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Graphical Organisers are similar to knowledge organisers in that they are a way for students to organise the information about a topic using visual prompts to help them. This then becomes a trigger sheet for later revision.

I have used these in class but having a 3 step and 3 colour process:

1. No Notes

2. Peer to Peer support

3. Books, Notes and teacher support.

This way the students can see what knowledge they have secured and what they need to look at again or in more detail.

The follow examples are for A Level Sociology and A Level Psychology:

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Graphical Organisers are similar to knowledge organisers in that they are a way for students to organise the information about a topic using visual prompts to help them. This then becomes a trigger sheet for later revision. I have used these in class but having a 3 step and 3 colour process: No Notes Peer...

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Phew...this one felt like a slog at times but it's done! 19 lessons, fully resourced with homework added in as well as revision/consolidation resources. Other than saving me a lot of time over the course of the first term, I hope it saves you guys some time as well. I've put together a quick commentary of the lessons to clarify any points.

Quick Notes

I developed this with my own classes in mind - a lower set with target grades ranging from 3-5.

All of the PowerPoints are in Kristen ITC so if you don't have this font installed, it may be formatted slightly differently.

The unit is integrated with some Paper 2, Question 5 language skills as well.

I haven't fully annotated any of the poems as I will be using a visualiser for that but the PowerPoints have key things to look at/analyse as well as some activities.

Consolidation homework to be completed after every poem (WPCSLIP)

Lesson 1: Welcome

A general overview of the SoW and expectations. A lesson to get the pupils sorted with books etc.

Lesson 2: Ozymandias

Beginning to understand the poem and eventually leading to a short paragraph analysing the language/structure of the poem.

Lesson 3: HOW to write a response

Mostly a skills lesson with a checklist for writing to support. Self-assessment at the end by colour coding their responses.

Lesson 4: Charge of the Light Brigade

Moving towards developing analysis of features & consolidation with a CLOZE paragraph.

Lesson 5: Storm on the Island

A focus on the contextual factors of the poem and writing a response against the AQA mark scheme. Self-assessment/peer-assessment opportunities.

Lesson 6: My Last Duchess

Using statements about power & gathering evidence from the poem - language skill. Analysing the key lines of the poem - emphasis on language/structural features used.

Lesson 7: London

Lots of contextual information on this one - designed to be a carousel activity. Slides can be printed off on A3 for ease. Students then focus on the language features used and analysing the effect this may have. CLOZE paragraph to consolidate. This can then be used to edit the CLOZE/improve it against the mark scheme.

Lesson 8: Checking Out Me History

Top Trumps between the different historical figures; students given a statement and asked to write a speech in response using the structure strips which you can find at the end of this post.

Lesson 9: Paper 2, Question 5 response to COMH statements

Writing their speech with extra challenge tasks. Self-assessment before being taken in for teacher assessment.

'Lesson' 10: Bayonet Charge (Homework)

Structured questions to take pupils through the poem with a WPCSLIP to complete afterwards.

Lesson 11: Review homework & creating statements

Ensuring understanding of their homework and then consolidating that understanding by creating statements which pupils find evidence for/against. Can be used as a 'warm up' or as an assessment piece.

Lesson 12: The Prelude

A focus on the juxtaposition of language but also the use of plosive sounds vs. sibilance as well. A CLOZE paragraph without the word bank - pupils to begin developing their own responses. Then used as a springboard for writing a second paragraph.

Lesson 13: Kamikaze & beginning to compare

A focus on Kamikaze & the power of nature. Using this to compare the poem to The Prelude & writing a paragraph with some scaffolding. Self/peer assessment and using this to close the feedback loop.

Lesson 14: War Photographer with P2Q5 task

Using a P2Q5 task as a springboard into War Photographer. Focus on the issues/themes first before getting into the language. I have a polaroid camera that I also use to get the pupils to understand the 'half-formed ghost' line.

Lesson 15: Poppies with comparative paragraph

Looking at the juxtaposition between domesticity and war - using this to compare War Photographer and Poppies.

Lesson 16: Exposure

Context - carousel lesson for pupils to mindmap factors. Exploding key quotes & moving into analysis.

Lesson 17: Remains

Linking through the idea of PTSD. Building independence - tackle it as an unseen poem with limited scaffolding.

Lesson 18: Tissue

I've left lots of slides on this one from when I went through the poem with my Y10 (mid/lower ability) group last year and I added their analysis onto the slides as we went. Hopefully useful!

Lesson 19: The Emigrée

Tackling this as an unseen poem and then reviewing as a whole class. Using this to write x2 paragraphs exploring the theme of 'loss' - possible to do a comparative essay on Poppies(?)

I left the remaining week in the term as a spill over/mop up week.

Revision cards with key quotations and questions to structure their analysis.

WPCSLIP to consolidate understanding of each poem. I print these on bright pink so that they are easy to find in their books. Can easily be done as a classroom activity but I set these for homework each week.

Structure Strips - inspired by Mr Lockyer on Twitter, I've developed the structure strips for Language P2Q5. So far, I've only done it for newspaper article and a speech but they can be edited to fit your needs!

Poetry speed dating! I LOVE this. I did this as an end of term 'party' type activity. I have some small LED candle lights which I put out and got some fruit juice & cups so they could 'break the ice'. Each pupil was given a different poem and their job was to find as many matches as they could using this sheet to help structure their conversations. It was a lot of fun and the kids really got into it!

You can download all of these resources FOR FREE from this link here.

If you would like to contribute via. PayPal then please do so but there is no obligation although it would be very much appreciated!

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Phew...this one felt like a slog at times but it's done! 19 lessons, fully resourced with homework added in as well as revision/consolidation resources. Other than saving me a lot of time over the course of the first term, I hope it saves you guys some time as well.

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Let me start with a heartfelt lament: I WISH I HAD KNOWN ABOUT THE LEARNING SCIENTISTS LAST YEAR 😭

( http://www.learningscientists.org/)

Now, upon receiving my (ex) most dreaded question 'how do I remember quotes?' from a student, old me would blushed, said something forceful and firm about effort, and concluded with a hesitant summary along the lines of: " errrm, well, errr, you need to use flash cards and... little but often... and mix it all up a bit, change is as good as a rest, err, yeah that will work..." (plus various other aphorisms.) The truth is, teachers generally haven't ever experienced much of a struggle in their subject areas, so it's not really an obstacle that teachers have personal experience of overcoming (exceptions, of course.) I've always been aware of this, and feel that cognitive science studies have given me a way to truly understand how to train for exams.

After reading the blog posts from ResarchEd and having my attention directed to Learning Scientists, I know better. Or, at least, the scientific logic behind how to revise effectively. At long last, I can give proper advice that I believe in! And yes, I admit the baser part of my ego was delighting in the idea of stunning my students through the oh-so-casual use of terms such as ' neural plasticity' and ' dual coading', but that turned out to be a minor pleasure in comparison to feeling as though I was genuinely supporting my students to remember more... aaahh. Historically, scientific thinking and I have never proved particularly compatible; however, the Learning Scientists have helped me arrive at a long awaited eureka moment. And I mean long. I feel I can finally begin to make sense of how it is that one can accumulate, store and quickly access vast quantities of information in that slimy, blobby lump of grey matter that's stored in the old headbox.

How will this help my teaching? That rather hefty volume of texts required at GCSE for a start... Again, Learning Scientists, I lament that I did not find you sooner.

So I started testing it all out on KS3. At my school, KS3 students complete fairly rigorous end of year examinations in each subject. This year, I thought I would put together some slides on the science/process of learning, in order to try and help my students to carry out effective revision. This was my first time referring to scientific evidence in in my attempts to teach how learning 'works', so I was rather nervous! However, it seemed to be well received by KS3 students. Phew!

Now, I am NO expert on this and certainly do not pretend to be! I let the Learning Scientists do the hard work for me and shared their videos on spaced practice and retrieval practice with my students. We then reviewed the slides I created below. The slides are directed at KS3 students, not researchers or experts in ' neural plasticity '. (See, there I go, 'dropping it in' again.) Also, I have cited all of the websites from which I have copied and pasted/gathered information.

Learning Scientist YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjbAmxL6GZXiaoXuNE7cIYg

The students were immediately interested and motivated by the examples shared on the slides. A few of them had older siblings and were already hearing of the horrors of quotation retention at GCSE. They were enthusiastic to start working with flashcards in a more focused manner, and also to begin planning where and when they would be able to fit in 20 minute revision slots, along with when it would be appropriate to revisit certain topics (which pleased me enormously as it provided me with a chance to dazzle them by impressively dropping in another fancy term: interleaving.) We also discussed connecting ideas on the cards; considered how to revisit simpler revision cards and explored how to expand the knowledge upon them as well as connect them with other cards.

I placed particular emphasis upon how the skills in English (e.g. inference, analysis and comparison), along with subject terminology, will essentially remain the same throughout their time at school. As English teachers, I think we have all experienced how the grammar lessons we teach often seem to be forgotten year upon year, which I suppose is what happens when knowledge is taught in isolation and if it is reinforced in English lessons only. I was very pleased when students began to question whether you can really learn anything without practice, as this demonstrated their understanding of the importance of retrieval practice, and how it is their responsibility, as well as their teacher's, to keep embedding previous knowledge.

Anywhoo, the students began to genuinely understand that cramming for end of year exams would ultimately only do them a disservice, as they would need to draw upon the same base of knowledge for their final school examinations; meaning that they may as well sustain practice via structured revision throughout their time at school. (A much preferable alternative to homework??) I believe this lesson fostered some extremely useful conversations regarding 'learning how to learn'. (Everyone's favourite example of polyptoton, no?) I'm confident that students left the lesson with an increased consciousness of the process of learning, and how they can best practice/learn independently.

So far, I focused mainly upon spaced practice and retrieval practice. This PPT is still a work in progress, but I am happy to share it when it is completed.

Up next: elaborate interrogation.

Thank you so much to everyone who shared slides/observations from ResearchEd!

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Let me start with a heartfelt lament: I WISH I HAD KNOWN ABOUT THE LEARNING SCIENTISTS LAST YEAR 😭 ( http://www.learningscientists.org/) Now, upon receiving my (ex) most dreaded question 'how do I remember quotes?'

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Edexcel Examiners’ Report: Literature – Always Learning

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Edexcel Examiners’ Report: Literature – Always Learning

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Edexcel Examiners' report Literature
Yesterday I published the examiners' report summary for Language. Attached above is the summary for Literature. I have followed the same format as before (thanks @SusanSEnglish).

We taught AIC for 20th Century, Romeo and Juliet for Shakespeare and the Relationship anthology. I have included Macbeth in my summary as that was the most popular play so thought this may help many of you 🙂

I have also included Conflict for poetry as again this was the most popular cluster so hopefully it will be of help. At the bottom is an overall summary of key points. I have also included questions I will be discussing with my team on Monday and points we need to consider with regards to the year ahead. There is more to the list but gives you an idea.

Please feel free to edit as required. The Literature report link is at the top of the post.

I will be creating a student friendly version of both this and the language report, when completed I will share.

Thanks,

Chloe

Posted on

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Edexcel Examiners' report Literature Yesterday I published the examiners' report summary for Language. Attached above is the summary for Literature. I have followed the same format as before (thanks @SusanSEnglish). We taught AIC for 20th Century, Romeo and Juliet for Shakespeare and the Relationship anthology.

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How to be a minimalist teacher | Teacher Network | The Guardian

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How to be a minimalist teacher | Teacher Network | The Guardian

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The new school year arrives with a flurry of activity: resources to prepare, PowerPoints to write, new classroom displays to create. By the time students arrive we are slumped in the corner, already exhausted.

Do we pause long enough to question the efficiency of all this activity? Do we consider what impact doing less might have on young people's learning?

Minimalism involves the deliberate and frequent rejection of all that is unnecessary: an essential practice in seeking to find ways to thrive in the impossibly busy life of a teacher. Using some of the principles of minimalism has certainly helped my work in school have more impact, and enabled a calmer and more reflective professional life.

The minimalist classroom

The classroom is a teacher's arena; it projects powerful subliminal messages to the young people in it. Its make-up will, in part, influence their responses to our teaching and their motivation in our subjects.

One of the issues in the modern classroom is the ubiquity of stuff that dominates every spare inch. Resources, workbooks, equipment and increasingly elaborate visual displays all vie for limited space. Inevitably, this results in an environment that is distracting, loud, and that can easily become disorganised. Not the best mix when trying to inspire the calm and focus of 30 boisterous adolescents.

There is also the impact of all this additional stuff on our own emotions in the classroom: is it feeding any anxious thoughts we might have about our jobs? Would a more streamlined approach help us to feel less stressed, and aid our clarity of thought in the environment in which we spend an inordinate amount of our time?

We may believe that our classrooms are organised and project clarity, but are we secretly teacher magpies? Take 15 minutes to look at your room from a renewed perspective and think: what image am I projecting? How much of the environment is helpful to enable young people to learn and concentrate?

We all know the wonderful lightness of spirit we experience after doing a spring clean. This image of renewal and serenity should be kept in mind to encourage a minimalist review of your classroom. Be ruthless: what isn't having a transferable impact on students' ability to learn?

The best place to start is to tackle the clutter: what is lurking in corners of the room that can be removed? When was the last time it was used? What are the pieces of paper that can be scanned and saved to that wonderful de-cluttering enabler: the trusty memory stick? Once you have adopted this purging mindset, apply it to the equipment and to the dusty posters: are they enabling learning, or a distraction?

Some of us don't have the pleasure of ownership of our own rooms. Here, it is about travelling light with the bare essentials and seeking to encourage colleagues to see the value of adopting the minimalist attitude. Once we model the way and highlight the impact on our students, our colleagues will embrace the less-is-more approach.

The minimalist planner

Once we've adopted a streamlined mindset to our environment, ruthlessness filters through into all aspects of our teaching. Minimalist planning is not about laziness: it is about efficiency. It seeks to refine the content of lessons to cut out waffle, gimmicks and activities that are not directly correlated to its focus. Time should instead be invested in planning for efficient direct instruction, challenging questions, and deliberate practice for students.

The minimalist planner rejects elaborate PowerPoints and the addictive call of the time-thieving photocopier. Instead, they will look at ways to harness memory tools to plan for retaining skills over the long-term: focusing more on the big picture and working backwards.

There will be fewer activities, but real clarity about learning that is covered in depth. As Peps Mccrae highlights in the excellent Lean Lesson Planning, "what is the least that needs to happen for my students to make progress towards their next learning milestone?"

The minimalist marker

A revolution is starting in the marking wars; an understanding that, in reality, less is more when it comes to written feedback. Rather than repetitive comments, minimalist marking involves reflecting on impact and action - only what will move learning forward. Reducing our time puts the onus on where it should be: what students use the marking for.

The minimalist marker also adopts one of the principles of Shaun Allison and Andy Tharby's Making Every Lesson Count, using time to write, share and deconstruct model answers with students. The result is an improved understanding of what excellence looks like in our subjects.

Sustain the habit

We may glow with joy as we look around our sparse and organised classrooms, reflect on our capacity to manage our time more efficiently and generate real learning progress with young people. But sustaining this new minimalist habit is challenging. I have found that a 10-minute daily investment in de-cluttering maintains the clarity of a classroom. In the face of management workbook reviews and learning walks, let the quality of the work in students' workbooks and the calm focus that radiates from your classroom answer any scepticism.

In the face of stress and exhaustion, this year should be one in which we do not think about how much we are doing, but about how efficiently we are doing it. Embracing a minimalist attitude might well be the best place to start.
Jamie Thom is an English teacher. He blo Follow us on Twitter via @GuardianTeach, like us on Facebook, and join the Guardian Teacher Network the latest articles direct to your inbox Looking for a teaching job? Or perhaps you need to recruit school staff? Take a look at Guardian Jobs, the education specialist gs at www.teachergratitude.co.uk and tweets @teachgratitude1. His book Slow Teaching will be out in early 2018.

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The new school year arrives with a flurry of activity: resources to prepare, PowerPoints to write, new classroom displays to create. By the time students arrive we are slumped in the corner, already exhausted. Do we pause long enough to question the efficiency of all this activity?

