English on a darkling plain – to follow your head or your heart

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return

The current GCSEs get quite a bit of stick in the education world. For some they are fascist and for knowledge fetishists only and for others they are clarity in a sea of wooliness. Yet, these exams have been seen to be the driving force behind the decline of subjects at A-level and beyond. Poets, writer and others see exams and changes in KS2 as the rot in the system. They will decry that learning grammar knowledge is reductive. They will decry that the removal of coursework will put students off for life. They will decry that if you don’t adhere to this world view that you are either aligned with a political party or evil. Or, in some cases both.

As a foot soldier, a teacher, and a head of a department, you see the world differently to others. You see the day-to-day of things. You see more the subtle shifts and changes and less of the tidal changes. You also see the complexity behind things.  And, I believe, it is something far more complex. The exams and grammar knowledge in primary schools are the easy targets because they are visible and easy to critique. They are products of the system. They are the poster boys for the problem. Yet, the problem is far more deeper than that.

We’ve reached a stage where we’ve been led to believe that teaching good literature is putting students off English.

We’ve reached a stage where we’ve been led to believe that teaching students about grammar terminology is putting students off English.

We’ve reached a stage where we’ve been led to believe that teaching students by learning some knowledge is putting students off English.

We’ve been led to believe a lot of things and I think sadly we haven’t address the real big change. That’s change has been society. Society has changed and with that change has changed many other things which have impacted on English and other subjects. The world has changed and so too have things around us. We had an oversimplification of the problem. One single change in the exam system and the world will change its rotation. One single change in KS2 will then reverse time. The oversimplification of education and the issues impacting on it has frustrated me to the point of being silent on Twitter.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

To be honest, long ago I always wanted to be an actor. Part of me, to this day, still does. I loved acting so much I did it at every opportunity. I was in the town’s annual pantomime. I was in school plays. I loved it so much, therefore,  that I decide to study it at university with English. Then, I had a dark decision to make after three years of acting: do I continue with something I truly enjoyed or do I opt for stability? My family isn’t wealthy and I was only able to go to university because of a grant. The grant alone wasn’t enough to support me, so I had to work quite a bit in a pub to cover bills. It wasn’t easy. It was pretty tough. The decision was a difficult one. Do I continue to struggle financially and do the thing I love or do I get a job in something I am not interested in?   

I went for the job.

I made a decision that was best for my context. It was a practical decision, but one that ensured I had money to house, clothe and feed me when the grant stopped. Yes, it wasn’t enjoyable or what I wanted but it was what I needed.  

 But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

The change I have seen in students in the last decade is the one I made in twenties many years ago. They are having to make difficult decisions sooner rather than later. They deciding to sacrifice enjoyment for the sake of stability and need. Students are making life-changing decisions at an earlier age. It isn’t about enjoying creative subjects, but about worrying about where will they get the money for the basics in life.

I have taught lots of students over the years and some have gone on to study English or English literature. Recently, I have noticed a more practical approach in the way students approach things. Rather than go for subjects they enjoy, they go for subjects that will guarantee a job. When I studied English for A-level and degree, I chose because I enjoyed it and not because I wanted a high salaried job at the end of it. The lay of the land has meant that creative subjects are not perceived as viable careers. I know how difficult it is to get into acting and writing. There’s no guarantees. The jobs associated with creativity are long-term plans and careers. They are not instant bucks.

We are living in a world where the biggest priority for students is getting financial security and stability. They have, in effect, grown up long before their time. That, for me, is what has changed. Not adverbial phrases. Not the lack of creativity. If creativity could guarantee that a student got a job when he left at eighteen, then students would be all aboard the creativity train. I know, first-hand, how scary and unsettling things can be. We all crave stability and security.

There is a battle in students between their heads and their heart. In financially insecure times, do you follow your head or your heart? This is the decision they have to make. You can blame whatever you like in the education, but society and the world at the moment is forcing them to make this choice. Not the subject.

 Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

 

Thanks for reading,

 

Xris

Nice Knowledge Retrieval Task, Shame About the Learning

This is just a little bit of my talk for ResearchEd Rugby.

