flipcharts. They can be usually categorised into three categories: ‘I know that’ category; ‘made me think’ category; and ‘it won’t work’ category. It is not that I am being cruel or arrogant, but some CPD works and some doesn’t work. It is not a criticism of the person leading it, but the ideas that are being propagated.

Ofsted are struggling now with the concept of teaching styles and preferable ways of education. As they hold so much power, it is not hard to see why their judgements are seen as indicators of what is right and what is wrong. CPD too is a minefield. In its use by schools, it can be suggested that some CPD ideas are the right ideas and your failure to use these ideas is failure of your teaching. The best CPD is CPD that makes me think. It makes me look at my current model/s of teaching and consider this additional question. This idea. It becomes a mirror to my own practice. Look at myself and consider what I could do to be better.

Education is like a greengrocer. It is full of vegetables. They are all good for you. They provide minerals and vitamins, and other stuff. You can cook the vegetables in lots of different ways. You still, however, get the same minerals, vitamins and other stuff. There are so many different ways to cook and prepare that no one person cooks in the same way. The end results are fairly the same: energy. Yet, the preparation, the cooking and the meal all look different. Education is like that. Full of vegetables – not in that sense of the word! CPD should be like cooking. It should be like watching Nigella or Delia. They both cook. They both make nice meals. They just do it in a different way. Nigella might have a better recipe for my Year 7s, but Delia’s recipe for tripe and onions works a treat with Year 11s. One thing: I just know that Jamie Oliver’s ideas will never work with the class. For a start, it is so difficult to do that in English.     

Anyway, I had a CPD session that fell in to that category of ‘made me think’ CPD. It had already generated one blog post. See it here: Frankenstein’s Essay. But, it also made me think of another question:

Does Bloom’s Taxonomy really work in English?

It is a simple question. Most might say yes. It is assumed that it will. Bloom has become a mantra for some teachers. A lull in a discussion or meeting on planning or curriculum could eventually lead to Bloom’s Taxonomy.  How does this fit in with Bloom? It is as if Bloom is an extra student you have to consider in every lesson you teach?

So, what is my ‘beef’ with Bloom’s Taxonomy? Let’s just remind ourselves of the structure of learning according to Bloom.

Remembering

Understanding

Applying

Analysing

Evaluating

Creating

We are led to believe that 'remembering' is less complex skills than 'creating' and therefore it is one of the first things that students do in the learning process. I would say that I am a good little teacher and I get students to do a lot of these skills in lessons.

Problem 1: Creating

We have the impression that creating is a high-level skill. The verbs used in association with this aspect of the taxonomy are:

categorizes, combines, compiles, composes, creates, devises, designs, explains, generates, modifies, organizes, plans, rearranges, reconstructs, relates, reorganizes, revises, rewrites, summarizes, tells, writes

The problem I have is that in English we are constantly creating. Like Art, Drama and Music, we spend most of our time creating something. We are the subjects that create. A story. A poem. An article. For us, creating is articulating. It is how students communicate in our subject. We compose all the time. Composition is our game. Creating is more complex than being a high or low-level skill. In fact, a lot of my lessons are inversions of Bloom’s Taxonomy. I start them creating something. Then, they evaluate it and analyse what they have done. I teach them something to help their understanding. Finally, I get them to remember what they have learnt. To be honest, I start complex and things become simple.
 

Furthermore, the notion of creating things is a problem for me. In English, we could easily get students to write a missing chapter or write in the style of, but is it as complex as evaluating and analysing? There have been numerous sequels of well-known texts and yet we don’t hold these writers in esteem for their cleverness. In fact, they are forgotten. Surely, someone who can write in the style of Dickens is really clever. No, the people we think are clever are the people how have analysed his life and explored the motivations behind his choices.

Sadly, the writers of - yuk- the sequels to ‘The Woman in Black’ have shown that they are far from clever. If you understood the novel, you would understand that there really can’t be a sequel because the cat is out of the bag. A key feature of the ghost story is mystery. Therefore, the sequel cannot work. Unless, ‘The Woman in Black’ had a distant cousin, who just so happened had a tragic past and as a result affected her so much she wanted to kill the offspring of people.

In fact, creating an extra chapter of a book can be a far simpler process than we are led to believe:

·         Use some of the words the writer has used.

·         Use some of the techniques the writer has used.

·         Use some of the characters / settings and ideas that the writer has presented to you.

We do this kind of task because it is fun. But, I question the level it gets on the taxonomy. Is it really better than analysing? Now, parodying or satirising a text is being high-level. Why? Because in that creation of something they demonstrate a higher level of understanding. Oh, and they use humour!

 

Problem 2: Remembering

Bloom’s Taxonomy having remembering at the bottom almost suggests that if your lessons concentrate on remembering you are doing some bad teaching. Yet, I teach novels. Long novels. Novels with more than a hundred pages. Novels with big words. In English, remembering is a skill that differs across the sets. Students in Set 5 struggle to remember to use full stops and students in Set 1 remember than three months ago you promised to show them the film version of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’.

 

When writing an essay about a novel, students getting the top bands will be students that:

·         Remember other examples in the text

·         Remember other texts that link to the idea

·         Remember other ways of saying a similar point

·         Remember precise words

The top students spot connections and patterns in work but key to doing this is remembering. You cannot make a connection if you can’t remember a thing in the opening. The students with the best memories make the best students.  