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Mark Roberts Teach | Thoughts and ideas about words, stories and what works best in the classroom and beyond

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Mark Roberts Teach | Thoughts and ideas about words, stories and what works best in the classroom and beyond

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The Back to School Collection | David Didau: The Learning Spy

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The Back to School Collection | David Didau: The Learning Spy

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So, Monday morning looms and another term begins. For everyone stepping back into a classroom this week, chin up, don't work too hard, and remember, it's just a job. For those new to the profession - or simply looking for a bit of refresher - I wrote a series of back of school posts a few years ago and, having reviewed them, am still happy they represent a pretty solid approach to teaching. Here they are:

Here too are a series of 'Five Things" posts that will, I believe, be useful for all teachers:

I hope these are of some help, but, as with all advice, feel free to take what you think's useful and reject the rest. Remember, you're the adult: what children say they want isn't necessarily the same as what they need.

Best of luck for the year ahead!

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The Back to School Collection - David Didau: The Learning Spy

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So, Monday morning looms and another term begins. For everyone stepping back into a classroom this week, chin up, don't work too hard, and remember, it's just a job.

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When the changes to GCSE English Literature were announced, I was outraged. Relatively new to teaching, caught up in the wave of Gove-hatred which I felt was the accepted way to feel, I was indignant about the announced alterations. But, I am not ignorant. I am open to change.

With my year 11s last year I ensured they knew the poems and key texts well enough that they could plan a rough answer without searching through the text. I guess my mindset was that I was doing it with year 10, so why not year 11? And I think their analysis became all the better for it; they were able to adapt quotations, develop their analysis, become more flexible with their understanding of character and theme presentation. It wasn't necessarily a bad thing. And when a far more experienced and wiser teacher than myself told me that the students not having their texts in the exam was a good thing, that they wouldn't spend ten minutes trying to find a particular quotation from Gerald which they had invented in their minds in the first place, I guess I started to consider how I would tackle quotation retention.

I must put my plan in context: I have a set 2 group of year 11, a handful of 7 targets with mostly 6s and a few 5s. They are the most able set I have ever taught. They have an incredible work ethic. They are the type of group that write down key information without you asking them to. The type of group that all hand in their homework. The type of group where you enjoy parents' evening as you just want to share how wonderful they are. And they told me they wanted to learn quotations. They wanted to be able to sit in an exam and choose the quotations they felt would best suit their argument, not the ones in the extract and one obvious quotation.

I poured over the mark scheme. I didn't want to be the teacher that stressed over quotations when many others, rightly, feel students knowing lots of quotations isn't necessary. But these kids want to be perceptive. Original. Exploratory. And they really are. And I realised if I wasn't giving them the tools to do that, then it wouldn't be fair.

I spoke to a small group of them one lunchtime before I went on maternity leave. I asked them how they would feel about a rather awkward and archaic system of quotation chanting. They were keen. Excited, in fact. Anything to make it stick, they said. So over my maternity leave I planned a system and tweaked it based on everything I have ever read. And we are one term in, and we are writing down 15 quotations from memory. And most students are getting all 15 correct. They are not revising them at home (though some are) as this all takes place in lessons (with the exception of step 5, obviously).

1. W1L1: Language analysis starter.

We have four lessons a week. For three lessons we start every lesson with a quotation. An example of how they see the quotation is below. Students enter the room, read the quotation for the first time, write it down and annotate it with at least three ideas of their own. Using a random system students are asked to share their ideas on the quotation. They must (and this has taken some encouragement/repetition on my behalf) say it as they would write it in the exam. I would not accept "they use like sharp like 'cos that's how Scrooge is like in the book like at the start like" - I would rephrase to begin with but now the students are there themselves "Great point, I see what you're thinking. Just so everyone can get that down, Dickens uses the adjective "sharp" because this represents Scrooge's sharp and unkind nature at the start of the novella? Is that what you're saying?" - we're there now. I don't rephrase as much. We get at least 5 ideas down about the quotation. I try and offer one piece of more perceptive analysis. They all dutifully scrawl it in their books.

2. W1L1: Chant followed by bell chants

We set up a beat for the quotation. It might just be me saying it in really emphasised iambic metre or the students might say "we need to speed up this bit". We then repeat it, as a class 3 times. No exceptions. Anyone not speaking earns the right of saying it themselves (this hasn't actually happened yet) or I tell the class one person wasn't being loud enough and we do it again three times. From then on, for the rest of the lesson, I have a bell (I tried calling out, it didn't work) which I ring and in response the students chant the quotations. I have started giving this out at random. They like ringing the bell and remember to do it more than I do.

3. W1L2 & W1L3 : Next quotation, chant of first two quotations.

So we're now on the next lessons of the first week. We repeat pattern one, but when we chant the quotations the first time we chant all the quotations so far. So two on Tuesday, three on Wednesday. When I ring the bell, we just chant that day's quotation. Otherwise we wouldn't have any lesson time.

Same again on Friday, along with chanting the first two quotations. Students can revise quotations at home (not part of homework - it's their choice) and some did this, some didn't.

4. W2L1: Quotation check 1 (fill in the gaps and visual reminders).

We are now on week 2, Monday's lesson. No quotation today, because it's quotation check day. I remember hearing Jo Facer talk about knowledge tests at English Research Ed last year and she explained that for the first tests they should either be low stakes or easier for students to perform well, to build confidence and encourage further achievement. So for my very first test I broke it down into fill the blanks, with an image. It was out of 15 but they got a mark for "hard" a mark for "sharp" and a mark for "flint". They also got marks for identifying "hard" and "sharp" were adjectives. The majority got 15: smiles all round.

5. W2L1: Analytical paragraph homework.

Now that students have been tested on the quotations, I set their homework (I do this on a Monday anyway - when we started this, I was setting weekly Paper 2 revision as their mock was at the end of term) and 10 minutes of it must be spent writing an analytical paragraph on one of the quotations from last week. Essentially this means that they look at one of them in depth, in answer to an exam question; so they practice applying the quotations they are learning in exam situations. I hasten to add that the first attempt at this was ... not great- see stage 8.

6. W2L2-L4: Another three quotations on the second text.

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For the rest of the second week I gave them a starter quotation from 'Macbeth' and we followed exactly the same process as last week - discussion, repetition of the quotation 3 times, chant every time the bell rings, repeating the first quotations on each successive day. I have learnt to give the best quotation on the Monday. It's the one they remember best as that's where the most interleaving happens.

7. W3L1: Quotation check 2 (varied prompts)

So they now get tested on all the quotations so far. For the first week of quotations they get zero blank spaces, and essentially see the visual reminder for that quotation (as the example above). Questions 1, 2 and 3 will be the first three quotations. This pattern will be continued until the end of the year, so by the time we're stressing about their exams they would have written these first 15 quotations, in the same order, another 20 times on a weekly basis. If that's not interleaving, I don't know what is.

For the second week of quotations, they get the same reminders as they did last week for the first set. So blank spaces and the image, as above.

8. W3L1: Homework recieved.

Essentially, they just regurgitated the comments they had come up with in the discussion in the starter, so I got 20 identical paragraphs on "hard and sharp as flint". It was not a great marking hour. But they got feedback the next day, asking them to do DIRT on their paragraph and make it an actual answer, where they include inferences, comments on the writer's intentions, contextual factors - basically more than just zooming in on each word. They have been better each week since- every week, 10 minutes of their homework is to complete a paragraph on the quotations from the week before. They can now come up with their own questions.

9. W4L1: Quotation check 3 (no prompts for first set/visual only/blanks and visual).

So now they don't get visual reminders for the first three quotations, just get the following reminder:

I know it's harsh. But after one week of chanting and writing the quotations for the past two weeks on a Monday and then writing about it for homework, they all pretty much nailed these.

For Macbeth they now get a visual reminder, and for the third set of quotations, from 'Never Let Me Go' they have the blanks and the visual reminders. So essentially for each set of quotes they have the "easy" fill in the gaps a week after (when the quotations are relatively fresh), then the following week they have a visual reminder (after spending week 1 chanting, week 2 writing about the quotation for homework) and then, as above, nothing.

10. Moving forward - 5 weeks of 3 quotations tested and adding vocabulary.

We are now at the point that, for the first 3 sets of quotations, they get 0 prompts. They're getting all of them correct. The week when we did the poetry quotations, I gave them two from each poem. We had a poetry practice paper at the end of the week and this was as much for my teaching as it was for their quote chants. This was too much - we didn't chant as much, and they therefore don't know them as well. They should know at least one of them. They're getting the second now just from the regular testing.When we started the second group of 'A Christmas Carol' quotations they were automatically linking them back to the first set. I'm hoping to enforce this more with the next set of 'Macbeth' and 'Never Let Me Go' quotations, with the hope that this is natural to them when we do some more poetry quotations.

With the paper 2 mock the final week of term and their lives lessons revolving around it, I decided not to do quotations. For the first lesson back on Tuesday they got the following prompts - I was worried after two weeks that they would forget it all, so I gave them prompts for the first few weeks again. They absolutely nailed it. Most got 18/19 - even though they technically only needed one poetry quotation (so 15 was the total quotations learned in 5 weeks and no one got less than that).

Below are two examples of Monday's test from a couple of students. When we started writing quotations they would often say "Oh, I only got one word wrong," and as long as the word wasn't a crucial one I would tell them to award themselves the mark. This came with a discussion about paraphrasing in the exam - when it is and isn't appropriate, and how to quote if you're not certain of certain parts of the sentence. I've told them that if part of the quotation is correct, and as long as they could confidently analyse it, they can decide whether they deserve the mark. Of course this often leads to interesting debates about whether missing a particular word changes the quotation "I have written Scrooge wants to wipe the writing away but this isn't the same thing" - so we discuss why he wants to "sponge" the writing away, instead of "scratch" or "wipe" for example.

Today, when returning to Lady Macbeth, I have decided to start adding a word to each quotation. This comes out of three motives - 1) their vocabulary was simply not extensive enough in their viewpoint writing, and I need to fix that 2) they are nailing the quotations now, I need to push them more and 3) In terms of articulacy, I want them using the word when they explore the quotation. One of their points in the starter had to include the new word. I explained the noun/adverb form of the word too, and lots used it. They liked the idea, and the fact we're stepping it up a notch. I'm keeping it simple, with just synonyms listed, as below:

I'll do a similar thing with this - to start with, probably give them the three words and the synonyms and get them to match them, then the next week the synonyms and ask for the three words, then the third week ask for the new word and a synonym for that word. We will see how it goes!

_________________________________________________________________

I hope this has been useful... and makes sense! When I planned on writing this blog, it took me a while to get things broken down enough to make the explanation understandable. I hope it is. If not please feel free to ask questions on Twitter (@Lauralolder). Which reminds me, we also have a class Twitter account which about half of them follow. I tweet the quotations on there over the weekend, with the small hope they might see them, therefore triggering the memory process again. Every little helps!

Thanks for reading

Laura

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Quotation retention: why and how I do it.

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When the changes to GCSE English Literature were announced, I was outraged. Relatively new to teaching, caught up in the wave of Gove-hatred which I felt was the accepted way to feel, I was indignant about the announced alterations. But, I am not ignorant. I am open to change.

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Ideas for teaching STRUCTURE – My English Effects

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Ideas for teaching STRUCTURE – My English Effects

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Here are FIVE key things to try...

It always seems to make sense to read a text before analysing and exploring the way that a writer has chosen to structure it and why they may have made these choices. However, this approach does not support comprehension and can make it challenging for students to find the bigger picture or to consider how the words create a narrative.

"Many students experience problems comprehending expository text. There are many reasons for this, one being that they can't see the basic structure of a text. Some students get lost in the words." (Dymock, 1998; Dymock and Nicholson, 1999)

Here are some approaches that I use to familiarise students with the structure of a text, before or as we read.

Ask students to identify and explain the key elements of setting when considering the meaning in a title or the opening of a text. Looking for semantic fields that link to time and place creates a foundation that builds a clear picture from which a narrative can emerge. Think about the clues that writers may leave for the reader to pick up on. Consider the possibility that writers may purposely leave out clues about setting and what this may suggest.

List major characters and establish basic information about them as soon as possible. This again supports students in their comprehension of character development and helps them recognise quickly how these characters may change. For example, in An Inspector Calls, we learn that Mrs Birling is 'cold', Mr Birling is 'portentous' and Eric is 'uneasy' in the prologue. Students can make inferences here and start to think about where these traits may take the characters.

Ask students to think about the expectations they have for the characters and what barriers or obstacles these characters may come across. Considering their hopes, desires and goals also provides a sense of purpose to reading a text. The rising action may include actions and behaviours that could lead to certain consequences - students can think about what those consequences may be.

Considering similarities and differences in characters, settings and events can reveal underlying meanings. For example, in John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, we have a vivid and positive image of Bruno's house which we can later compare to the grim and prison-like house at Auschwitz. This symbolises a shift in the narrative and will support students in understanding where that narrative may lead. Thinking about and discussing the significance of similarities and differences can often reveal where the plot may take the reader and therefore guide a student's understanding of the elements in a story.

Hierarchy of importance

Thinking about why a writer may reveal certain events in a story at certain points and in varying detail for a reason is important. Rather than seeing events as independent of each other, making connections between them creates a 'big picture' that serves its own purpose. Ranking events or making explicit connections between them can reveal further, more significant meanings. Discussing why certain points are prioritised or played down by a writer can be very poignant as well. Paul Marshall's character in Ian McEwan's Atonement is largely absent and yet it is his behaviour that sparks the fateful events in the novel and conveys the privileges of his class when he continues to remain in the shadowy background.

Thank you for reading - perhaps knowing there were only five points made it easier..?

Here are some further posts on structure:
Jekyll and Hyde https://myenglisheffects.com/2017/04/11/structure-narrative-and-form-in-jekyll-and-hyde/ An Inspector Calls https://myenglisheffects.com/2017/04/19/an-inspector-calls-structure-form-and-the-three-unities/

Sharing ideas and resources for English secondary school and sixth form teaching

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Here are FIVE key things to try... It always seems to make sense to read a text before analysing and exploring the way that a writer has chosen to structure it and why they may have made these choices. However, this approach does not support comprehension and can make it challenging for students to find...

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'Siegfried Engelmann Instructional sequences have the capacity to make students smart or not.'
In teaching it seems the focus is often on what makes an outstanding lesson. I think we need to spend much more time thinking about what makes an excellent unit.

In this blogpost I want to explain how we might go about designing a unit of learning in English. What if we coherently sequenced knowledge for cultural capital and enduring memory? Much depends on the curriculum sequence, but I just want to focus on unit design for now.

This approach is a little bit like going through Lewis Caroll's looking glass: once you go through, it's hard to imagine going back. Such is the analogy used by David Didau to describe the shift from unit planning that starts from overarching skills, to unit planning that starts from underpinning knowledge.

Why would we design units with knowledge and memory as the starting points? For two main reasons:

Memory is complex: pupils need to remember lots of complex, confusing things.

Knowledge is vital: disadvantaged pupils lack the cultural capital of their wealthier peers, which inhibits their academic achievement.

In short, memorable knowledge is the best route to academic achievement. This simple insight gives us a very precise diagnosis: when pupils underachieve, it's often because of insufficient knowledge, memory or practice. It also reveals very clear actions: ensure they know, can remember and practise using the key content and concepts in the subject.
What is most useful for our pupils to know and remember about the text? How can we best teach so that our pupils remember what they're learning?
Beyond the why, these questions drive knowledge-led unit design in English:
First, specify the most useful knowledge for the unit
_

There are four necessary elements you need to decide on in English units:

These are the sinae quae non of your knowledge unit.
Next, sequence the unit for optimal instruction
_

The idea of touchpaper questions is a fascinating one. In unit design, I find focusing on the following questions is most helpful. What's the best way of:

... assessing?

... interleaving?

... recapping?

... explaining concepts?

... checking understanding?

... questioning?

... modelling exemplars?

... practising?

... using feedback?

... setting homework?

... remembering content?

The idea of 'multiple working hypotheses', from Thomas Chamberlain in 1890, is useful in thinking through the optimal answers to these questions. There are no perfect answers, but certainly some answers are more effective than others. So it's worth keeping multiple competing options in mind and testing them out to find out which work best. So, what would be most useful to have decided up front in advance of teaching the unit? Here are some of the evolving options:
Step One: Specify the most useful knowledge for the unit
How then do we go about designing a unit in English with coherent knowledge and optimal instruction? I'd like to share evolving examples of two knowledge units, one on Greek myths, and one on Oliver Twist.

As I've said, the four vital ingredients to decide on are the texts, content (plot character themes), context and concepts. So, in Oliver Twist I need to select the extracts, as I can't teach all 53 chapters. I settle on these as the 15 key episodes, one each lesson:

From hundreds of Greek myths, I can't teach them all. How do I decide which ones to teach? I choose the myths that have best stood the test of time and endured down the ages. I choose The Odyssey to read in depth as the epic with the highest cultural capital.

