Questioning, exploring and probing Literature

It is that time of year again. Not Christmas, but mock marking. Interestingly, this time we noticed that students were not getting under the skin of a character. For our Literature mock, we asked students to write about Tybalt and how he is presented in the story. Whilst some students were able to explore the character in detail, the rest resorted to repeating how Tybalt is a catalyst throughout an essay. They remembered the knowledge and forgot to think about the character in any detail. 

Exams want students to think about the characters or themes in the question, yet it is so easy for students to focus on their existing knowledge of a character to frame an argument. In fact, it is their default method. What can I remember about the character? What words can I remember to describe the character? For a large part of the thinking and planning process it is focused on the ‘what’ and there is very little time spent on the ‘why’. For this reason, we always get the one student who describes the plot of the story. When writing an answer, ‘what’ seems to have a greater level of priority than the ‘why’. The ‘what’ is easier because it is about knowledge and knowledge is largely concrete. The ‘why’ is fuzzier, because it is an inference. 

When writing about a text, we are inferring all the time. We make an inference about the writer’s ideas. We make an inference about how the reader reacts. We make an inference about the reasons we think a writer wrote something. As I say to students, we are making an educated guess around what the writer’s intent is, because for most of the time we will need a seance for that to happen. Over the years, I have seen verbs used to help get students to write about the writer’s intent, which like most things makes the writing sound like students are exploring the writer’s intent, but haven't actually engaged with the idea. One verb alone isn’t going to help you explore a writer's intent. Students need to have the thought processes around the intent rather than just a few throwaway verbs.

To address the writer’s intent, it is so easy to link everything to a writer’s history. Therefore, students turn into mini Freuds. This bit here reflects the writer’s troubled relationship with his mother. This bit here reflects his sad childhood. The problem with this level of thinking is it removes the writer’s present. What in the present impelled him or her to write the story in that way? Not everything is about the past. Therefore, to echo something Dickens wrote: students need to be analysing in the present and the future. We are too fixated on the past and filling in gaps when maybe there isn’t a need to fill a gap. The text should always be the source of ideas on the writer’s present and not the student. 

So how do we get students to explore the thought processes better behind a writer’s intent? Well, questioning. Getting students to question texts better. Step away from a nugget of knowledge as the formation of an idea and push towards questioning, reasoning and speculating ideas. 

The problem we have in the exam scenario is that only a slim proportion  of students do that exploratory thinking. The rest go - ‘Pants, what did miss say about Tybalt?’. Therefore, we need students to build up their thinking and we must model how to explore. This is what I did with a class when giving feedback on the Tybalt exam.   

We spent 10 minutes jotting down answers to these questions. I revealed one question at a time and then students wrote down their ideas or thoughts. Then, we feedback our answers. 

1. What is Tybalt's role in the story? ​

2. What does Tybalt teach us about Elizabethan society? ​

3. What does Tybalt teach us about men? Young people? ​

4. Does Shakespeare like or dislike this character? How do you know? ​

5. What can you find to like about the character? ​

6. Shakespeare includes numerous young male characters such Romeo, Mercutio, Benvolio, so why does Shakespeare add Tybalt to this group? ​

7. Is the character realistic? ​

8. What big idea is Shakespeare using Tybalt to show us?​

9. Tybalt is a symbol of violence and aggression, but what else is he a symbol of?  ​

10. What do you think Shakespeare is trying to do with a character like Tybalt? 

Finally, we decided what we thought about what we all thought Shakespeare wanted and why he needed the audience to feel a particular way. The stacking of questions was really important, for me, because all too often we rely on one big question and, at least, this way if students couldn’t answer a question then they had an alternative question to answer. Plus, we are modelling the questions a student should be asking when approaching a text. Maybe, in our search to get the right answers from students we have forgotten the importance of getting students to ask the right questions about a text. In our attempts to make students’ work look and sound good we have forgotten what underpins that: an exploratory, inquisitive nature towards literature. Texts don’t spark that inquisitive nature without someone to help fan the flames. 

Here is another set of questions I am going to use with ‘An Inspector Calls’. 

1. Does Sheila make the audience think or does she make the audience feel? 

2. Is Priestley telling the audience they should like Sheila more than other characters in the household? 

3. Why does Priestley make Sheila and Mrs Birling so different? 

4. Do you think Sheila is a two-dimensional character? 

5. What, in your opinion, is the reason for Priestley placing Sheila in the story, even though she has very little influence in society? 