The title for this blog is inspired by a song from ‘Not the Nine O’clock News’. The song was: Nice Video, Shame About the Song. It featured an arty and pretentious (and now dated) video with a song that doesn’t match it in style and quality. It is true that this is often the case. Money, time and effort is spent on the video when it should have actually been spent on the song. That for me is the current problem with Retrieval Practice. I am seeing lots of nice tasks, but I keep asking myself about the learning. Is this really supporting learning in the classroom? I always put myself in the lesson and think how I'd react. The Year 10 me would hate the constant changing of approaches, because I feel more comfortable with patterns and systems rather than a new approach every single lesson and week. 

English is a very knowledge rich subject. In fact, it is probably more rich in knowledge than other subjects, because we can go from linguistic knowledge to historical, geographical, political, social and philosophical knowledge in just one line from a poem. It is that rich. That’s the beauty and the tyranny of our subject. There’s just so much knowledge it is hard to see that wood for the trees. In fact, every lesson is a knowledge weave. There are days where I wish I could teach Maths, because of the simplicity of knowledge at the heart of the curriculum. You can see how hard knowledge is in English when you try to compartmentalise anything in the subject. Things just so a bit bleurgh. Because you cannot compartmentalise something that is so vast and crosses so many domains. This is why we have had problems with knowledge in English. 

Problem 1: Knowledge Organisers

If I had a time machine, I’d go back an change this completely. The problem that we fell into was that knowledge organisers focused on plot, character, context and quotation knowledge. These things  barely scratched the surface of what we want students to say. You may as well just have a plot summary and tested students on that. The knowledge was redundant later when you explored a different text. Simply, the knowledge organisers focuses on understanding rather than learning in English. Scroll back through your organsiers and you’ll see that they were about some pretty basic stuff and they didn’t build on / connect / support other parts of the curriculum. That’s not to say there isn’t value in the stuff, but if you have to spell out all the characters in a book and have to test students about the names of the characters again and again, then there’s something inherently wrong with your teaching. Teaching the concept of realism when reading a book is far more beneficial because it can be used in a number of different contexts. Knowing the name of a character in a book will be good in one context: a general knowledge quiz, if you are lucky. Knowledge Organisers, in truth, are supporting pub quizzes and nothing else.

 Problem 2: The Amount of Knowledge

Like most of us, when we think something is worthy we put the foot on the pedal  and speed on. We went mad for knowledge. We drowned in it. We made booklets with questions and answers. We tested students all the time on them. I made readymade videos with questions and answers. We bathed fully in the knowledge waterfall. We were dripping in knowledge goodness, or so we thought! There was no thought apart from the fact that we knew students needed to know quotations and students needed to know facts. We threw everything at them. When was the book written? Who had a ruddy face? Often missing behind all this kind of work is a picture of what needs to be retained. We were largely chucking everything and hoping something will stick. This works well for some subjects, but for English it doesn't. You end up with students able to write Dickens's ingrowing toenail but unable to explain the structure of the story. 

Alongside all the different retrieval practice tasks and these two problems, I think there is a problem with knowledge in English. We have largely adopted things that work in other subjects without necessarily thinking about the what and the how. It has been a case of nice retrieval practice task, shame about the learning. But, doesn’t it look pretty. 

For me, we needed some precision, clarity and structure to the knowledge in English. Something to hang all the knowledge on. There was too much clutter. In our attempt to teach we threw everything and the kitchen sink. Teaching is largely decluttering and we often forget that. Therefore, we decided to approach things from a Cognitive Load Theory angle and explore how to address the different types of load:

•        Intrinsic load – difficulty of the information

•       Extrinsic load – manner in which the information is presented

•       Germane load – processing, construction and automation of schemas

We focused mainly on the extrinsic load elements. How could we present the knowledge in a way that reduces the load and helps with the process and constructing of schemas? We looked at a model for this and used something I had invented early to cope with the poetry anthology of the GCSEs.