I now need to select the content: what about the plot, which of the characters (and what about them) and which themes do I want pupils to remember in a year's time and beyond?

There are around ten characters in Oliver Twist that I most want pupils to know all about, in order of importance: Oliver, Fagin, the Artful Dodger, Bill Sikes, Nancy, Mr Brownlow, Mr Fang, Rose Maylie, Noah Claypole, Mr Grimwig, as well as a whole host of minor characters such as Mr Bumble the Beadle and the shadowy Monks. As a starting point for the themes I specify poverty & inequality, c rime & punishment, l aw & injustice, c hildhood & adulthood, fortune & misfortune, family & friendship, courage & betrayal, murder & evil, death & prison.

Who the characters are (and what they did) is the vital element that I'd like pupils to remember in reading the Greek myths, and reminds me of how useful the Who's Who books of Greek mythology are when it comes to reading English literature. The great thing about The Odyssey is that it folds in the heroes of the Trojan Wars in the Underworld episode, and secures pupils' knowledge of Greek gods like Zeus, Poseidon, Apollo, Hades, Athena and Hermes. If pupils in years to come vividly remember who these are, it would help them succeed in English:

The themes as a starting point are the Wrath of the Gods; Heroes & Monsters; Death & The Underworld; Tricks & Transformations; Battles & Quests; Prophecy & Curses; Trust & Betrayal. Of course,the best pupilswill go far beyond this; this is best thought of as a minimum entitlement.

I now need to decide the context. There is almost limitless knowledge of Victorian London and Dickens' biography, and the Greek civilisation and gods to know about. They can't know everything, nor is all of it vital; on the other hand, there's no point limiting the amount they should know: so a baseline that everyone should understand and remember seems the right approach. Beyond that, it's about their own independent study when it comes to context.

We then need to decide the subject-specific concepts that we want them to grasp. Much depends on when this unit is taught in the sequence of the curriculum: for instance, Year 7 might only be taught a handful of concepts, whereas Year 9 might consolidate far more. Assuming this is being taught to Year 7, the handful to focus on might include dialogue, narration and syntax in Oliver Twist and questions, imperatives and adjectives in Greek myths. The point is to decide a few that all must grasp, and teach others in a more ad hoc style.

Deciding on the extracts, the content, the context and the subject concepts is an iterative rather than linear process: it requires going back and forth between them and adapting each so the whole unit coheres. A useful tool to capture the context, content and concepts is a knowledge grid. Katie Ashford came up with this and it is a brilliant idea. On one slide you specify exactly which parts of the context, plot, characters and themes (in novels) all pupils have the entitlement to remember.

Clarified aim
Whilst this is evolving, it is important to clarify three extra pieces of the puzzle: the aim of the unit; the assessment questions and rubric; and the sequence of lesson questions week-by-week. Far from being a step-by-step process, this is highly dynamic and iterative.
Selected texts & extracts
Frontloaded assessment (interim & end-of-unit questions and rubric)
Sequenced lesson questions
Specified knowledge grid (context plot characters themes)
: Sequence the unit for optimal instruction
If the grid above captures the knowledge, those three extra pieces of the puzzle are put together in the grid below: the aim, assessment and lesson questions.

Planning and resourcing a knowledge-led unit, with its careful specifying and sequencing of the tiny chunks of knowledge that make up deep understanding, is undoubtedly labour-intensive, although the upstream time invested actually saves time downstream.

For optimal instruction, numerous resources are pre-planned before teaching the unit:
Examples from the Oliver Twist Unit 1. Multiple Choice Questions

1. Multiple choice questions & options

2. Comprehension questions

3. Hinge questions & options

4. Actionable feedback questions

5. Planned homework tasks

6. Worked exemplar models

7. Essay structure of sub-questions

8. Drill questions on context and content

These questions diagnose who has misunderstood and what their exact misconception is.

What were the 1834 poor laws?
2. Comprehension Questions
What does Mr Grimwig promise to do if Oliver doesn't return?

These questions can be asked verbally while reading the text as a class.

The Workhouse
3. Hinge Questions

1. What happened when Oliver was born (and how)?

2. Who named Oliver Twist (and how?)

3. What does Oliver ask for (and why)?

4. What does the workhouse decide to with Oliver (and why)?

5. What do the gentlemen think will happen to Oliver (and why)?

These questions check which pupils have understood what they need to grasp in each lesson.

What happened to Dickens as a child?
4. Feedback Questions
What is capital punishment?

These questions encourage connections between knowledge of for instance, character and theme, or plot and context.
5. Homework Questions

How does Mr Fang represent the law in England?

How does kidnapping link to 1830s Victorian London?

Why did Dickens decide this ending for Sikes?

These questions encourage independent enquiry into the novel between lessons.
6. Exemplar Models

How is Dickens presenting the character of Fagin in the novel so far?

How has Dickens shown the theme of injustice in the novel so far?

Create and answer your own enquiry question into a character or theme in the novel

These are designed (for Year 7) to show examples of clear, cogent analysis:
7. Essay Sub-Questions
Mr Fang is a bullying, impatient and rude judge in charge of a London law court, who puts Oliver on trial. For example, he interrupts the old gentleman and says, 'Hold your tongue sir! How dare you bully a judge!' The way he speaks shows that he is sneering, snarling, growling and snapping. Dickens wanted to show how the law was not very just in 1830s Victorian London, as he had experienced his father being put in prison for debt in 1824, when he was 12 years old. The themes of poverty and injustice are shown through the character of Mr Fang, because he is cruel to Oliver, a poor orphan that he accuses of 'shamming', and sentences him to three months of hard labour.

These (designed by Katie Ashford, as much of this unit was) help structure pupils' introductions for the essay title: How does Dickens present the character of Oliver (or Fagin, or your own choice) in the novel?

Introduction
8. Drill Questions

Who wrote the novel? When and where was it set?

What is the novel about?

What happens in the novel?

What is Dickens trying to show through the character?

These build pupils' memory of the core content and context with increasing precision.

Week One

What happened to Dickens' father?

What were the 1834 Poor Laws?

What happened to Dickens' sister-in-law?

Week Two

When was Dickens' father imprisoned for debt?

When were the poor laws brought in?

When did Dickens' sister in law die from a fever?

Week Three

What happened in 1825?

What happened in 1834?

What happened in 1837?

Most drivers don't design their own cars
The complexity involved in this cohesive, sequential planning is not insignificant. All of these are just illustrative examples: multiply them by the 15 episodes to get an idea of how much work goes into planning a knowledge unit. Just as qualifying as a driver did not make me an engineer, nor did qualifying as a teacher make me a curriculum designer. This approach (and the choices I've made) are very much open to debate, and I'd welcome suggestions for improving these units. There remains a great deal of work to be done.

After all, what makes an excellent unit is highly dependent on the units that precede and succeed it - the cohesive sequencing of the curriculum across a whole year and key stage. If Engelmann is right, and the instructional sequence is what makes students smart or not, that sequence should be carefully planned not just across a unit, but across pupils' entire school journey through our subjects. Their learning depends on it.

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Oliver Twist abridged from 300+ to 20 pages (with context) Oliver Twist Reading Booklet + Context The Odyssey abridged from 200+ pages to 20 The Odyssey
Two resources are below:

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'Instructional sequences have the capacity to make students smart or not.' Siegfried Engelmann In teaching it seems the focus is often on what makes an outstanding lesson. I think we need to spend much more time thinking about what makes an excellent unit. In this blogpost I want to explain how we might go about...

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UKS2 Whole Class Reading Unit – All Planning and Resources Included – misswilsonsays

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UKS2 Whole Class Reading Unit – All Planning and Resources Included – misswilsonsays

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This year, the work I have done as an SLE has involved supporting schools to develop their teaching of reading. For many reasons, including lots set out in a previous blog post here, I have seen more and more schools making the move to whole-class reading.

When working with schools, I've found myself in need of having a comprehensive example of planning to share with schools as a starting point. Because of this, I decided to put together a unit of planning and resources that teachers could pick up, and then adapt to suit the needs of the readers in their class. Although this unit is an Upper Key Stage 2 unit, it is my intention to add to these units over the coming months, including some units for Lower Key Stage 2. The complete unit for Boy in the Tower by Polly Ho-Yen, including all planning and resources is available to download free of charge at the bottom of this blog.

I am now in my fourth year of teaching whole class reading and through trying out different approaches and making changes along the way, I am gradually developing a system that works well for me. There are some rules that I, and the teachers at my school, try and follow when planning whole class units:
Use whole texts supported by non-fiction when necessary
We always try and use whole texts in reading lessons and we have spent a lot of time and money in investing in developing teacher's knowledge of these. The children's knowledge and understanding of these fiction texts greatly benefits from them having a sound knowledge base of what they are reading about. Because of this, we help to develop this knowledge base by studying linked non-fiction texts too. For example, in The Boy in the Tower, the reader learns that the Blucher plants are deadly because of their spores. This makes a lot more sense to the children if they know what spores are!

We read our class text in story time for approximately ten minutes a day. In our reading lessons, we are then able to cover a key chapter that we have previously listened to. This means we don't focus on every single chapter; just the crucial ones. We get through one text a half term and this rate of coverage means we maintain the pace and interest in the story.
Vary the Format
To be successful in the end of Key Stage tests, the children are expected to be able to tackle questions with varied formats. Instead of straightforward retrieval, children may be expected to retrieve information from the text to fill in a table, or use it to order sections of a story.

We make sure that in our reading lessons, children are expected to manipulate the information they have gathered from the text and use it to answer a variety of questions types. I have put together a resource called Moving Beyond Comprehension sheets which has lots of practical ideas for how to do this in lessons.
We link our lessons to our DERIC skills
Across our school, we talk about our DERIC skills and these are constantly referred to in the lesson. As the children move through Key Stage 2, we expect them to articulate which reading skill they are using when answering a question.

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We mostly chunk the lessons
There will obviously be exceptions to this rule, but we generally chunk the lesson to allow us to focus on different DERIC skills, not just one. There are lots of example of how this works in practice in the example planning on this blog.
Finally, some things we don't do...
This is in response to some questions I'm asked a lot...

We don't link our reading and our writing. Our writing often links into our topic. We found that also trying to link our class reader to our topic limited the selection of books that teachers could choose to study so we don't make this a rule.

We also don't let children choose their class reader. (We do, however, have an extremely well-stocked library where they can choose their reading material to their heart's content). The one time I let my class choose the book we were going to study, we ended up stuck with Gangsta Granny by David Walliams. It was so hard to do good inference work using that text. Teachers are the experts in knowing the reading curriculum and which texts are best suited to deliver it. I also think they have a responsibility to open children's eyes up to texts they wouldn't necessarily have considered reading.

Below is a link to download a unit of twenty whole class reading lessons based on Boy in the Tower by Polly Ho-Yen suitable for Upper Key Stage 2. The materials include a planning and resources booklet and a PowerPoint which links to each lesson.

Happy reading!
Boy in the Tower Planning and Resource Booklet Sample: Lesson 1 Planning Sample: Lesson 1 PowerPoint Full Download of All Planning and Resources

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UKS2 Whole Class Reading Unit - All Planning and Resources Included

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This year, the work I have done as an SLE has involved supporting schools to develop their teaching of reading. For many reasons, including lots set out in a previous blog post here, I have seen more and more schools making the move to whole-class reading.

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gettingitrightsometimes | Reflections on how and why we try, try and try again

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gettingitrightsometimes | Reflections on how and why we try, try and try again

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Reflections on how and why we try, try and try again

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More resources for GCSE English Language Paper 1 – Mr Hanson's English

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More resources for GCSE English Language Paper 1 – Mr Hanson's English

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More resources for GCSE English Language Paper 1

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I've added several more resources into the dropbox folder for teaching GCSE English Language paper 1. Some of them I've already blogged about (see the links below) - but at least now you can see the resources I used. What I've added: Lessons on language and structure using Du Maurier's Don't Look Now - I've...

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Michaela Community School | The teachers blog at Michaela School

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Michaela Community School | The teachers blog at Michaela School

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Michaela Community School | The teachers blog at Michaela School

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Teach French à Michaela We're looking for an amazing French teacher. Here's some of what we do: The highest expectations of what pupils can - and do - achieve. The highest expectations of ourselves as teachers. Beautiful accents, exceptional pronunciation, fantastic range of knowledge. Lots...

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Lauran Teaches | English Teaching Resources | Nineteenth Century

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Lauran Teaches | English Teaching Resources | Nineteenth Century

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Lauran Teaches | English Teaching Resources

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Lauran Teaches | English Teaching Resources

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Lauran Teaches features instant English teaching resources and blog

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Something you may not {or may} know about me, is that I am obsessed with planners. I love them. I love creating them and using them to help manage all the daily madness. As educators a well organized planner is an essential, must-have for our line of work.

When it comes to choosing your planner for the year, you could use the standard teacher planner that gets passed out every year at school, but those are usually pretty darn boring if you ask me. So the solution for me has always been to create my own.

As a fun summer project, I worked on creating a planner for teachers and another planner for coaches to support your DIY Planner style. They have all the planner essentials you need, yet leave you with room to build out from there. You can find these different Teacher Planners in my shop.

Or if you're interested in a weekly calendar that's already set up and ready to go, definitely check out The Time & ToDo Planner.

Alright, now let's take a look at how you might set yours up.

For my planner I chose to use a Discbound notebook, which seem to be all the rage these days and for good reason! They're sleek and sophisticated, highly customizable, fold neatly in half, and lay flat when open. Love it! You can check out the Circa notebook system by Levenger , or the Arc notebook is a slightly less expensive option yet just as good.

On the inside I added a pad of gotta-have sticky notes, some page tabs, and a few paper clips. I also had my cover laminated to spice it up a bit!

The Simplified Teaching Planning Kit has a few different cover options you can choose from. The colors in all the covers cordinate with the colors in the calendar.

I used white tab dividers, some washi tape, and my label maker to create sections for "Calendar" and "Lesson Plans". Two essential sections for every teacher!

Begin your calendar section with a Year at a Glance spread. Use it to note important dates for the year, goals, and/or student birthdays.

Behind the Year at a Glance, let your two-page Monthly Calendar spreads for the year begin. These August 2016-July 20147 calendar pages will serve as your Comprehensive Calendar and it is going to be one of your most important tools in your Teacher Planner. A two-page spread is a must, since this is where you will record all of your hard deadlines, events, and meetings for both your school and home life. Yes, both! If you value getting a pizza and watching The Bachelor on Monday night, you've got to block that time off and work around it the best you can. Not that I watch The Bachelor or anything...

Behind each month are two lined pages for notes.

In the section for your lesson plans, I created a weekly lesson plan template you can use to get all your big ideas down. There are 42 planning spreads in each Teacher Planning Kit, designed to be printed front-back, so you can either print for the year, or a month at a time. It's designed to be flexible!

Lastly, I used some sticker paper to make a label for the folder in the back. This "Inbox" is where I'll collect any loose odds and ends that come my way.

Now that you've got the essentials taken care of, the rest of the planner is up to you. You might add a section for grades, meetings, general reference, whatever you need!

A few notes on printing the Weekly Lesson Plans in your Planning Kit or Teacher Planner. For easier viewing and printing, I recommend using Adobe Reader which you can download for free here. You can also use Preview if you have a Mac.

Once you open the Planner PDF in Adobe you should see a screen that looks similar to this:

The weekly lesson plans are set-up for simple duplex/two sided printing. If you have a duplex printer, you're good to go. If not, no worries. I don't either, so on my printer I first printed the "odd pages" by adjusting the "Subset" selection in the print box. The paper I used for printing is standard letter size, 8 1/2″ x 11, 98 bright and 32 lb. from Staples.

After the odd pages were printed I flipped them over, inserted them back into the printer, and changed the "Subset" selection to "Even pages only." Now, here's what you need to make sure to do: print out a few test pages BEFORE printing out the entire document! Kind of like the old adage, "Measure twice, cut once." Or you can take a shortcut and just head to Staples.

OR don't forget about your Time & ToDo Planner option either. You'll save on the cost of printing, and be ready to go.

Alrighty then, let's get this Planner party started! Here's to an organized and awesome school year.

Happy Planning!

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Something you may not {or may} know about me, is that I am obsessed with planners. I love them. I love creating them and using them to help manage all the daily madness. As educators a well organized planner is an essential, must-have for our line of work.