6. Why did Priestley not use two sons rather a son and a daughter in the play? 

7. Does the form of a play limit our understanding of the character? What would we understand better if this was a novel? 

8. Is Sheila a stereotype? What is she a stereotype of?

9. Given that Priestley is a man, has he misunderstood anything about how women behave, speak and act? 

10.  Does Priestley have a different message about younger women than older women? 

A love of Literature goes hand in hand with questioning and probing ideas. If we want to seriously improve engagement and uptake in Literature, then we need to look at how we interact with the subject. The exam questions don’t engage the hearts and minds of students, yet the majority of questioning around Literature centres on the presentation of a character and a theme. Compare the following questions: 

[1] Compare how Dickens presents women in the extract. 

[2] Do you think Charles Dickens is a bit creepy in the way he presents women? 

Which one would you rather write or speak about? Engagement comes from a number of different ways. For me, emotional and cerebral engagement go together. The exam questions are the most boring questions in the world. They have to be, because they are exam questions, but that doesn’t mean that every single question we ask or set students in lessons needs to have the same level of boredom. Add opinion questions to engage students on an emotional level. Add tricky questions to engage on a cerebral level. Just don’t, whatever you do, photocopy the exam question. Flavour it. 

Questioning is where we can engage students. The texts are often engaging, but the questioning is what bridges the gap between the student and the text. Get that question right and the student connects with the text. 

Thanks for reading, 

Xris 

Starters and the three part lesson - R.I.P.

I remember a time when the most important thing for me in teaching was the starter. I’d spend hours, days and weeks thinking of ways to start a lesson. Ways to hook students. Ways to engage with students. Little did I know, decades later those starters would be redundant, useless and pointless. They’d sit gathering dust in cupboard somewhere. Common sense raised its head and people started to see that ‘engagement’ shouldn’t be a driving factor behind education.

For years now, I have worked on getting students to pull knowledge from one lesson to another. The great thing about knowledge organisers is that they do this explicitly. In a few conference talks, I have mentioned the need to ‘pull’ the knowledge learnt between lessons. Revisiting the knowledge learnt again and again in lessons, for me, is important in learning. During one conference, Andy Tharby explored the use of questioning and the use of different types of question. I like the idea, so I started playing around with it and I made some interesting discoveries.

One approach of Andy’s was the use of precise questioning. Here’s an example I used for ‘Bayonet Charge’.

1. What colour is the hare?
2. What kind of material was he wearing?
3. Who is he fighting for?
4. What ‘c’ is the shape the hare runs in?  
5. What ‘r’ is numb?
6. What ‘f’ is used to describe the way the hare moves?
7. What alliteration is used?
8. What is the last word and image of the poem?
9. What is personified in the poem?

This started as ‘starter’ with my Set 6 out of 6. The class had studied the poem in the previous lesson. As a class, we had been studying four poems from the Conflict and Power anthology. I decided to group the poems together around an idea or specific aspect. In English, we are working on student knowing a poem for an exam. They are expected to memorise and recall the poems.  

Anyway, verbally we answered the questions. Not everybody in the class could answer the questions on the first round of questioning. However, at least one person could answer each question. The rest of the lesson was spent looking at a different poem, ‘The War Photographer’. At the end of the lesson, I then revisited the questions again. Students could answer more than one question now. Then at the start of the next lesson, we attempted the questions again, and, as you would expect, the students were able to answer more questions.  In addition to these questions, I tested students on another set of questions linked to ‘The War Photographer’.

1. Where does the poem take place?
2. What colour is the light in the room?
3. Name three places the War Photographer has been.
4. What ‘r’ is how the poet describes England?
5. What ‘g’ is how the poet describes the person in the photograph?
6. What ‘s’ is where the pictures will be published?
7. What metaphor does the writer use to describe the photographs?
8. What contrast does the writer use to show us how lucky we are?
9. What religious reference is made in the poem?

Alongside the poems I questioned the students on these questions. And I repeated it over several weeks. The start, middle or end of a lesson would contain these questions. Sometimes we’d do one of these sets of question. Or, we’d do all of them. We answered the questions verbally rather than through their writing. The questions were repeated and repeated. I never named the questions, so the first thing the students had to do was identify the poem based on the questions. Sometimes, I’d even as students to recall the questions based on the poem.