Several years ago, I produced this:

It was created to help build and retain knowledge of the texts. Students worked, with the teacher, on learning the questions and the answers, helping them learn several things so they were able to write about the poem from memory. They could remember the content – RED. They could remember some quotations – BLUE. They could remember some techniques and their effect – GREEN.

 We applied this to our Shakespeare text:

I wrote one of these for every scene in Romeo and Juliet. When students were studying the play, we’d use these questions. From the beginning, we were being precise and structured with the knowledge to be learnt.

Process for the lesson:

·       #Watch scene

·       #Together, as a class, we find the answers to the nine questions.

·       #Analyse the scene – and teacher some stuff

·      #Task

·       #Quick answers to the nine question from random students

·       #Next lesson would start with the questions being answered in books

The knowledge retrieval was part of the lesson and not dominating the lesson. Plus, it was structured knowledge retrieval. Students knew the structure and the format. I wasn’t changing things all the time. There was consistency and familiarity in the approach. Students liked it. It was pattern forming and behaviour forming. We’d often revisit an old scene and check their knowledge on that scene and filling any gaps if needed. 

The interesting thing for me was the creation of the questions. Each subsection of questions was working to build a different schema. We were working on collectively building that knowledge from the beginning and constantly retrieving it. By the end of the process, students will have 84 separate plot points, 84 separate quotations and 84 separate techniques linked to a quotation. We will have a clear body of knowledge to work with on securing and revisiting. The 'what' or the knowledge  was transparent to the students too. Instead of telling students to revise the whole things, we could guide them to our questions. Plus, a student missing a lesson wasn't at a disadvantage, because we'd revisit the knowledge. We were constantly revisiting things.

I have a problem with comprehension tasks in lessons, because I feel they try to do too much and are largely deceptive for students. They will ask students to spot things and then in the next question they’ll ask them to form an interpretation of a character. There is such a jump in the thinking between questions like this. I preferred this new approach for me because it started with concrete knowledge and so the rest of the lesson could be spent on developing interpretations. That concrete knowledge could be utilised in developing an interpretation and extending thinking. It allowed time to be give easily, and freely, to explorative and interpretive thinking.

The questions themselves were interesting because they needed to be precise. The plot points weren’t very obvious ones. They had to have a dual purpose. Some of the questions related to who was on stage in the scene or who interrupts a conversation. These subtle plot points are often missed when teaching and only the strongest of students pick up on them. The quotations were small for ease of retention, but also they helped to be used in multiple contexts and arguments in an essay. Often we teach students to learn longer quotations because they have loads of techniques in them, but actually they are cumbersome because they don’t fit organically into the writing. This approach allowed us to build a range of quotations. Furthermore, the linking of techniques and effects was really important for us, because students don’t retain this connection and knowledge. It meant that students did not only have quotations and techniques, but they also were thinking of the impact on the reader.

Year 10 is about introducing and securing the knowledge to long term memory. Year 11 will be about revisiting and revising, but we might use one or two different approaches to the testing. However, we will still use the same format. We are providing structure, precision and clarity to the knowledge. Of course there is more knowledge and approaches to it learning it, but this is a driving one for a core body on knowledge. Making sure there is a clear foundation of knowledge. 

English is a rich and beautiful subject. I know that some fear the dominance of knowledge. We need to be careful of fetishism of knowledge. It is good to know stuff, but I think, like most things, a balance is needed.

Are we overloading students with too much knowledge that the most important and useful things are not sticking when it comes to texts. 

Knowledge shouldn’t be isolated to one lesson. What happens if that lesson is missed? We need to look at building structures to help us, if a student misses a lesson. If we are not clear about the what, then this becomes a problem. Also, if we are not clear about what students need to know, then how can we help students revise? For some, reading the text numerous times will help, but for others it is useless. 

Two questions everybody needs to think about: What is the main knowledge students need to retain for a text? What is the structure we are going to use to impart, test and revise the knowledge?

At the moment, I feel we are chucking everything and hoping it sticks. We are using every approach under the sun to make some of it stick.  

Thanks for reading,

Xris

P.S. I will be sharing my PowerPoints with all the questions later.