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Here are my Long Term Plans for 2017-2018 Year 10 Language Long Term Plan1 Literature Long Term Plan Exam overview exam-overview-key-ring1 2. Exam overview door posters lang-paper-1-door-overview lang-paper-2-door-overview gcse-english-literature-overview-for-door-paper-1 gcse-english-literature-overview-for-door-paper-2 3. AO overview Chart summarising each AO, percentages and which parts of the paper each AO is targeted in. edexcel-ao-overview 4.

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Ah, the good old debate around traditional and progressive philosophies of education. An important debate for some and one that such people tell us has given them enlightenment and understanding about what they do in the classroom.

Except we all know it isn't important, no matter what they tell us, don't we? And you know why we know it isn't important? We know it's not important because it isn't a debate that happens in schools. It all plays out on the internet. And of course, things said on the internet aren't really real. Those aren't real people telling us this is important to them. They are just floating avatars spewing out the same rubbish day after day. Probably Russian bots or something. We should ignore them. If the trad/prog debate is something we don't talk about in schools, it's obviously not important at all.

Okay, that may be an extreme characterisation, but it is the crux of a particular argument: the trad/prog debate isn't something that happens in schools so it is not important. The fact it isn't spoken about in schools is largely true. Walk around any school and you'll rarely see people having this debate. (The lack of the debate will be even more starkly obvious if you don't actually work in a school: if you're a consultant and you visit lots of schools, you will be able to report with confidence that in absolutely none of the schools you visit people have had this debate.*)

I think we're all agreed then. If we aren't discussing it in schools, it's irrelevant. It's unimportant. And if we aren't discussing it in schools there's really no validity in discussing it anywhere.

So let's all agree that the trad/prog debate is an irrelevancy and let's disregard it.

But if we disregard on this basis, then in the interests of fairness we should all agree that anything we don't really talk about in schools is also irrelevant and should be disregarded.

So out goes the trad/prog debate. See ya!

But we'll also need to say goodbye to the mental health of teachers. That can go too. According to this TES article, "The one place you won't hear much talk of teacher mental health is in schools." Well, as we all know, not talking about it in schools makes it irrelevant and unimportant, of course. Bye bye teacher mental health!

Another unimportant issue we should disregard is violence against teachers. Again, in the TES: "I think this issue of violence against teachers is actually a taboo in our occupation. We don't talk about it." Well if we don't talk about it in schools, it means it's not important. Duh.

And our feelings too. We don't talk about the emotional labour of teaching and the impact this can have, according to the Washington Post. Who cares? If we don't talk about it, it's obviously of no import.

There's a whole host of other things teachers and commentators tell us "we need to talk about" more in schools : the joy of learning, financial education, the dangers of pornography and sexting, healthy eating ... all of these things are unimportant precisely because we don't have enough conversations about them, right?

It's a kind of cognitive dissonance that uses "we don't talk about it in schools" as an argument to disregard some things and suggest they are utterly irrelevant, and yet sees the same "we don't talk about it in schools" statement as a valid way to highlight that some things are unfairly undervalued.

Of course, I don't think that any of the things above - mental health, violence, healthy eating, etc. - are unimportant. I think we should be talking about all of them. And I think the same about debates in education - no matter how unfamiliar the debate is to your daily experience, it is still a debate that people are having and to tell them it's unimportant because it doesn't happen in other arenas is ridiculous. The first reason/excuse people will give for any of the topics above not being talked about enough in schools is lack of time. Where do we find the time to discuss mental health of teachers, etc? We are so busy, that we just don't find the time. Well, the same goes for the trad/prog debate. Where in a busy teacher's day do they have the time to have deep discussions about philosophies of education? Somewhere between getting a cup of tea and going to the toilet before heading back to the classroom to set up their next lesson? Schools aren't really the place for many topics that need unpicking at length. So what do teachers do if they want to discuss anything they don't get to delve into in the school day? They use social media. And when they do, they get told: if you aren't having this discussion in schools, then it's an invalid discussion here too.

The whole this-debate-doesn't-happen-in-schools response is an extension of the "you aren't living in the real world" argument: teachers who debate and discuss the philosophies of education (a debate that has been going on for more than a century, by the way) on Twitter aren't living in the real world of schools where, as we've established, nobody talks about this.

Jeffrey Israel, a lecturer in religion and political philosophy, argues that, amongst other things, the accusation that someone's opinions aren't from the real world is narcissistic. He defines narcissistic here as being "characterized by an inability to perceive the lives of others as anything other than examples of one's own idiosyncratic preconceptions." In this way, we might see those suggesting that the debate around education philosophies is insignificant ("because it doesn't happen in real life") as lacking the ability to attach value to anything that is beyond their own worldview. The debate may not be happening in schools, but it happening on social media and in blogs and articles and thus it is real and it is significant to the people involved in it and to many reading about it. It might be seen as narcissistic to disregard it on the grounds that it isn't happening "in real life".

In fact, there really is no distinction to be made between beliefs held in different domains. Believe it or not, people discussing something on Twitter are real people. As Israel succinctly tells us:

"Everyone who is living is living in the real world."

And whilst they aren't having lengthy debates about philosophy in the real world of schools, they are having debates with real people in the shared world of social media.

There are plenty of examples of people who have developed or had their thinking shaped as a result of the debate online. Indeed, I wrote about my own experience last year.

Here's a couple of tweets from real people telling us that the debate changed their minds:

Anyone claiming the prog/trad debate doesn't change minds should see the dust on these now neglected books at the back of my cupboard. pic.twitter.com/QaXnA2OB08

- Nick Wells (@NSMWells) April 12, 2017

As a young teacher the trad vs prog debate changed my career & I think kept me in the profession. Find it baffling that others write it off.

- Louis Everett (@LouisEverett1) April 10, 2017

Is the debate invalid because these people are choosing to discuss it on social media rather than the staffroom? Are they not living in the real world?

It matters not where the debate is happening. If it is happening, it is real. I am happy to listen to any arguments against the debate, but the argument that it isn't valid because it doesn't happen in schools is a very, very poor one that simply doesn't stand up.
(*If you are a consultant and you think that visiting lots of schools and never experiencing something means it doesn't exist, you are sadly mistaken. You are the least likely to actually experience it as your relationships with the people you come across every day, whilst I'm sure are useful and beneficial to the school and you, are largely of a fleeting nature. The context in which you would be a more able judge of whether something exists in a school is to work at that school. I should also add that you also aren't privy to the conversations about consultants that undoubtedly happen after you've left. They do exist even though you don't witness them. And they're always entirely complimentary, of course.)

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Ah, the good old debate around traditional and progressive philosophies of education. An important debate for some and one that such people tell us has given them enlightenment and understanding about what they do in the classroom. Except we all know it isn't important, no matter what they tell us, don't we?

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Shiny New Term | Just a Teacher Standing in Front of a Class

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Shiny New Term | Just a Teacher Standing in Front of a Class

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Just a Teacher Standing in Front of a Class

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So we start a new school year, and as ever, we reflect on what worked and didn't work across the last year. Boy was it a tough year; we were sailing into the unknown, hoping that what we were doing was right. After three days of little sleep, the GCSE results were published. It was all ok. I had two year 11 classes and they had done me proud, in particular, my 1/2/3 and a smattering of 4s class had absolutely smashed it. We had 5s and 6s. I proudly hugged crying students, who were so dumbfounded by their success, that all 'coolness' had disappeared. It felt good.

I work in a 'challenging' school, with over 50% of our students having English as an Additional Language and with a well above average PP cohort. We have just had the cohort with the lowest points score since 2010 get the highest results. But we can't just sit on our heels, we have to keep going to work out how to give students the best possible education that we have to offer. But we also can't burn out. We have to look at ways to make sure that we are all able to stay healthy and sane whilst also knowing that we are doing the best that we can for the students.

I'm not an academic. I'm a teacher who reads and trials ideas and strategies within the context of my classroom, the place where I'm happiest to be. I've learnt not to overload myself with new ideas; if I'm overloaded the kids are certainly overloaded. I need to take the things that work, and build on them, and chuck out what doesn't work and doesn't matter. I'm a real nitpicker, I dissect everything, and am always looking for ways to get better. So I sat with my exam results this week, and worked out question by question where my students had performed well. I was pleasantly surprised that they were pretty consistent. In fact, their marks for each of the Language papers were spookily close, and if there was anywhere that improvements were to be made, it was the writing tasks on both papers. So some things had worked. So what did I think worked, and what are my plans for the year.

I become fiercely defensive over my students and I always want each and every one to succeed. When I first started teaching my 1/2/3/a few 4s targets in year 10, I was very aware that many of them felt like they couldn't do it, that GCSEs were impossible. Many had complex SEN needs, some were EAL, and most were PP - everything that is supposed to be a barrier. But I just told them that we were all aiming for 4s and 5s and we were going to show everyone that we could do it. I kept repeating it. Their end point in my head, was the same as for all other students. I didn't dumb things down and I never expected less of them, I just sometimes went a bit slower until we had mastered it, I sometimes pushed some of them harder, whilst scaffolding some of them up, but always kept the same end goal in mind. And they believed it. They believed that if they worked hard, they could achieve. We became a unit and on a rainy Wednesday in February half term (my birthday) they turned up for a revision school with a birthday cake for me. They had walked in the rain, with a cake (that got a bit squashed along the way) to come to school in the holiday, because they wanted to do well.

And they did. I'll admit that I went home and cried on results day because I had seen 6s on results slips. That may not seem much to some people, but some of these children had arrived at school not even having reached a level 1 in their SATs. So I have learned that it is vitally important to keep the same endpoint in mind for all. Not everyone will succeed, and there were a couple that weren't ever interested in succeeding, but that we are letting students down if we don't just expect the same from them, because if we only ever work to a 2 because that's their target, we don't know if actually they are capable of so much more, and they do appreciate that you keep that faith. That class will forever remind me of that.

Retention and interleaving

I started a personal research project with year 10 in the summer term, looking at interleaving and retention. I also used some of the same ideas with year 11, for revision, but focused mostly on yr 10. I wrote about the project here, if you want to see where the initial ideas stemmed from.

Students learnt quotes each week, and were tested on these. The idea was never that I wanted them just to know lots of quotes, but that they felt confident with the text. Their lessons were also interleaved so that they had lessons each week on prior learning and at the beginning of every lesson, students answered sets of questions on a selection of prior learning. They were also encouraged within lessons to connect across topics. So what did I find out?

Please bear in mind that this is a personal research project, there were lots of variables, it was never going to be perfect as research. I only had the previous year to compare with, so I compared how many quotes had been used in the end of year 10 Literature Paper 1 mock, compared to the same mock at exactly the same time the previous year. It couldn't be directly comparable, the students were of varying abilities, but I wanted to see if learning the quotes meant that they used the quotes. They had. The orange and blue lines are from the previous year. They were using far less quotes in their answer than the grey and yellow lines, which were this year's students.

But did it impact on their marks? Well yes it did. The tables below show the results from 2016. The pink shows how many quotes they used, the yellow their exam grade. We fine grade, so C is low, B middle and A high.

I did exactly the same for the 2017 classes. They had performed better overall in the mock and there was a correlation between the amount of quotes used and their exam performance.

Now please don't jump on me; there are a huge number of variables. Maybe my overall teaching had improved, the students' ability did not exactly correlate, there are still students that can't be bothered, any number of things that make this all a load of rubbish....and yes I know that the exam board say that quotes don't matter. But, for me, it was about making sure that the students felt confident with the texts and to have studied and analysed the language well enough to go into an exam and have something to write about. I think it does make a difference and, it is something that I will continue with.

So this is how this half term looks for me. They will do a piece of extended writing fortnightly, alongside interleaved lessons, but with An Inspector Calls as their main focus. Each week the homework leads into the following week. This worked well last year, with a high completion rate, once they knew that they would be tested and use what they had competed for homework in lessons.

For the last half of the summer term, the students had homework booklets that they completed, where everything was designed to lead into the following week. I have slightly changed that this year, so that they are also learning vocabulary relevant to the topics every week, which they will then be tested on. I will also encourage that vocabulary use within lessons. They also have to complete 20 mins on the Bedrock vocabulary programme online every week, as well as completing pages from their Inspector Calls workbook. So this is how this term looks in terms of homework. The initial idea and template has totally been stolen from @evenbetterif

They have a homework booklet where each week looks like this.

The vocabulary and definitions are clear. I will have gone through them before they take them home.

So we will see how that pans out. I'm adapting for year 10 and they will be taught using the same principles and interleaved lessons. I'm not claiming it will be perfect, but I am trying to encourage retention, confidence, challenge and independence. If there is one thing that the results have shown me this year, is that hard work makes the difference. The students know that if they learn and revise as they go along, it will make a difference at the end, and they are happy to go along with 'Miss's Project' because they can see that it works.

I have 4 GCSE classes, and I need to improve on getting feedback to students quicker. There is no point in them waiting a week to get feedback, it needs to be as instant as possible. Last term I trialled whole class feedback, which worked really well. That is something that I want to continue this year. I also want to get better at live marking, so that as many students as possible get their feedback immediately and act on it there and then. I also want to play about with the idea of multiple choice questions as part of feedback. As part of our marking policy, we require students to either go back over their work, or answer questions relating to their work, but I want to look at how this can be tightened even more, so that it is instant and lightens my workload of an evening. I also very much like the idea of comparative judgement, but that is one for persuading those above me....watch this space.

Keep it simple

Lessons don't need to have flashy ppts and millions of resources. There is such a thing as overload, and in the past I've been guilty of it. I'm teaching An Inspector Calls this term with me, copies of the text, some slides with vocabulary definitions, the students' ideas and a lot of enthusiasm. Let's see how that goes.

I wish you all a happy and productive year. Be kind to yourselves this year, don't overload yourself with ideas, just because everyone seems to be doing them. Pick something that you think will work and see how it goes. I'll leave the last words to a student. When it is dark and grey and we are tired, remember why we do this...because actually, in the end, education opens doors.

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So we start a new school year, and as ever, we reflect on what worked and didn't work across the last year. Boy was it a tough year; we were sailing into the unknown, hoping that what we were doing was right. After three days of little sleep, the GCSE results were published.

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Reflecting English | In search of classroom answers

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Reflecting English | In search of classroom answers

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Tod Brennan, @TodBrennanEng, is putting together a series of interviews with English teachers. This morning we chatted about the benefits of a knowledge-first approach to English teaching. The video link is below:

Do follow this series of interviews. They are bound to be fascinating.

Last week's guest was Caroline Spalding on career progression:

Related posts:
Can we teach children how to make inferences? English teaching and the problem with knowledge? General knowledge, the new English GCSE and the 'as-the-crow-flies error'

A lot of the advice teachers receive about formulating good questions is based on Bloom's Taxonomy. According to Bloom's, 'creation', 'evaluation' and 'analysis' questions - the higher-order questions - sit at the top of the pile. At the bottom sit their lower-order brethren, the 'remember' and 'understand' questions. The theory goes that if teachers ask more high-order questions and fewer lower-order questions, then their students will be encouraged to think more critically and deeply. And woe betide any teacher who expects his students to answer a knowledge recall question. He is merely encouraging flimsy rote learning.

Even though Bloom's and similar questioning hierarchies are not without merit, they suffer from two obvious flaws. First, they are based on the assumption that knowledge and critical analysis are separate entities. In fact, they are completely enmeshed and often impossible to disentangle. Analysis always needs something to analyse. Second, they are too generic. Different subjects require different types of question. Indeed, a skilled questioner adapts the style and form of the questions she asks according to the topic she is teaching and the children she is teaching it to. Questioning in maths lessons remains fundamentally different from questioning in English lessons.

Over the past few months I have been putting together an exhaustive list of what I call 'analytical question templates'. These are generic question structures that provoke analytical and critical responses to texts. They are useful to English teachers but probably not to anyone else. Analysis and evaluation questions are difficult to design because they can easily become too vague or require too much guesswork on the student's part. Often questions like 'Why do you think the writer did this?' or 'Why do you think this might be significant?' are too loose and not specific enough for a strong answer.

Therefore, I have tried to choose questions that usually lead to focused, accurate and interesting responses. These have been partly inspired by the 'text-dependent questions' explained by Doug Lemov, Colleen Drigg and Erica Woolway in Reading Reconsidered. Because text-dependent questions are so tightly worded, students are compelled to read the text closely and to use textual evidence in their responses. The student cannot respond with a tangential comment - they must speak about the text. Nevertheless, I have also included some questions that might be less text-dependent, yet encourage the child to enter into the emotional context of the text.

The questions cover five foundational literary concepts: language and literary devices; characterisation; form and structure; contextual features; authorial intention. They can be used to provoke class discussions or as writing prompts. As students become accustomed to them, they could also design their own questions using the structures as prompts. Ultimately, however, the question list that follows is most useful as a planning tool.