Here are some more of the questions I used:

1. How many people were in the Light Brigade?
2. What did the soldiers ride on in battle?
3. What ‘v’ is where the battle took place?
4. What ‘c’ did the enemies have that the Light Brigade didn’t?
5. What ‘H’ is the way the writer describe the place where the battle took place?
6. What ‘s’ did the soldiers have instead of guns?
7. What is repeated at the end of every stanza?
8. What body part is used as a metaphor to describe the place?
9. Give an example of repetition in the poem.

1. What is the poet’s connection to war?
2. What animals celebrate when the soldiers head back to war?
3. What is the weather like in the poem? 
4. What ‘n’ is repeated in the poem several times? 
5. What ‘g’ is used to describe the soldiers?
6. What ‘i’ is used to describe their eyes at the end? 
7. What punctuation mark does the writer use to make things seem so slow? 
8. What kind of sentences does the writer use to create a sense of never ending torture? 
9. What pronoun does the writer use to show us that the speaker isn’t alone?

Over several weeks we kept revisiting these questions again and again. Now, here is the crux: we spend time generating questions upon questions in lessons; we spend hours planning what questions to say and when to say them, hoping to develop the learning.  What if we just asked the same one question again and again? There is an assumption that questions must be getting progressively harder to enable progress. What if asking the same question again and again supports learning better than asking hundreds of questions with different answers? Now, I could have changed the questions or I could have asked some more challenging questions at the end of the lessons; however, what I did with asking the same few questions again and again was build up the knowledge and ensure that the knowledge is stored and retained. How many times have students given us the wrong answer and we have just told them the correct answer? We consciously or subconsciously feel that the student will make a metal note of that mistake and learn from it. In truth, they don’t.

By revisiting the same questions again, I was building the knowledge up explicitly and with the students onside. The great thing about this was the time it saved. One slide on a PowerPoint. That one slide was starter and / or plenary for several lessons. Five minutes planning time became thirty minutes of lesson time over the course of a few weeks. Those questions will be used again and again in Year 10 and Year 11. The questions will be where the knowledge is stuck to the sticking place.

Tomorrow, as requested by the class, they want to be tested on all the questions in the format of a test paper. They have spent two weeks answering the questions, so they feel ready to complete a test on it. They haven’t seen it as boring and pointless. In fact, they have enjoyed it. They have enjoyed testing the knowledge again and again. Plus, it is going to take me ages to create the test paper. Umm… no it won’t. Copy and paste it.

We have always tried different methods to ensuring knowledge is retained. We often reword the question or we have presented the question in a different format. We expect possibly too much from students if we think that them making a mistake on one test fuels them to not make the same mistake on another paper, when the question is reworded or presented differently. What if we asked the same question again and again and ensure that they get the answer right? What if the memory of the question is equally as important as the memory of the knowledge of needed for answering the question?

So, when I think about my planning of lessons for the next group of poems I am studying with the class, I will not be thinking of how will I start and end lessons. I will be thinking of the 9 questions I want students to know about each poem in the group. What is the starting knowledge I want the students to have for each poem?   

Thanks for reading,

Xris

Cohesion: AQA Unit 1 English Language Exam Question 2

As I have told my friends this week, I have achieved the leftie equivalent of achieving a Blue Peter badge. I was featured in an article on the Guardian website. For years I have read the paper and never once did I think I would be included in it in some form. But, as I read the article again for the fifteenth time I started to look at the webpage in more detail. It just so happens that I was thinking about blogging about the second question on the AQA Unit 1 English Language paper. The one about pictures and their use in an article or text. My blog about question one is here.

The thing I found funny was the fact that my name was under a picture of a stock photo of a random class. Anybody could easily assume it was me in the picture. I am sure some of my old school friends on Facebook will think I have changed. They will think I have ‘beefed-up’ or I have let myself go – after all, isn’t that one purpose of Facebook: to watch the rest of humanity age at a faster rate than you. Look at Tom; he has no hair. I even joked that I now have a teaching stunt double. Except: nobody is going to confuse the two of us together.  I have bigger muscles.