My new version of Bloom’s Taxonomy

Creating

Understanding

Evaluating

Analysing  

Remembering

Parodying  

I am sure you will disagree with me; I am happy for you to disagree. I just struggle with a rigid model of learning. We all learn in different ways. Maybe, the creative ones learn things differently. I know I do.  

Thanks for reading,

Xris

Gifted and talented at reading loads of books

I am asking the common question again: What can I do to push students? Like a pinball machine, a teacher’s head has lots of things and questions wheezing around in it and sometimes it hits something interesting and score points; other times the thoughts  go straight to the hole at the end of the game. Stretching the most able is something I feel strongly about. Pushing GCSE students isn’t just a case of giving them A-level texts. Pushing KS3 students isn’t just  about getting them to attempt GCSE questions. It is a fundamentally far bigger thing than give them work from the next stage up.

I have taught students fresh from the GCSEs and it has often saddened me that students who have chosen to do a subject lack drive, initiative, engagement and thought. But, I think the system we have does cause this. I often feel that I am cramming students with stuff all the time. I am preparing them for too much and it is all with the hope that some of it sticks. Take the literature exam for instance. In it, I have to teach a novel, a play, and several poems. It is like having a driving test and being tested on how you drive a car, a van, a lorry, a motor bike and a unicycle. All at the same time. Soon, we are going to be able to add Shakespeare to the list of things to teach them. Yay! The problem, I find, is that all this doesn’t encourage natural thought and ideas. Too much time is spent on ‘getting through the text’ and we often neglect that English is about ideas and how ideas are communicated. It is about thinking.

Isn’t that the point of the exams? To separate the wheat from the chaff? It may be. But, aren’t we limiting the thought processes at KS4 for which we endlessly moan about a lack of in KS5? I had a teacher at A-level who made me think.  Mr Powell was his name and I am sure he is Head of English in a school in Wales now. He taught me ‘Hamlet’ and ‘The Duchess of Malfi’. I will admit that I didn’t see eye to eye with him. In fact, he was the complete antithesis of Robin Williams in ‘Dead Poet Society’ for me. Mr Powell was an excellent, young teacher. Most people, I know, have a teacher that inspired them to teach. I don’t. But, he is the teacher who made me think about texts that as a result now I haven’t looked back since. He made me think. He took ‘Hamlet’ and made me think about questions that there were no simple answers for. He’d use quotes from critical essays and asked us to write an essay exploring it in relation to the quote. He made me think about the play, life, the context, the language and so much more. Before I plodded through texts and afterwards I thought about them in detail.  Like Hamlet, I procrastinated too much. But, that is what makes a great student: someone who thinks.

Back to that question: What can I do to push students? The default answer tends to be: read more. Booklists are given out and students look at them forlorn, hoping that one of those books was written in the last decade, and interesting? For me, it is about that but it is more about thinking. Getting students to think in a deeper way is the answer. Thunks at the start or end of the less are great for some abstract thinking or making connections, but I think more is needed to develop genuine thought and ideas.  These are four things I am doing or have done in the past that work, or might work:

[1] Critical essays

Each text I study I photocopy pages from critical essays and give them to a few students as an extension task or homework. Students read it looking for ideas that they agree, disagree or can’t comment on. Oxfam bookshops are great for picking up these.

[2] The Big-Clever-Intelligent Reading Project

This I have started this term and it is working… so far. We have read ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and I have asked students to find a book that explores racism or America from 1930-1960. They have come up with several books – ‘The Help’, ‘Great Gatsby’, ‘Noughts and Crosses’, ‘Of Mice and Men’ and ‘The Colour Purple’ (I know, I have warned them).

They are in the process of reading the book now and in December they are going to present a small talk on how their author presents racism or America. Furthermore, they are going to comment on how it contrasts with the presentation in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’. How could they possibly comment effectively on the presentation of racism in a book if they have only looked at one book on the topic? By thinking about how another author presents an idea, they will understand the main text better.  

[3] Socratic Discussions

Enough said really. However, I do sit in the discussions occasionally.

[4] A love letter to the author.

Students are given a review of the text and explore if they can prove the ideas in it. Or, they look for flaws and inconsistencies in the arguments presented.  

Dear Harper Lee,

I think ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ is the greatest novel known to man. It is the one book that every student should read for its nuanced exploration of racism in 1930s America. The novel teaches us morally, socially and spiritually what is good and bad, which is especially of note in these troubled and desperate times.

Firstly, through ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ we learn that history is sometimes given too much status in society. Nobody can escape the past. Each character in the book has a past and that past affects how they behave and, more importantly, how others judge each them. Several characters live off the history of other characters. Their social interactions are formed as a result of historical events. The town of Maycomb too has a history and that history linked to the civil war also causes prejudices in the novel.  You, Miss Lee, show us how that racism is a historical thing and that for us to combat it we need to change how we view each other. History should teach us the wrongs and rights, but each person is not reflection of their ancestors. The sins of the fathers should be remembered but they shouldn’t haunt the current and future generations.

I am now off to ponder, consider, procrastinate, cogitate and decide whether or not to grow a moustache for Movember.

To Movember or not Movember – that is the question!

Thanks for reading,

Xris32

P.S. If you know of any English teachers in driving distance of Derby, please tell them about the English Teachmeet on the 16th November. The link is here.