Finally, please remember that the structures need to be reworded depending on the text.

So ... 'The writer uses the word/phrase/sentence/ technique ________. What does this suggest about ______________?'

Becomes ... 'Priestley uses the adverb 'coldly' to describe Mrs Birling. What does this suggest about her relationship with the rest of her family?'

Or ... 'How does _______ connect to your prior knowledge of the text's context? '

Becomes ... 'How does Stevenson's description of the night-time streets connect to your prior knowledge of Victorian London?'

And: 'The writer uses the word/phrase/sentence/technique ___________ to _____________. Why do you think he uses _____ rather than ______________?'

Becomes: 'Dickens use the simile 'as solitary as an oyster' to describe Scrooge. Why do you think he chose the adjective 'solitary' rather than, say, 'cosy'?

You get the picture.

Finally, this is a work in progress. Please share any suggestions or alert me to any obvious omissions. The questions are below but you can download a Word copy from here. Oh, and do make sure you read Reading Reconsidered.
Language and linguistic devices

1. Which words/phrases/sentences/techniques does the writer use to imply that _______________?

2. The writer uses the word/phrase/sentence/ technique ________. What does this suggest about ______________?

3. Can you find two examples of __________? Which is the most interesting? Why?

4. How does the word/phrase/sentence/technique___________ suggest that ___________________?

5. The writer uses the word/phrase/sentence/technique ___________ to _____________. Why do you think he uses _____ rather than ______________?

6. What do we usually associate with __________? What might the writer have be been implying about _____________ by using this description?

7. What feelings are usually connoted by _____________. How do you think these images help the reader to ___________?

8. Where have we seen the writer use _______ before? Why do you think the writer has chosen to use it again?

9. The writer uses ___________. Why do you think he chose to use this technique at this point in the text?

10. What kind of imagery do we see in the text? How does this help the reader to understand ____?

Characterisation

1. What would you do if you were in the same situation as the character? Would you have behaved similarly or differently? Why?

2. What attributes and qualities best describe the character? Where have we seen evidence to support this?

3. What changes has the character undergone? Why have these changes happened? How do these changes transform the reader's opinion of that character?

4. What is the character's hierarchical position in relation to the other characters in the book? Does this change depending on how we measure it?

5. Is the reader positioned for or against the character? How does this reinforce the writer's view about __________?

6. Does the character conform to - or break - the social conventions of the time/place being written about? What evidence from the text supports this?

7. Does the writer use the character to embody or symbolise any attitudes/ideas/central conflicts?

8. How might two readers respond differently to the character and their actions? On what aspects might they agree and disagree?

9. What do we learn about ________ from reading about this character?

10. How would the story function without that character? What would be lost from the story?

Form and structure

1. Can you summarise the sequence of events/ideas in the text?

2. What does __________ at the start of the text make the reader think/feel/believe about ___________?

3. What does ____________ at the end of the text leave the reader feeling about ________________?

4. Why do you think that the writer chose to place ____________ before ___________?

5. What are the major differences between the start and the end of the text? What do these imply about _________?

6. What kind of narrative device is employed? How could you describe the 'voice' of the narrator? Why do you think the writer chose to use this device? How does it differ from other texts you have read?

7. How are the internal structures of the book - chapters and paragraphs - organised? Why do you think that the writer made these decisions?

8. Where does ____________change? How does this affect the reader's attitude towards ______________________________?

Contextual features

1. What does ___________ tell us about what it would have been like to have lived in the time and place the text is set?

2. How does _______ connect to your prior knowledge of the text's context?

3. Which factors from the writer's biography may have influenced aspects of the story?

4. Which aspects of the writer's contemporary society did he/she support/criticise?

5. Do you believe that the writer created an accurate portrayal of the time in question? Were any aspects exaggerated or underplayed? Why do you think the writer chose to do this?

6. What are the differences between how __________ would have been received in the writer's time and how we receive it today?

7. How does the text compare to other works from that period/by the same writer? How does it compare to works that came before and after?

Authorial intention

1. Who were/are the writer's target audience? How do you know this?

2. What was the writer's main purpose in writing the text?

3. What is the writer's attitude towards _____________?

4. What do you believe that the writer wanted the reader to feel about _____________?

5. How far do you agree with the writer's attitude towards _______________?

6. What do you think that the writer wanted to teach the reader about the human condition?

7. If the writer could be with us today, what do you think she would have thought about ______________?

8. If ___________ had been different, how might it change the reader's attitude to ______________?

9. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the writer's argument about _____________?

See also:
Closed question quizzing: unfashionable yet effective The poetry dilemma: to teach or to elicit?

Over the past couple of years it has become clear to me that the individual lesson is too simple a vehicle to be relied upon as the main driver of learning. That is not to say that lessons are unimportant in themselves, but that learning itself is too tricky and elusive to be calculated from the cumulative sum of a series of hour-long, bite-sized chunks of teaching. To me, this vision of learning presents a child with a situation not unlike being asked to clamber up a set of stairs with a raging inferno hot on his tail. Even if he gets to the top without being sizzled to a cinder, his chances of ever making it down again are very slim. Each stair - each unit of learning - burns away just as his foot leaves it.

Instead, our students need repetition, consolidation and extension; if not, their seeming progress can be little more than a Pyrrhic victory.

This problem is especially true of English teaching. Language learning is not speedy or linear or logical; in fact, it is slow and erratic and associative. It is the result of mastering and practising some fundamental concepts, but it also benefits from a virtuous cycle of discovery: the deeper we submerge ourselves, the more we learn, and the more we learn, the more likely we are to dive deep again. Vocabulary research, for instance, suggests that young people absorb new words through multiple exposures in slightly different contexts. The lesson-by-lesson, unit-by-unit, year-by-year model can be too crude to manage this successfully.

We need a mature vision of English planning and teaching that appreciates the interplay between the short-term and the long-term, that recognises the conceptual and iterative nature of learning, and accepts the supporting roles that reading, writing, speaking, listening and thinking all play in this process.

I like to think of English teaching in terms of three principles: direction, immersion and habit. A holy trinity, if you like.
Direction
'Direction' covers all the concepts, information and chunks of knowledge that we want students to learn and will direct them to learn. This might range from how to spell 'onomatopeoia' to knowing the events in Chapter 1 of Animal Farm to understanding how and why writers use imagery to represent their main ideas. This learning will, at times, be specific to one context; at other times, students will apply what they have learnt to a range of new reading, writing and speaking situations. This material can and should be planned for lesson-by-lesson, but it is even better to plan to revisit it so that students are less likely to forget. It is the stuff of 'learning objectives', 'lesson plans' and 'curriculum maps'.
Immersion
If direction is about the depth and strength of learning, immersion is about breadth and diversity. We cannot expect students to remember everything they have been taught, and teachers cannot repeat everything students have been exposed to ad infinitum. English classrooms should immerse students in language and ideas so that they also have the best chance of learning indirectly and through osmosis. Text choice and task choice are important here: in my view, children need to be constantly challenged to read and think beyond the confines of their world. Engagement and enjoyment are important to immersion but perhaps we should be making things 'interesting' rather than fun.
Habit
Students consolidate and improve their reading and writing skills because they maintain good habits over time. Helping students to do this has to be one of the main priorities of the English teacher, and it is an area of planning that calls for a coherent long-term strategy because it is devilishly difficult to do (see this post). First, we must decide on the behavioural habits we need to inculcate in students: these might be to rigorously edit and improve their work independently, or to read every day for pleasure, or to give full and well-reasoned verbal explanations in response to teacher questioning, or to always consider alternative viewpoints when analysing a text. All of these are worthy aims. Whichever we choose, we have to work backwards from the habit, work out the best way to teach students how to get there and then maintain an unrelenting focus on it over an extended period of time. From my experience, the more habits I try to promote, the fewer my students take on board. Less is more in this case. Of course, once the habit is in place, new habits can be introduced slowly.

So there you go: teach some material clearly and directly, and expect it to be learnt; create an environment where indirect learning becomes more likely; insist on those habits that are most conducive to long-term skill development. These can only be brought about through intelligent planning and a more subtle definition of what constitutes a good lesson.

*

The ideas in this post have been a precursor for a new and exciting long-term writing project that I am about to embark upon. I am looking to refine these thoughts so please share your opinion and let me know if there is anything blazingly obvious I have left out!

Thank you for reading.

Andy

in Image / Posted onEducation /

Recently, I asked a class of top-set year 11s to identify the verbs in a piece of writing. It was a seemingly simple activity that I had given them a few minutes to complete, yet it quickly became clear from the blank faces I was met with that my request had posed something of a problem: after five years of secondary school, a sizeable proportion of the group did not know what a verb was.

How many times in 11 years of schooling must they have encountered the term before? How many times must they have heard the word uttered from a teacher's lips or seen it written up on a board? Yet despite numerous exposures, this relatively simple concept, one probably within the capacity of a bright 5 year-old, had slipped away and had hardly been grasped at all. Of course, the humble verb is but the tip of the iceberg; the number of completely learnable terms and concepts which I have exposed my students to and they have have not learnt is too numerous to list.

This realisation, that so much of what I have taught has not been learnt, has been steadily dawning on me over the past year or so. It has set in motion a strange and vertiginous feeling, akin perhaps to trudging for many miles across a plateau in the hope of finding a place to spend the night, only to find oneself standing at the edge of a plunging, bottomless abyss.

Much has gone before, in my classroom and in others. Curricular have been jammed with sparkling ideas and concepts; lessons have overflowed with activities and ingenious new strategies; every inch of white board has been crammed with text and pictures and diagrams. Exercise books have been filled with words; hours of discussion have ricocheted between the classroom walls; synapses have sparked and connected in their billions. But still it is the same. So many children leave school knowing far less than we would hope them to.

The reasons for this are complex. Anybody who tries to tell you that there is one cause is wrong. Anybody who finds solace in an ideological or scientific explanation is probably only telling you half the story. Society, motivation and development all play a part, but I still think one of the causes has its roots in both curriculum and pedagogy. There is a paradox here: in trying to do so much we do too little.

My theory is that we try to throw too much at children, and that this is why so little of it sticks. A basic understanding of cognitive load theory can help us to conceptualise why over-stuffing lessons and curricular does not work. The human working memory - the part of the brain that processes new information - can only cope with a limited number amount of new information at one time. When it becomes 'overloaded', there is no room left to think, which can then prevent new information from reaching the destination it needs to get to: the long-term memory, where it can be stored indefinitely. (Alex Quigley usefully sums up how this works in this post on thinking hard.)

There are other reasons, too. One, which I have dubbed the as-the-crow-flies-error, lies in asking students to perform complex skills, like analysing a writer's style, before being secure in the knowledge needed to be able to do this, such as understanding the text's plot or comprehension of the writer's language.

The recent drive to increase the level of 'challenge' in lessons is an important one, but only if this challenge is focused and achievable. I would argue that we should always aim for more depth and less breadth. Drawing on international comparisons, Tim Oates argues - here - that teachers should look to expand upon the current idea before progressing to the next ones. Take one idea and examine it in depth, rather than let five or six ideas be touched upon superficially. A concern with this approach, some might argue, is that it does not benefit our more-able students who will be forced to remain with topics that they are ready to move on from. However, with good planning and more imaginative and stretching questions, our more-able students might well benefit more from this approach than any other.

The beauty of this way of thinking is that we might achieve more success by doing less work than we already do. By stepping back, by deciding on what is most important (and then going home a little earlier) could we go some way towards helping students to learn things more securely?

What follows are the things I am currently working on in my role as English teacher; the principle behind them all, however, could extend into all aspects of school life:

Plan to teach only 1 or 2 new vocabulary words or concepts per lesson.

Give less feedback - i.e. set one target, not two, but give time and space over a number of lessons to work on it.

Limit the number of success criteria, or procedural processes, that students work on in one go. (I have a habit of asking students to do 5 or 6 new things in their work; it works better to use fewer so that they can really think about them.)

If a slide show is to be used, cut down the number of words per slide, and cut down the number of total slides . If they have to read something from the slide, allow time for that.

Plan for two or three tasks per lesson, no more. Revisit the same material but in slightly different ways.

Decide on the key, essential knowledge that must not be forgotten. Teach it, revisit it, test it ... and repeat. Joe Kirby's knowledge organisers provide a useful model of how this could be organised.

Teach a bit, let the students write a bit. Teach a bit, write a bit. Teach a bit, write a bit. Lesson over.

Ultimately, all this is about prioritisation, about separating the wheat from the chaff - and then ensuring that the wheat is learnt well.

And if you are prepared to take this jump, perhaps you will have the spare time to start visiting friends, reading books, doing the things you enjoy and, dare I say it, forgetting about work.

(If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy this video on the art of subtraction from Jason Ramasami, who illustrates this blog.)

In our recent book, Making every lesson count, Shaun Allison and I have used the following diagram to introduce the idea that feedback is a two-way process:

The notion on the left, that feedback should inform planning, is often overlooked; instead, teacher-to-student feedback is very much the flavour of the month - to the extent that 'quality of marking' has now become an accepted measure of a teacher's effectiveness. However, there is a logical error inherent in this way of thinking. Quality of feedback can only be contingent on the quality of the initial input. Harry, for example, might have received high-quality teaching and no written feedback from his teacher; Hannah, in another class, might have been the recipient of poor teaching and lots of remedial feedback. It is absurd to suggest that Harry's teacher's marking is of a lesser quality than Hannah's teacher's marking, without taking into account the quality of the initial teaching. If students are clearly making good progress, does it matter how much or how little red pen is in the books?

The craze for written feedback might also lead to a reliance on flimsy teaching methods. The mistakes I notice in my students' written work are often the results of conceptual knowledge gaps or ingrained bad habits. Sometimes they are a combination of the two, and these cannot be solved by a couple of lines of red biro. Let's say I write, 'You need to use the possessive apostrophe accurately' in a child's exercise book. This is only useful if: a) he already knows and understands the concept of the possessive apostrophe, and b) the feedback reminds him to use the possessive apostrophe in his future writing. If these requirements are not met, then my written feedback will not solve the problem alone. Only focussed teaching and/or sustained practice over time will lead to a genuine improvement.

DIRT (dedicated improvement and reflection time), when the class can begin to practise their mistakes, is a useful starting point. Too often, however, it only papers over the cracks. The most useful thing about looking at student work is that it provides us with a recipe for future action. We learn what we need to teach again or teach better; we learn about our students' working habits and how they can be improved.

It is important that schools and departments provide teachers with the flexibility and space they need to respond to their classes. Schemes-of-work and plans should have built-in room for this; they should not be too rigid. Destinations should remain the same, even if the journey is very different for each teacher and each class. This term, we are starting fortnightly revision lessons with our year 10s. Not only will these allow us to review previous content, but they will allow us to revisit areas of general weakness too. The link between reflection and planning is crystal clear; it feels like a powerful process.

It is frustrating that reflective and responsive planning, unlike marking, is largely invisible. We cannot pin it down or measure it; it happens in a teacher's thoughts. Perhaps it is the root of what we call 'expertise', where our knowledge of how to teach our subject meets our ever-growing understanding of our students' learning. When we watch a successful teacher in action, we witness a complex array of behaviours. It is difficult to distinguish which of these strategies is the cause of her success; it is even more difficult to conceptualise the thoughtful planning that has carried her to this point in time.

How best to bring this tacit thinking to light? How best to learn from the best teaching? Shaun Allison and I have started interviewing some of our most successful teachers in an attempt to tap into what they do and why they do it. These interviews have been fascinating, but we are struggling to find the best ways of sharing this information. How do we use it to develop the practice of others? I also like the idea of 'learning observations', when a teacher coaches another right through the planning, teaching and reflection process, so that both the thinking and the action are modelled.

The best that teachers and leaders can do is to encourage not only a culture of learning and reflection, but also one of humility. At its best, the idea that there are 'great' or 'outstanding' teachers in a school will create a few over-inflated egos; at its worst, it will lead to division and resentment. I have learnt most from those teachers who are never afraid to say that they have got it wrong and that they are going to try it again another way.

When school leaders and subject leaders do this, and when the staff room is full of teachers talking about the problems they are trying to solve, this is when our students will really start to learn from feedback.

Related posts:
Feedback: let's build it in, not add it on

We have always liked to holiday in European cities. Before our son was born, one of our habits was to take the metro to a random place beyond the predictability of the inner-city environs. One stop a few miles from the centre of Hamburg, the name of which I have long forgotten, comes to mind. We stepped onto a platform set in flat fields with nothing around apart from a tidy set of allotments to one side, and a gaggle of unfriendly, low-set apartments to the other. It was completely unremarkable in every way.