Anyway, I quite like the second question on the exam paper as it all about cohesion. Previous exam papers I have taught lead students to comment on the font or the type of paper used and this has caused me endless headaches as students search for a whiff of relevant meaning. For example: the writer has used a simple font because they wanted to make the text simple. It made writing about non-fiction so endlessly puerile. It was searching for something that wasn’t there. Often, writers present things in a way because the designer of the article presented it that way. Maybe, I should have taught students to write: ‘The writer didn’t have a choice about the style of font, but I am sure the designer of the article did’.  

The exam paper asks students the following question:

Explain how the headline and picture are effective and how they link to the text.

The problem with this question is the way that students automatically break a task down. They automatically assume that first you should write about the headline. Then you should write about the picture and finally you should write about how they all link to the text. 

 

For me, the whole question is about glue. What sticks everything together? What are the connections between the different aspects? Miss the glue and you miss the whole point of the question. Some people might call it glue: others call it cohesion. It was only while teaching A-Level that I came across this term for something that we tend to neglect in other aspects of school.  It is the cohesion between headline, picture and text that is important with this question.  Also, the cohesion between the reader, writer (designer-if you want to be picky) and the text needs to be explored.

Therefore our students need to comment on the:

·         Reader
·         Writer
·         Headline
·         Text
·         Picture

Sadly, the mark scheme for this question is a helpful as an ice cube tray in the desert. It should really read:

7- 8 marks – Fancy handwriting

5-6 marks -  Joined up handwriting

3-4 marks – Handwriting that has a circle or a love heart over the i’s.  

1-2 marks – Handwriting that doesn’t sit on the line

Mark schemes are aimed at examiners, and not teachers, but they could be written in a style that at least conveys some meaning. I laugh at the use of the word ‘perceptive’ in the one for this question as it has so many meanings, depending on the context. Perceptive can meaning anything, but what we need to know is what is perceptive in an examiner’s eyes.

What might we teach?

While teaching these, I would constantly refer to the reader, writer and text in discussions.

The Headline

·         Annotate a headline in isolation and identify the techniques used.

·         Explore the different possible word choices. What other words could they have used? Why did they not use ‘inventive’ or ‘forward-thinking’ instead of ‘creative’ in the Guardian article?

·         Question the purpose of the headline. What is it designed to do? Does it suggest the tone, perspective of the text?

·         Predict what the rest of the article might say. What would they include in the article?

·         Give students isolated quotes from the text and they have to identify how the two are linked. Do they support each other or do they contradict each other? Or, do they do something else?

·         Give students a selection of pictures and they have to justify which picture is the best one to go with the headline.

·         Before looking at the text, tell them the story and get them to create a headline. I did this once with Plebgate and produced some fantastic responses. The students have left now, but I think it would be great for them to re-evaluate those headline in light of recent developments.

·         Rewrite the headline for a different perspective or audience.

The Picture

·         Give students the picture and another one that is slightly similar. They discuss why one was picked over the other.

·         Get students to find an alternative picture that does the same job, or a picture that changes the perspective or angle of the article.

·         Think about symbols. Take a selection of pictures and ask students what they each one symbolises. Look at the picture from the article and comment on what it symbolises. Then, explore the text and think how it might symbolise something else in the text.

·         Get students to label the picture with quotes from the text. Limit the quotes to three or four words long so they are precise with their selections.

·         Get students to use drama to explore the reasons behind the choices here. See this blog about how I used this successfully.

·         Zoom in on one aspect and explore that one choice. Why have the teacher wear the colour blue? Why have a male teacher?

·         Ask the simple questions: What does the picture show us? What doesn’t it show us?

·         What would make this picture better?

·         Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the picture.

The Text

·         Get students to storyboard the article. What picture would they use for each paragraph? Then, decide why this one picture was chosen above their choices.

·         Highlight the text according to bits that support or contradict the picture.

·         Pick a quote for a caption with the picture. Which quote is the best one?

·         Track the thread of the argument by highlighting the different points or reasons.

 

The Whole Thing

·         Summarise the whole text and work out what each section (text / picture /headline) contributes.

·         Draw arrows showing links between the different aspects. The picture shows the reality. The headline raises the question and the text reinforces the reality.  

·         Rejig the order of the headline, picture and text. What would the reader’s reaction be if the picture was at the end?