I can't put my finger on why I enjoy visiting such empty places. However, one of the reasons might be to do with the mysterious sense of transience they evoke. It is strange how two large chunks of concrete, two long lines of steel and a corrugated iron roof can bring meaning to what was once emptiness. Before the metro line was constructed, did these fields mean anything to anyone other than the farmer who tilled them? Not so long ago, would they have even been considered a place at all?

For the woman sitting on the train on the way to work - flicking through her newspaper, perhaps, or sipping a coffee - this station and this field have a concrete meaning. They are a name on a map, joined by a straight blue line to two other names, one in each direction.

Yet for the farmer whose field has now been cut in two, this station and train line have another significance. Most likely, they are an unnecessary nuisance that add extra difficulty to his work. And for the Turkish grandfather, now too weak to leave his top floor apartment, the station and train line in the distance are a sharp reminder that this new, inexplicable world is fast leaving him behind.

As a society, as an education system and as teachers we create similar tube maps. These are our curricular, schemes of work and learning objectives. We choose, rightly or wrongly, the best getting-off points and we teach with these certainties in mind. This is simple, clear and logical. How could we do it any other way?

Yet what we often forget is that what we intend to teach is not necessarily what is experienced or learnt by the people and minds we tend to. The clear, well-connected tube maps we carry so comfortably ourselves are rarely, if ever, received as carbon-copy replicas by our students. Even though learning science seems to suggest that how we learn is remarkably similar, what we learn is often very personal indeed.

It never ceases to amaze me that despite my methodical, largely traditional approach to classroom teaching, my students learn such different things. While I aim for some degree of uniformity, it rarely happens; the input never seems to match the output. Yes, there are patterns, patterns they and I can learn from. Yet every essay is different and every spelling test shows a remarkable array of strengths and weaknesses. The same student on a another day can produce markedly different work.

Graham Nuthall estimated that around a third of an individual student's learning is unique to them and is not learnt by others in the same classroom. Why? The reasons are myriad and complicated and involve a heady mix of prior knowledge, motivation, social relationships and contextual 'in-the-moment' factors.

I enjoyed reading this passage from John Holt's How Children Fail (1964) this week:

It has become clear over the year that these children see school almost entirely in terms of the day-to-day and hour-to-hour tasks that we impose on them. This is not at all the way the teacher thinks of it. The conscientious teacher thinks of himself as taking his students (at least part way) on a journey to some glorious destination, well worth the pains of the trip.

Perhaps we have gone some way towards reversing this discrepancy in recent years but I rather suspect that it still exists, even in the best schools. Many times, despite having shared what I thought to be clear learning objectives, my students will come to the next lesson asking "Are we still finishing off that sheet?" rather than "Are we still analysing Dickens' use of language in Stave 1 of A Christmas Carol?"

Other more recent thinkers, such as David Didau, have got me thinking about the invisibility and liminality of learning. What a student says and the work he produces do not tell us reliably whether he has learnt something or not. And, in the case of complex concepts, our students rarely know or don't know something - they are often grappling in a space somewhere in between.

I think it is time to consign certainty to a place far away (maybe to a field somewhere in northern Germany?) and face up to the unbearable. Data and spreadsheets, and words like 'progress' and 'impact', are not completely meaningless; they have their uses. But they just have far less meaning than many will have you believe.

There are 'best bets' when it comes to teaching practice; Shaun Allison and I have written about challenge, explanation, modelling, lots of practice, feedback and questioning in our book Making Every Lesson Count. Nevertheless, there are no silver bullets and learning remains confusing and, at times, illogical.

Let's enjoy it for what it is.

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Posts with a similar theme:
You win some, you lose some GCSE results and the stories we tell ourselves

I have always struggled with teaching poetry. My lessons regularly leave me with a nagging sense of dissatisfaction and an unanswered question: Why didn't they quite get it? I think the reason lies in a delicate problem that all English teachers face daily.

How much should I tell them and how much should I elicit from them?

There's no easy answer, but I think there are some serious flaws with a teaching approach that relies too heavily on the elicitation method, especially when starting out on a study of challenging poetry. It's worth considering how we prepare to teach a new poem. If you are anything like me you will read it a few times, Google a few lines you are unsure about and discuss any tricky bits with your colleagues. This week, as I've been preparing to teach Wilfred Owen's 'Exposure', a colleague has helped me grasp the meaning of the poem's tricky penultimate verse. (Cheers Russ!)

In truth, even as the 'expert' in the classroom I look for outside support to help me shape my interpretation.

If it is tough for me, it is likely to be even tougher for very many of my students. The problem with asking for students' interpretations is that, more often than not, they are either non-existent ( I don't know ... ), completely wrong ( Ozymandias is about a war in the desert) or over-simplistic ( Ozymandias is about time). Too often, one or two bright sparks in the room carry the class while the rest hopelessly try to guess the ideas I am holding back from them.

That said, I think it would be a mistake if students were not to experience the sense of satisfaction that comes from finding truth, meaning and even beauty in a jumble of words that once appeared incomprehensible. A problem we cannot solve taps into our natural sense of curiosity. It's an itch we need to scratch.

So here are three very simple ways I am trying to solve my dilemma.

1. The first is a must and will come as no surprise. Give them a hook. It could be an introduction to a theme or context. In our department, we are enjoying finding literary fiction and non-fiction texts to act as thematic hooks. This week, however, to introduce 'Ozymandias' I used a series of images of Barack Obama, each one a little smaller than the previous, and each labelled with a year from 2015 to 3015. By 3015, the screen was a blank page. The message was clear: given time, Obama's current power and influence will have fizzled, inevitably, into nothing.

2. Next, I read the poem out loud and, after this, they read it themselves. Their job is to do four things:

1) Circle and label anything of interest - this might be related to language, themes or anything that takes their fancy.
2) Draw a square around anything they do not understand.
3) Write a comment about any patterns they notice.
4) Make a link to another text they have read this year.

Now, of course, this task offers up the possibility of misunderstandings and misconceptions. Students do - modestly - seem to benefit from exlicit modelling of how to approach a new poem. My colleague, Bridget Norman, talks about developing 'reading resilience' - or how we get our students to keep going even when syntax and vocabulary are difficult.

Once students have had a go, I find out what they do and do not understand and then, without shame, I tell them what the poem really means - usually through annotating the poem on the board and explaining the finer details. Sometimes I will have to tell students they are completely wrong. Sometimes I will develop their nascent good ideas. Sometimes I will give them more of a say as their initial ideas are strong.

3. My third strategy is to have them answer carefully scaffolded 'tight questions' that allow them to think deeply about the text but ensure that their answers are likely to be good.

Take these two questions:

a) What does 'sneer of cold command' demonstrate about Ozymandias?
b) How does the phrase 'sneer of cold command' demonstrate that Ozymandias was a cruel leader?

Even though the first question is more open and will elicit a wider range of responses, the second question is more likely to lead to accurate and analytical answers. While the first question allows for freedom, question two steers them towards explaining the impact of 'sneer' and 'cold'. Try it. It encourages finely focused language analysis and helps them to hone their critical writing style.

Here's a few others I have used this week:

* How do the words 'boundless and bare' show us that Ozymandias' power and influence have gone?
* How does the enjambment in the simile 'spits like a tame cat/Turned savage' create a sense of surprise?
* Why does the metaphor 'space is a salvo' create the sense that the wind is attacking from all angles?

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It is very possible that you have read this post and disagreed with me.

Perhaps you think that we need to teach students to develop their own interpretations. I agree - that should be our ultimate goal. But how can you know what a sophisticated interpretation of poetry looks like if you have not studied a number of sophisticated interpretations beforehand?

You might argue that a poem does not have one set meaning and all interpretations are valid. Again, I agree - we should teach alternative interpretations. Nevertheless, it is also true that some interpretations are stronger, more robust and more sophisticated than others.

Another reasonable complaint is that the new GCSE exams require students to read 'unseen poems' - shouldn't we give them as much freedom as possible to prepare them for this? Once again, we share the same end goal. However, a huge factor of reading ability is the knowledge a student brings to their reading. To read a difficult poem successfully, they will need wide background knowledge and strong domain knowledge of the main conventions of poetry. If they do not read poetry in their spare time, they are very unlikely to develop the latter without the experience gleaned from the clear and direct teaching of many, many previous poems.

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This is what I'm thinking about at the moment. Please feel free to add your thoughts below.

Related posts:
Can we teach students how to make inferences? English teaching and the problem with knowledge

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Tod Brennan, @TodBrennanEng, is putting together a series of interviews with English teachers. This morning we chatted about the benefits of a knowledge-first approach to English teaching. The video link is below: Do follow this series of interviews. They are bound to be fascinating.

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“Betcha by Golly Wow” | alwayslearningweb

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“Betcha by Golly Wow” | alwayslearningweb

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-Full of wonder and surprise and...
Betcha by golly wow! (wow!) (wow!)

Prince - Betcha by Golly, Wow - Emancipation

Whenever anyone shares their work their generosity always amazes me. Teachers on twitter,in particular, are so kind and helpful. This is because most have one thing in common; they all want children up and down the country to succeed. And it's their generosity with ideas, knowledge and kindness that always makes me think "wow"!

So, this blog as well as a few other recent ones (my most requested resources) "Extraordinary" (my best twitter steals) (my not such good ideas) is another little way of me saying thank you. To be fair my folders may not help you at all, maybe just helped me sticking in one place, but I hope it does help.

One thing about planning that can take time is finding articles or extracts, so below are links to some (hopefully) useful folders with a load of articles or extracts in them. Each folder is a working progress so I will continue to add to them.

If you have any documents you want to add please find me on Twitter (@FKRitson) and I can add you to the dropbox account. Also has a collection of 19c texts to use with the new AQA spec - if you have anything to add drop him a line too!

I repeat, these are all working documents, so I am constantly adding, re-naming or plain sorting- I'm aware some are a little untidy! They will get tidier as now they are 'public'.

1) List of theorists

This is for AS/A-Level English teachers, a table of some theorists.

2) Articles (19c)

Some non fiction articles to help with AQA new spec - I am in process of trying to catalogue by date then brief description of what each is about (big job, going slowly)!

3) Modern articles

Mainly from The Guardian - but lots of articles that you 'could' pair up with non-fiction 19c articles. The same as (2) I will slowly sort these with better titles.

4) Extracts for analysis

Extracts for normal classroom analysis from classic and modern literature. I have sorted these in author then book. These may be fiction or non-fiction. Please help me add to this!

There are over 300 extracts here:

Below you'll find a link to lots of resources for the new AQA spec language and literature. I need to make it clear that this has been made possible by the kind and very generous Twitter #TeamEnglish staff that have all agreed to allow me to post their resources here in one place. Please help yourself... but what would be even better is to help us by adding to it!

5) AQA Language resources

6) AQA Literature resources

7) AQA Extract booklets (via AQA)

8) AQA Short Stories (old spec......)

If any of you can remember the old AQA Sunlight on the Grass Anthology (spec 4705 I think), they were a collection of short stories for GCSE students. Well, below is a link to each one and resources AQA kindly made up for each one. When you follow this link, there are 12 folders, in each folder is the short story, word and PDF (except Flight - will have to see what's happening there) and you will find a bunch of teaching resources for the story. Enjoy!

9) Questioning Templates

10) Glossary of Terms

Various glossaries - GCSE, A-Level and others I've acquired!

11) Sentence Starters

Again over time I've collected these, some are mine - some aren't. I will try to credit those that are not mine.

12) Speaking & Listening Resources

Again, from kind generosity of other teachers I have started to collect some S&L resources.

13) Links to other blogs with free resources!

Here are some links to other blogs with kindly donated free English resources (I will add to this as I remember them!:

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Full of wonder and surprise and... Betcha by golly wow! (wow!) (wow!) Prince - Betcha by Golly, Wow - Emancipation . Whenever anyone shares their work their generosity always amazes me. Teachers on twitter,in particular, are so kind and helpful. This is because most have one thing in common; they all want children up and down...

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You will find all of these on my Twitter timeline, but for ease of access, here are some links. I have many, many SoW and resources which I am happy to share. These are just the ones that I have up...

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Recently, I have been looking at our departments marking procedures and how best to be effective markers (obviously reducing workload is key!).

I designed this crib sheet as a way to provide quicker feedback to the whole classroom rather than writing comments in each book, so reducing marking time from 2-3 hours per class to less than an hour. Now I actually really do miss writing comments, leaving questions and the other bits in their books but it really wasn't a workload issue I could continue with (especially as I have my first child on the way!).

Therefore the crib sheet allows me to go through each students' book and I make comments on the whole class sheet using the sections below.

The benefits are that it gives me a snapshot of the whole class's progress, allows me to 'fine tune' my lesson planning and it also gives activities and tasks for students to complete within DIRT the next lesson.

Using this I do the following which we complete in lessons for 20-25 minutes, you can also get a feel of what it looks like in students books. Students' are given an A5 copy to stick in under the title of 'DIRT' and using a red pen they review their SPaG, answer questions I have created from reading their books, finish any work or complete an extension activity. We always finish with a spelling test to hammer home those misspelt key words.

Pupils books look something like this - we do this every 2 weeks or so.

Now, that does not mean I use this for assessments - my focus is on providing more detailed and worthwhile assessment feedback, with this being reserved for standard lessons etc. For more on what I'm trying in assessments, check out the rest of my blog.

Need to convince SLT or others, or want a handy guide on how it works?
https://www.dropbox.com/s/svno99pmwtbdnti/Research%20Conference%20Handout.pptx?dl=0

Attached is ppt. resource

Marking Crib Sheet ppt. Marking Crib Sheet V2

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Recently, I have been looking at our departments marking procedures and how best to be effective markers (obviously reducing workload is key!). I designed this crib sheet as a way to provide quicker feedback to the whole classroom rather than writing comments in each book, so reducing marking time from 2-3 hours per class to less than an hour.

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Creative Writing Prompts – Escapades in Teaching

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Creative Writing Prompts – Escapades in Teaching

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After seeing some amazing 200-word challenges for GCSE English Language (AQA), Paper 2, Question 5...I was inspired to create something similar for Paper 1, Question 5!

Each challenge has a particular focus for writing as well. I'm looking to develop some structure strips for the P1, Q5 as well so that they complement the prompts. Coming soon...!

AQA AQA English Language creative writing descriptive writing narrative paper 1 question 5 story opening

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After seeing some amazing 200-word challenges for GCSE English Language (AQA), Paper 2, Question 5...I was inspired to create something similar for Paper 1, Question 5! Each challenge has a particular focus for writing as well. I'm looking to develop some structure strips for the P1, Q5 as well so that they complement the prompts.

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Three Assessment Butterflies | Pragmatic Education

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Three Assessment Butterflies | Pragmatic Education

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Winston Churchill once said 'success is stumbling from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.'

Looking back now on assessment in our first year at Michaela, I can now see what I was blind to then: we stumbled and blundered. What mistakes did we make, and how did we stumble?

We spent hours marking. We spent ages inputting data. And we didn't design assessments cumulatively.

First mistake: we spent exorbitant amounts of time in the first year marking, in particular marking English and History essays and paragraphs. We wrote comments, we set targets, we tried individualised icons, we corrected misspellings, we corrected grammatical errors, we judged and scored written accuracy, we wrote and shared rubrics with pupils. We spent hours every week on this. Over the year, we must have spent hundreds of hours on it.

The hidden pitfall of marking is opportunity cost. Every hour that a teacher spends marking is an hour they can't spend on renewable resourcing: resourcing that endures for years. Marking a book is useful for one pupil once only: creating a knowledge organiser is useful for every pupil (and every teacher) that ever uses it at again. Marking is a hornet. Hornets are high-effort, low-impact; butterflies are high-impact, low-effort. Knowledge organisers are a butterfly; marking is a hornet. We had been blind to just how badly the hornet's nest of marking was stinging us. So we cut marking altogether and now no longer mark at all.

Our second mistake: we spent far too much time in the first few years on data input. We typed in multiple scores for pupils that we didn't use. Preoccupied by progress, we thought we needed as many numbers as we could get our hands on. But the simplistic equation of 'more data, better progress' didn't hold up under scrutiny. Every teacher typed in multiple scores for each assessment, which were then collated so we could analyse the breakdowns. We were deluged in data, but thirsting for insight. There was far too much data to possibly act on. My muddled thinking left us mired in mediocrity, and we had invested 100s of hours for little long-term impact.

What we realised is this: data must serve teachers, rather than teachers serving data. Our axiom now is that we must only collect data that we use. There's no point in drowning in data, or killing ourselves to input data that we don't use.

Our third mistake was this: we had forgotten about forgetting. We designed end-of-unit assessments that tested what pupils had only just learned, and then congratulated ourselves when they did well whilst it was very fresh in the memory. We had pupils write essays just after they had finished the unit. We coached them to superb performances - but they were performances that they would not be able to repeat on that text in English or that period of History even a few weeks later. Certainly, months later, they wouldn't stand a chance. Just as if you asked me to retake for Physics GCSE tomorrow, I would flunk it badly, so just one year on, our pupils would flunk the exact assessment that they had aced one year earlier.

Looking back with hindsight, these three mistakes - on marking, data and design - helped us realise our two great blind spots in assessment: workload and memory. We didn't design our assessments with pupils' memory and teachers' workload in mind.

We were creating unnecessary and unhelpful workload for teachers that prevented them focusing on what matters most. Marking and data were meant to improve teaching and assessment, but assessment and teaching and had ended up being inhibited by them.

We were forgetting just how much our pupils were forgetting. Forgetting is a huge problem amongst pupils and a huge blind spot in teaching. If pupils have forgotten the Shakespeare play they were studying last year, can they really be said to have learned it properly? What if they can't remember the causes or course of the war they studied last year in history? Learning is for nothing if it's all forgotten.
The Battle of the Bridge
Assessment is the bridge between teaching and learning. There's always a teaching-learning gap. Just because we've taught it, it doesn't mean pupils have learned it. The best teachers close the teaching-learning gap so that their pupils learn - and remember rather than forget - what they are being taught. We've found the idea of assessment as a bridge to be a useful analogy for curriculum and exam design. Once you see assessment as a bridge, you can begin to ask new questions that generate new insights: what principles in teaching are equivalent to the laws of physics that underpin the engineering and construction of the bridge? How can we design and create a bridge that is built to endure? How can we create an assessment model that bridges the teaching-learning gap?

We've found 3 assessment solutions that have exciting potential. Here are the reasons I'm excited about them:
They have absolutely no cost. They are low-effort for staff to create. They have high impact on pupils' learning. They are not tech-dependent at all. They are based on decades of scientific research. They can be immediately implemented by any teacher on Monday morning. They have stood the test of time at Michaela over the last three years. I anticipate we'll still be using them in three, six and even ten years' time, and beyond.
In short: no cost, low effort, high impact, research-based, long-term solutions.

Three of the most effective assessment tools we've found for closing the teaching-learning gap are daily recaps, weekly quizzes and knowledge exams.

Over 100 years of scientific research evidence suggests that the testing effect has powerful impact on remembering and forgetting. If pupils are to remember and learn what we teach them in the subject curriculum, assessment must be and revisit curriculum content. The teaching-learning gap gets worse if pupils forget what they've learned. As cognitive science has shown, ' if nothing has been retained in long-term memory, nothing has been learned'. Assessment, by ensuring pupils revisit what they're learning, can help ensure they remember it.

Pupils forget very swiftly. We use daily recaps, weekly quizzes and biannual knowledge exams to boost pupils' long-term memory retention and prevent forgetting.

Daily recaps are a butterfly: low-effort, high-impact. Departments create recap questions for every single lesson. Every single lesson starts with a recap. They are easy to resource. They consolidate pupils' learning so they don't forget. Every day they spend up to 20 minutes in each lesson applying what they've learned before. In English, for example, we spend those 20 minutes on grammar recaps, spelling recaps, vocabulary recaps, literature recaps (with questions on characters, themes, plots, devices and context). We do recaps on the unit they have been studying over the last few weeks. We do recaps on the previous unit and previous year's units. This daily habit builds very strong retention and motivation: pupils feel motivated because they see how much they are remembering and how much more they are learning than ever before. All recaps are open questions, and weaker forms might be given clues. The recaps are always written; they are no-stakes, without any data being collected; they give instant feedback, as they are swiftly marked, corrected and improved by pupils themselves. We've ask pupils after: 'hands up who got 4 out of 5? Hands up who got 5 out of 5, 100%?' Pupils achieving 100% feel successful and motivated to work hard to revise.

Weekly quizzes are a butterfly: low-effort on workload, high-impact on learning. Departments create quiz questions for every week in the school year. Every week there is a quiz in every subject. They are easy to resource. They challenge and test pupils' understanding. They are mastery tests, where most pupils should be able to achieve a strong result.

We have dramatically, decisively simplified how teachers score them. Instead of marking every single question laboriously, teachers simply sort them into piles. They make swift judgement calls about whether each pupil's quiz is a pass, excellent, or fail. Each judgement is a simple scan of the pupil's quiz paper and a decision as to which of the three piles it should be in. Accuracy isn't perfect, but nor does it need to be: there are diminishing returns to perfecting accuracy.

The data is then inputted in 30 seconds into a beautifully simple tracker. Any pupil failing often is red-flagged, so teachers can focus in lessons on pupils who are struggling. And that is the only data point that our teachers have to keep in mind: which pupils are struggling most?

Knowledge exams are another butterfly - high impact, low effort. What I love about our knowledge exams is that they are cumulative, so that pupils revise and remember what they've learned. We have exam weeks twice yearly, in January and July (not half-termly). We set GCSE-style exams for depth, and we set knowledge exams to test a much fuller breadth of the knowledge pupils have learned. Knowledge exams are 35-question exams that take 60 minutes to complete. They are beautifully simple: they are organised onto 1 sheet of A4 paper, and they can be answered by pupils on one double-sided piece of A4. The breadth we can achieve with these exams is staggering. By Year 9, we have 3 knowledge exams in History, Religion, Science and English alone; they organise 35 questions on what pupils learned in Year 7 and 35 questions on what pupils learned in Year 8, centred on those years' knowledge organisers. Twice a year, pupils are challenged to revise and remember what they've learned over all the years they spent in secondary school. This means they answer 12 knowledge exams - over 400 questions in total across 4 subjects. I am willing to bet that many of our teachers could not beat even our Year 7 pupils on these exams across all subjects! Imagine more than 24 sides of A4 packed with answers from every pupil in the school. The humble knowledge exam is a great catcher of knowledge.

As for marking them? We simply sort them into three piles: excellent, pass and fail. We don't even record the marks. Teachers just note the names of pupils who failed multiple knowledge exams so we know who's struggled.

Knowledge exams solve the breadth-depth tradeoff in exams. They give pupils maximum practice with minimum marking burden on teachers.

Simplicity must cut through assessment complexity. We should practise what we preach on cognitive overload for teachers as well as pupils. Assessment resources must be renewable, replicable, sustainable, scalable, enduring, long-term.

And the impact of recaps, quizzes and knowledge exams? Well, it's very early days yet, but we've had some (very weak) Y8 or Y9 pupils miss an entire term though unavoidable long-term illness, only to return fully remembering what they've been taught the previous term and previous year. It's an early indicator that the assessment strategy is bridging the teaching-learning gap and overcoming the savage forgetting curve. The real test of its impact will be GCSE results in 2019, A-level results in 2021 and University access and graduation beyond.
Blind, still
The two blind spots we've discovered - memory and workload - provide us with ways of interrogating our teaching and assessment practice:

How much are pupils remembering?

Where are they forgetting?

Where are teachers overloaded?

And I still think that we at Michaela can do more and find better ways of creating assessments with memory and workload in mind. I'm sure our pupils are not yet remembering as much as we'd like them to. I had a conversation with Jonny Porter, our Head of Humanities, just this week, about ramping up the previous-unit daily recaps we do. In this sense, even at Michaela we still feel blind on the blind spot of memory - pupils are still forgetting some of what we are teaching, and we want them to remember what they are learning for the very long-term. Our ambition is that they have learned what we've taught for years to come: for five, ten, twenty years.

Every day, teachers and pupils at Michaela see Churchill's words on the wall: ' success is never final; failure never fatal; it's the courage that counts.' It takes courage to radically simplify assessment - and courage to continually confront our workload and memory blind spots.

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Winston Churchill once said 'success is stumbling from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.' Looking back now on assessment in our first year at Michaela, I can now see what I was blind to then: we stumbled and blundered. What mistakes did we make, and how did we stumble?

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Parts-of-speech.Info - POS tagging online

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Parts-of-speech.Info - POS tagging online

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Parts-of-speech.Info - POS tagging online

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Parts-of-speech.Info - POS tagging online

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automatic Part-of-speech tagging of texts (highlight word classes)

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Teaching Narrative writing part two: slow and seductive modelling. | Teacher Gratitude

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Teaching Narrative writing part two: slow and seductive modelling. | Teacher Gratitude

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"Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."
- Samuel Johnson

A quick confession that would have Mr Johnson spinning in his grave: I left London. Nearly half a decade was enough for me, a wonderful city but one that can indeed leave you rather "tired". As a humble Highlander whose childhood involved rather a lot of greenery, silence and space for football frolics there was one place that filled me with dread: Oxford Street. To be fair, it did regularly get into a heated battle with any form of London public transport for top anti London spot. I ended up running the three miles to work every day and the three miles back to avoid any dalliances with tubes or buses. No sack of marking was too large to haul into bags and stumble home with. We shall return to that gargantuan beast that is Oxford Street shortly...

At the start of the term I wrote about teaching narrative using a range of stimulus with my Year 10 group. Five weeks later and I still feel that narrative writing is very difficult to actively "teach". Despite some excellent blogs and resources out there (Mark Robert's posts on teaching students to avoid cliches are excellent) there are so many challenges, especially if your customers are not particularly avid readers (despite endless cajoling!)

This half term was interspersed with a parent's evening for this group. My opening gambit is always an entertaining variation of: "So, how are you finding things in English at the moment Geraldina?" Normally this elicits an embarrassed grunt, or perhaps a "fine" if the young person is feeling particularly effusive. This time it opened up a whole can of worms (apologies Mark):

"Narrative writing is impossible" x 4

"I find it so difficult to structure writing" x 5

"I have no imagination" x 4

"I can't think of anything to write about" x 6

"Narrative writing, ahhhhhhhh!" (followed by sprinting out of the room in floods of manic tears) x 0

Ah, clearly a solution is needed. The most repetitive lament was about knowing how to structure ideas and how to sustain a piece of writing over the scope of five hundred words. Now I thought I had done lots of modelling over the four weeks preceding these narratherapy sessions. That was until I read this excellent post from Shaun Allison in which the school's head of science, Steph Temple, runs a session on the value of modelling. This part particularly struck me:

Steph then went on to describe two different methods of procedural modelling - modelling to students how to work out empirical formula. Firstly, the method that a number of inexperienced teachers or teachers who are lacking confidence about the subject matter use, simply putting a prepared worked example up on the board. The problem with this approach is that it misses the narrative behind the steps - and you're not actually modelling - you are just showing a finished product.

I had shared lots and lots of quality writing with students but I was missing the reasoning behind the steps. I wasn't deconstructing the writing process in enough detail to give them confidence to apply to their own writing. The issue was that it was all too quick; I was not assisting them in the process of thinking about how to build in our 'narrafesto' of key narrative writing features we decided on at the start of the term. They had a go at writing a number of five hundred word pieces with some solid enough results, but nothing that sparkled with any originality.

Time to embrace the slow and seductive modelling process.

Welcome back to Oxford Street. A few years ago, after being dragged around Oxford Street by my wife yet again, I penned this fictitious (some students have cried "masterpiece") account of a chap having to pay a horrifying visit to Oxford Street on Christmas Eve A-walk-through-Oxford-Street-model-answer (1) to purchase a gift for his partner. This was not going to be yet another "throw a model at them and hope for some osmosis style absorption" of how to write a narrative. Nay - they were going to become the agents of the story. This story would seductively become theirs - alongside walking slowly through my thought process. The first step was to fold the narrative into three distinct sections, so that the students had to pause at the moment the fold occurred- unaware of how the narrative would progress. At the pause they would become agents of the story - continuing the narrative and trying to mirror style and tone. Importantly there challenge was to apply all of the work we had done on narrative writing - becoming a way to celebrate and increase their confidence in narrative writing.

First the students were instructed to draft an engaging opening paragraph. All they were provided with was the opening line, the time period and context about my thoughts and feelings about London and Oxford Street. Students always enjoy a glimpse into a personal world beneath the teacher mask: "You lived somewhere other than Newcastle!", they cried in mock horror tones. It is helpful also in getting them to think about how they can employ their own experience in the art of narrative writing, often a passport to much better writing:

"Released from the Oxford Circus Station underground I am..."

After this the students had to share in their groups and nominate the most engaging opening. I then read my example. Each time we talked about my example we would annotate it, dissecting the features used and looking at how I am trying to build atmosphere and reader interest (alongside being picky about my writing - always the section they enjoy far too much). This enabled me to talk through what I was seeking to achieve and elaborate on points the class might make:

The second stage involved the students taking on the narrative direction to attempt to describe characters in detail. Despite spending time with Dickens and a range of others this term, they still haven't quite grasped how to generate interesting character portraits. This involved pausing the narrative at a section in which our plucky protagonist finds a space to observe the manic street around him:

"Finally: a gap..."

Their focus was to describe a character or characters, looking at building a picture of the street around them. This was followed by reflection on my example and sharing of theirs. Spreading this over two lessons meant that I could also give them time to reflect on their own descriptions after reading mine and others - encouraging the art of proof reading and careful editing. We then introduced some dialogue into the narrative. Again this paused on this line:

"It is the diversity that strikes me as I watch the faces pass me: every nation, every colour, every age"

Groups then shared and discussed how effectively the dialogue had been introduced and how it had moved forward the narrative. I shared my example and we moved towards the end of the narrative. We discussed the various ways in which we could close this narrative. They then drafted their own example and compared this to my own. Their examples at this stage were depressingly better than mine: result. We had therefore deconstructed the journey of a five hundred word narrative over two lessons, looking at how to work on tone, pace, dialogue, description, openings and endings.

It was important that the students could then transfer this new confidence into some of their own writing. I gave them a series of similar titles: 'The Journey', 'The Station' or write a narrative with the opening line: "released from... or Why, why, why did I... to write their own five hundred word versions at home, trying to build in the work we had completed in the two lessons above.

It is easy to over complicate teaching writing, and my attempts over the past few weeks have managed to leave students with less clarity about how to write narratives effectively. At the end of the two lessons I asked for some feedback and overall the students were positive about having more clarity and knowing when to add different features of narrative writing into their writing. Interestingly, this little slow and seductive narrative experiment was aligned with some of the things I have been reading this week. 'Simplicity' by Edward De Bono highlights the merits in looking for the simple solution, rather than my attempts to overload students with a wide range of examples and time to write without proper understanding:

"There is always the possibility that there is a simpler way to do something. Even if that is not always the case it is worth investing some thinking time and creative effort in trying to find a simpler approach." pg 20.

The fascinating read 'Why Don't Students Like School' by Daniel T Willingham talks about the value of problem solving for young people. It is always a challenge to apply this to English teaching, but the unravelling of a model answer and giving student's ownership over its direction is one way to enable this: they have to solve the problem of the narrative direction. By seeing the fruits of their direction of the narrative they could go some way in achieving the following:

"Any teacher knows that there are lots of reasons that a child might or might not enjoy school. From a cognitive perspective, an important factor is whether or not a student consistently experiences the pleasurable rush of solving a problem." pg 15

Speed induced model answers will not provide a solution to providing clarity for young people about how to write. In many ways it can have the adverse impact: intimidating them into believing the art of the narrative is impossible and reaffirming the narratherapy that my parent's evening merged into. Slow, seductive and deliberate investment of time in model answers can demystify the writing process for young people - showing them they can indeed write effectively.

Thank you for reading, enjoy your half term. Rather ironically I'm off to London for a few days (public transport will not be involved).

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Teaching Narrative writing part two: slow and seductive modelling.

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"Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford." - Samuel Johnson A quick confession that would have Mr Johnson spinning in his grave: I left London.

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This term a key priority for the department has been on creating the right environment. Displays, you see, set the tone, establish the culture, support pupil learning and celebrate success. Here is what we have been working on at the academy.

Every member of staff within the English department has a space on the Welcome to English board. Each staff member has a WeeMee. Alongside this, to support our reading culture, every member of staff has identified a book of great significance to them and explained why.

2. Our world map

When I first joined the academy we had a graphic artist come in to design the subject areas. Then, due to expansion, the subject areas moved which meant that I have inherited a world map and a historical timeline. After seeing our fab Geographer Courtney Grainger's books from around the world display, we decided to create our own using this gigantic map.