·         Work out the order the text will be read in and track a reader’s thoughts. At first I was…. Then I felt …. By the end, I was ….

 

Going back to the infamous picture in the Guardian article, there is a contradiction in the text. The article is about creative approaches to questioning, yet the picture provided doesn’t demonstrate a very ‘creative’ approach to questioning. The one boy sticking a sheet of paper up instead of a hand is only thing creative I can spot. But, it does contradict, in a way, the section that refers to picking students at random. That is the problem with pictures: they are only part of the story. The picture looks like the teacher is picking students according to who knows the answer.  Maybe the picture was chosen because there are three male teachers describing their ideas. Maybe the picture was chosen because it is a classroom. Maybe the picture was chosen because it shows the act of teaching and a very traditional mode of teaching which the article is offering alternatives.

What the exam seems to be looking for are developed explanations about cohesion with a dash of evaluation. For your really bright students, maybe they need to highlight the flaws, inconsistencies, track the structure and the reader’s reactions and explore alternative reasons behind the choices. What word do we get to describe all of this? Perceptive. If only examiners could be more perceptive when writing their mark schemes. Is there any wonder why we get a lot of papers remarked? Maybe if we had clearer mark schemes, then we would have less to quibble about. When you next mark something using a mark scheme, think about what picture should go with the scheme.

Thanks for reading  

Xris32

Questioning the questions

This is a blog about my talk for the TLT13, which took place yesterday at Southampton University. Before I even start I will apologise now if there are any typos or errors. In total, this weekend, I have spent eight hours driving. But, it was worth it, even if it has left me a bit frazzled, and with a brain that is barely functioning – my tweets are clear evidence of this.

Anyway, TLT13 was great. A hotpot of teaching goodness and a shot in the arm to any tabloid newspaper which thinks teachers are greedy-money-grabbing-parent-hating-time-wasting-cheats. Loads of teachers gave up their Saturday to look at ways to make teaching better. For all the comments about teachers who strike ruining the education, this day was an antidote or a big gesture of two fingers to the negative perception of teachers. The whole thing focused on being the ‘best’. Gove wants the best education system, but assumes teachers do not want that. He assumes that we are lazy and feckless. Case for the defence: evidence 1.2 – TLT13.

I would love to list all the teachers I met yesterday, but I am worried I would cause offence by missing someone out. It was great. I will just leave it at that. So, what did I talk about? Questions.

Questioning carries on a theme of a few of my blogs this year: Deep Reading. I am concerned that a lot of teaching reading dwells simply on skimming and scanning. Find and locate isn’t that high on the reading skills necessary for life. It is helpful, but it will not solve a case. It will not make you great in business. It is a building block. There is so much more to reading. In the past, the DfE has suggested that good readers paint pictures in their head when they read. Or, they might ask a question. Or they may even predict how things might end. I have always struggled with this notion of developing reading in lessons. Simply getting a student to draw a picture of a bit they have read does not, for me, show a high level of understanding or engagement with a text. It simply shows that they can decode a text. Yes, some things might be inferences, but does it really develop a student to be a better reader?

Teaching Year 12 and 13s English Literature has not involved me getting them to draw bits from ‘King Lear’ or Edward Bond’s ‘Saved’. No, it has involved things other than drawing. I have recently read some books on developing literacy in schools and they constantly refer to drawing (visualising), predicting, questioning and other methods to develop reading. Now, for less able students these are good strategies to use to develop their reading skills, but what about the more able students? Or, the average students? What do we do about developing their reading skills? Reading more and harder texts doesn’t always, in my opinion, develop the reader. The old days of ‘just get on with it’ isn’t something I am happy with. I like students to have independence and I do want them to have an idea of how they can become fluent readers, but as we are talking about reading it is very vague. As reading is an internalised process, we need to be explicit with reading and the processes relating to reading. And, I think questions are a huge part of this.

When?

There are a few problems with my questioning in lessons. These are some of the problems:

•       Tend to be loaded towards the end of the process

•       Focused on clarifying understanding and not developing understanding / thoughts or feelings

•       Specific

•       Clear direction (teacher-led)

•       Limited in number so I can be precise

•       Limiting the thought processes (recall not apply)

•       Focused on students answering, rather than both answering and questioning

 

 

I think that I often leave the questioning at the end of the process, because I want to see what they have learnt and not how they are learning. The position of the question can help us understand how they are learning. At the start of the process, it shows us how much prior knowledge they have, or what their intuition is like. In the middle of the learning process, it shows us where on the spectrum of understanding they are. At the end of the process, it shows us what they have and haven’t got. That for me is where I think I need to develop my questioning. Where in the process should I ask a question so that I can develop the skills of a student? In other words: Death to Comprehension Tasks! Or, less of them. Or, just do one at the start and in the middle, as well as at the end.

One thing I have started doing is getting students to ask the questions themselves at the start of a text. Recently, I was teaching ‘Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ and I showed the class a film poster. The class had to think of questions. . Rather than get them to think of questions about the plot, I got them to think about the theme or the structure or even the message of the text from the cover of the film. That focused way of questioning helped me get some high level questions before they had even read the text.

What?

Then, what questions should I ask? Well, I have been on so many CPD sessions and I have heard this too many times: closed questions are bad and open questions are good. Yes, let’s reduce the complexity of questioning to two types of questions. Yes let’s reduce the beauty of the English language to two categories. Questions are complex and we need to understand that. Here are some examples of different types of questions. You could categorise them into closed and open questions but I think you’d be a bit sad, as these questions do a lot more than give you a long or short answer.

•       Why not…. ? Why doesn’t….? Why wouldn’t..?

                Questioning the alternatives

•       Which is the best /least /most/ weakest….?

                Questioning that aids evaluation

•       Did you not think that …..?

                Questioning that asks them to adopt a viewpoint

•       If_________________, then why ________?

                Questioning the consequences

I wanted to help staff in my school to develop the reading skills of students, but also I wanted to develop questioning at the same time. Step forward ‘The Detectives’. Detectives are clever people and they read situations and people. It is my approach to developing reading through questions and using precise skills based questions. Each detective represents a different type of skills which has a set of questions to develop that skill.

Here’s an example using an extract from the Daily Mail website:

Sherlock Holmes: What can you infer about the writer’s opinion here?

Mother caught drinking LAGER at the school gates as she waits to pick up her children

By Steve Nolan

Perched on railing with a can of lager in one hand and a cigarette in the other, this mother is hardly setting a shining example to children filing out of a nearby primary school.

 
Here's what the detectives look like. I have includes some example questions and some sentence stems for answering.

Sherlock Holmes                                                                       Inferences / reading between the lines

What clues are there that ….?

How do ____ and ____ link together?

What is the connection between _____ and ______?

I can infer from this that …

This suggests that…

It seems that …
This evidence and that evidence show that …

Miss Marple                                                        relating to our own world/ experience/ knowledge

Where have you seen this before?

What other subject has this?
What skills in RE can you bring in to explain this?

 

This reminds me of …

We saw this when …
I notice that _____ has happened when ______

 

Poirot                                                                                          looking for the flaws, inconsistencies

Which bits don’t add up?

Where have they contradicted themselves?
What are the weaknesses in their argument?
 

They say this, but this bit doesn’t match up with that. 

I notice that they say this but later they say the opposite.
I don’t think they are completely certain because of ….

 

 Inspector Morse                                                                                        looking at the perspectives

What does the other person say?

How does this person’s view differ from the rest of the people?
Does everybody agree with this point?

 

One person said ____________ while the others said this …

From a different perspective, it can be seen that …
 

 

Inspector Clouseau                                            making a hypothesis and getting it wrong or right

What do you think will happened?

Why did they do that?
What will happen as a result of this?
 

I think that ___ will happen.

I predict that ______

 

Now, this is in its infancy and I am sure it will change and develop, but at the moment it is a framework for asking questions. It is also a framework that focuses on developing a skill rather than just test what the student knows. This is the beauty of questioning. The right question at the right time can teach a child something or develop a skill. Hopefully, people will be able to find a use for these somewhere. Some have used it to get the class in groups. A group of Miss Marples. Or, a group of Sherlock Holmes. Much better than a group that focus on closed questions.

If you can think of some other detectives with a different skills focus, I would love to hear from you.

I will carry the question blog on next week.

 

Thanks for reading,

Xris32

 

P.S. Thanks to @englishlulu for the photos. Thanks also to @HFletcherWood for his technical support. Last thanks to David and Jenny for organising the whole event.