3. Pictures of our pupils in action and quotations from visitors

Opposite the map we have a picture of pupils in the library. In September I will add to this with four further images of our pupils in action. Underneath these images I have taken quotes from visitors such as Ofsted where they have recognised the work we are doing in English.

4. Quotation wall

Like many English departments, we display the key quotations from our core texts: Blood Brothers, A Christmas Carol and Macbeth to try and aid pupils' memory. Thanks to Twitter, we have a quotation wall.

5. Our historical timeline

The other graphic. We have used resources, again from Twitter, to create a social and historical timeline, detailing key events and also key literary works.
6. Vocabulary wall
We have displayed all of our core vocabulary in the corridor to help pupils. When they are arriving at lessons and leaving lessons we hope that they may just soak up one or two words around them.
7. Topic banners
In the corridor, we have topic banners for each year group and for each unit they are working on. These banners change every term and makes it easy for everyone to see what we are studying.
8. Learning aids at the front
I strongly believe in displaying all learning aids at the front or to the side of the classroom. For that reason I have displays to do with sentence structures, paragraphing, punctuation, connectives, adverbials and analysis to support pupils during the lesson at the front of my classroom. Alongside this I have my biggest resource - my classroom library!

9. Recognition board

After reading Pivotal's book on behaviour and knowing that they are coming to do some training with us in September, I decided to introduce a recognition board. I am pretty poor at recognising pupils, although I have great relationships with my pupils. Therefore, I am keen to develop this next year. Erin, as you can see, felt she deserved recognition the day I was on a course.
10. Book posters 11. Language, structure and form board
We display a copy of all of the books we study between KS3 and KS5 in every classroom to show our pupils the vast range of literature that they will be exposed to throughout their time with us.

My language, structure and (soon to be) form board is a new display for 2017-18. I am trying to create a more interactive revision based room and this supports pupils in lessons with their analysis of methods. One side has the term and on the flip is the definition. I am hoping it will be an aid for revision.
12. Exemplar essays 13. Interactive revision cards.
I want my pupils to have access to a wide range of brilliant essays. These folders will contain exemplar essays. Initially, these have been taken from the exam board but every time one of my pupils creates something spectacular their work is also added to the exemplary folder.

My next revision aid. Every core literature text has a display board and at the bottom of these display boards will be pockets with these A5 laminated revision cards covering the growth of characters and the development of a theme with key quotations. These cards will be there to support pupils revision and retention.

So this is where we are up to and there is still a whole heap of stuff to be done! Over the summer I will be working on my analysis board, our traffic light trays and our growth mindset resource area. Of course, the next thing in September will be covering the remaining walls, both inside and out of our classrooms with the amazing work our pupils will produce to celebrate and sing loudly how brilliant they are in English.

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This term a key priority for the department has been on creating the right environment. Displays, you see, set the tone, establish the culture, support pupil learning and celebrate success. Here is what we have been working on at the academy. Every member of staff within the English department has a space on the Welcome to English board.

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Fakebook - create a fictional social medial profile

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Create a spoof social media profile for a person, theme, place or object being studied

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AQA · AQA new specification · For Pupils · Reading skills · Teaching Ideas Updated November 2017: the link to the resources is now here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/dojccihmctyepyh/Comparing%20images.pptx?dl=0 A short blog on paper 2 skills. On a recent visit to a school, one of the English teachers talked about how they are using images to help develop synthesis and summary skills for paper 2.

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On being PiXLated | The Learning Profession

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On being PiXLated | The Learning Profession

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Yesterday I travelled, along with approximately 1599 other English teachers, to the Big Smoke to attend my first PiXL English conference. I doubt there has ever been so many English teachers all in one room which was quite something in itself* (even if parallels were drawn to that scene in 'The Witches').

Every conference gets its own metaphorical title; previously the organisers have gone with 'Great Expectations' and 'Oh Brave New World'. This time, however, they went with 'Touching the Void'. The intention, of course, was for us to make the connection with mountain climbing but, call me puerile, to me it sounded a little... ahem... rude. I wonder what they will go with next - perhaps 'Much Ado About Nothing' or 'Country Matters'?

In the first keynote speech, Rachel Johnson explored some of the lessons we might learn from mountain climbing (e.g. it's difficult to sleep when you're hanging off a cliff's edge) and characterised PiXL as our Sherpa guiding us through the climb and making things a bit easier. Lindsay Skinner followed with the best title I've seen for a keynote yet: Tracking in the Year of Doom. Lindsay made the point that, as English teachers, we are responsible for 30% of Progress 8 and consequently we are now the single most important subject in the school. She also shared this very concerning table showing how many students will no longer be achieving a good pass.

If we didn't already know it, the message is very clear: this mountain of a year is likely going to end with tens of thousands of our year 11s failing to get to base camp. It makes for sobering reading.
Main Takeaways from 'Approaches to the most difficult questions (AQA)' with Jo Heathcote
Jo focused on Paper 2 Questions 2 and 4.

This is an AO1 task and is a test of basic comprehension - something which Jo reminded us students have been doing since Key Stage 1. This is clear when you look at the mark scheme:

The key words: 'inference', 'reference' and 'difference' should guide how we teach students to approach this question.

Example Curve question: You need to refer to both source A and source B for this question. The places which Alain de Botton and Mary Shelley visit are very different. Use details from both sources to write a summary of the differences.

Jo gave some great advice that I'll be taking back to my team:

1. Guide students to summarise their ideas using clear statements of the differences, supporting quotations and inferences to show their understanding.

2. Give students the confidence to put their pen down and think before they start planning and then writing their answer.

3. With practice questions, get students to list the differences - they'll soon find that there's loads e.g. one is a quiet place and one is a town.

4. Ensure that students use the focus of the question in their answer e.g. place.

5. With students who are struggling, work on the basics by getting them to make a statement supported by a quotation e.g. Alain de Botton visits a quiet place. He tells us, 'It was as quiet as a library'.

6. With more confident students, work on developing inferences e.g. The place where Alain de Botton is staying is very quiet. He tells us it is 'as quiet as a library'. This could suggest it is very peaceful but also perhaps that there is very little happening there.

7. For our most able students we need to work on encouraging them to make perceptive inferences - seeing things others might not.

8. Remember Statement + Quotations + Inferences.

9. This is NOT a comparison question.

10. This is NOT a language analysis question.

Unlike Q2, this is a comparison question and is about the writer though not just about what the writer is doing but what they are thinking, feeling, imagining and experiencing. It's about the methods they use to show those thoughts, feelings, imaginings and experiences.

The key words 'compare', 'methods', 'textual detail' and 'perspectives' should, again, guide how we teach students to approach this question.

Jo's great advice for Q4:

1. Just because the question says 'whole of the source', the students should NOT feel they need to write about everything that is there - they need to be selective. Selection is the key to success in the time that students have to answer this question.

2. Students should ask themselves: What is the writer's intention in each text? What message is each writer trying to give me?

3. Challenge students to boil down each text to one quotation that encapsulates what the writer is trying to say. Jo suggested blowing the source up to A3 so that students can cut out their 'boiled down' quotation (I'll be doing this next week).

4. When they've boiled down the text to a quotation students should ask what the writer is thinking, feeling and experiencing before considering HOW the writer shows those thoughts, feelings and experiences.

5. For students who are struggling with this question, work on getting students to build their response using one well-selected quotation from each text.

6. More able students can work with two quotations form each text whilst our most able students will look for subtle differences and shifts in tone.

The clarification on these two questions was really helpful and I've come away with a practical activity I'll be using with my students next week to help build their confidence with some of the more tricky questions they'll be faced with this Summer. Thank you Jo!
Main Takeaways from 'Approaches to writing for the most able' with Lindsay Skinner
I've seen Lindsay speak a couple of times now - most recently at #TLT16 - and I always enjoy her presentations and come away with ideas I want to use in the classroom. Here's a few of her approaches to teaching writing for the most able:

For the narrative questions, teach students the narrative arc and get them planning answers to a variety of questions. I'm sure my students will enjoying planning my death in a car crash very soon too... I love Lindsay's challenge to her students of, 'make it matter if I die'.

Students tend to get their understanding of narrative from longer forms e.g. films and novels. A good thing to do might be to get them to find short animations to look at condensed narrative forms e.g. 'The Present' with its clever moment of revelation.

Ensure students don't rant in their viewpoint writing - they ought to give strategies and be deferential to their audience when appropriate.

DON'T start viewpoint writing with a rhetorical question.

Teach students to be subtle and nuanced - it's OK to tell students that animal metaphors such as, 'His heart was racing like a cheetah' are RUBBISH! Students should write imagery that is appropriate to the tone and should aim for originality.

Teach students what the point of a simile or metaphor is (to create atmosphere) and then explore HOW to create that atmosphere.

Move students away from their fixation on including particular devices and instead focus their attention of the effect they want to achieve and HOW they might do that.

Get students to rank similes and metaphors for the same image to evaluate which are the most effective.

All in all it was a really useful day and I've come away with a lot to think about and some new strategies to use in the classroom and share with my team. It was also really nice, albeit brief, to catch up with some of my Twitter pals. I'm looking forward to the next PiXL English Conference already.

* I'm still waiting for a definitive answer on what the collective noun is for a group of English teachers. Current suggestions include... an anthology, a worry, a hope, a grammar, a poem, a novel, an excellence, a rhyme and a scuttle (thanks to @LPLFlippedEng, @FionaFellows, @SimonMurray2012, @bellmanclaire and @heymrshallahan).

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Yesterday I travelled, along with approximately 1599 other English teachers, to the Big Smoke to attend my first PiXL English conference. I doubt there has ever been so many English teachers all in one room which was quite something in itself* (even if parallels were drawn to that scene in 'The Witches').

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An organising technique and resource for discussion. Good for Step 1 revision and for practising retrieval, synthesis, analysis... (Good for all ages, too.)
Step 2
Using sharp scissors, cut up some mini-whiteboards to make a set of unique, four-piece jigsaws, like this. (This is surprisingly quick and easy to do, and oddly satisfying.)

You now have a robust, re-usable resource.

On each jigsaw, use a board pen to write four connected things which you want pupils to think about. These might be terms, facts, quotations, diagrams, concepts or any other fragments of knowledge. Each jigsaw should have a different theme or connecting principle. Like this.

Or this.

Or this.
Step 3
Or this.

Or this.

Mix up the jigsaws and distribute all the pieces around the class, so that each pupil has one piece. (If there are 'remaindered' pieces, make these available to find on a table.)
Step 4
The class then have to mill about looking for the other parts of their jigsaws. This involves some trial and error, but mostly a lot of talk about what's on the jigsaws.
Step 5
It ends with the pupils all in fresh groups of four, with each group sitting around a completed jigsaw.

Now, each group has to discuss their four things and what connects them. They prepare an explanation for the rest of the class, during which they can be challenged further by lots of teacher questioning.

Wipe clean and pack away for another time.

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View all posts by James Durran (@jdurran)

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An organising technique and resource for discussion. Good for revision and for practising retrieval, synthesis, analysis... (Good for all ages, too.) Step 1 Using sharp scissors, cut up some mini-whiteboards to make a set of unique, four-piece jigsaws, like this. (This is surprisingly quick and easy to do, and oddly satisfying.)

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Writing a critical paragraph – An Inspector Calls – Mr Hanson's English

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Writing a critical paragraph – An Inspector Calls – Mr Hanson's English

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Writing a critical paragraph - An Inspector Calls

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This is the question: How important is Eva Smith to the play? For your homework, I asked you to write a couple of paragraphs in response to this question. Below is the paragraph that we did in class with the breakdown: Firstly, you need a strong opening sentence which signals to the examiner what your paragraph...

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Five Things I Wish I knew When I started Teaching | chronotope

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Five Things I Wish I knew When I started Teaching | chronotope

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Five Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Teaching

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1. Motivation doesn’t always lead to achievement, but achievement often leads to motivation. While there is a strong correlation between self perception and achievement and we tend to think o…

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Pass Merit Distinction These three main stages in the Speaking and Listening marking criteria are quite different. As a result, I'v...

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Scheme of Learning Expectations.docx - Google Drive

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Scheme of Learning Expectations.docx - Google Drive

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An 'upside down, inside out' approach to GCSE English | News

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An 'upside down, inside out' approach to GCSE English | News

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Inside Outside Upside Down is a wonder of a book.

Written by Stan and Jan Berenstain (1968), it has a beautiful, lilting rhythm and cleverly breaks a complex narrative into a handful of words (a young bear goes into a box, mistakenly is taken away on a truck into town, before finally being able to run home to his mother). The title immediately sprang to my mind when reflecting on a writing approach for GCSE literature essays.

The examiner reports from the summer 2017 exams emphasised the need to lead with the big themes of texts. It was noted that "a frequent indicator of higher level responses was that of beginning by responding to the focus of the question using the whole text" and that "this indicated a confident, strong grasp of the text and its ideas".

What those "big" ideas are, as well as how students can adapt their approach to lead with them, has preoccupied much of my thinking this term when teaching Years 10 and 11. I wanted to find a way to give every student the opportunity to write a "higher-level response", regardless of their perceived ability, while being careful not to overburden them with strategies and too many layers of analysis to juggle all at once.

GCSE English themes

First of all, in order to lead with ideas, I have been much more direct about what the big themes and ideas are in a text. I have worked on turning the text "inside out" from the very start. For example, rather than waiting for students to notice that many things are locked away in The S trange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, I have told them that concealment matters before we even begin reading. They then have an ear and an eye out for anything locked in and do the rest of the work themselves, thinking thematically as the narrative unfolds.

As well teaching students to pay attention to big themes, I have also been teaching them to tackle questions with 'outside in' eyes and an 'upside down' reading of the paper. Typically, an AQA GCSE English literature paper has a short extract followed by a question that contains wording along the lines of:
Starting with this speech, explain how far you think Shakespeare presents Lady Macbeth as a powerful woman. Write about: * How Shakespeare presents Lady Macbeth in this extract. * How Shakespeare presents Lady Macbeth in the play as a whole.
The first step is to find a way into the question. I am always mindful that this needs explicit modelling. Students need to find the key to the question: in this case, Lady Macbeth as a powerful woman. Then everything - points, paragraphs, quotes - should revolve around this key.

An upside-down approach

We then ask students to focus on the second bullet point first, the play as a whole (upside down, inside out). Students bullet point three to four ideas about how Lady Macbeth is a powerful woman in the play as a whole. Their ideas range from her wickedness, her manipulation and control to her ambition. With these ideas in mind, they are much better placed to find evidence from the extract that supports these big ideas, rather than trying to do it the other way round. They have activated their textual schema and words such as "spirits" and "murdering" begin to leap from the page, and sort themselves neatly into groups. The big ideas begin to lead the way.

This approach, I think, opens up the first assessment objective: reading, understanding and responding to texts. It gives students permission to root their answer firmly in their understanding of the whole text and not bolt on comments at the end of a lengthy, close-word-analysis paragraph.

It may well be that we will have to reign in the writing if the focus strays too far from the extract and word-level analysis is lost altogether. But I hope, at least, we'll have students that stop being so fixated on the individual, unseen extract that they too find themselves constrained within the box, unable to step outside.
Kate McCabe is head of faculty for English and media at St Gregory the Great Catholic School in Oxford Want to keep up with the latest education news and opinion? Follow Tes on Twitter and Instagram, and like Tes on Facebook

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An 'upside down, inside out' approach to GCSE English

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Inside Outside Upside Down is a wonder of a book. Written by Stan and Jan Berenstain (1968), it has a beautiful, lilting rhythm and cleverly breaks a complex narrative into a handful of words (a young bear goes into a box, mistakenly is taken away on a truck into town, before finally being able to run home to his mother).

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With GCSE classes approaching that point in the year, I made these to advertise some key AIC quotes. A3 in size, but could be made into postcards instead. Click on them to enlarge each, and then...

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An English Teachers’ Bibli-blography | English Remnant World

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An English Teachers’ Bibli-blography | English Remnant World

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This page is very much under construction at the moment. In fact, it's likely that you will be able to say that about this page for some time, if not indefinitely. It's designed to be a collation of blogs about aspects of English teaching. If you come across either an aspect of English teaching which I've missed out or a blog post that you think ought to be here, then please let me know via Twitter .

Planning an English Curriculum:

A mastery model for writing: moving away from the text type treadmill from Michael Tidd @MichaelT1979

A new English curriculum from Alex Quigley @HuntingEnglish

Clearing out the cobwebs: Key Stage 3from Kat Howard @saysmiss

Collaborative Planning for September 2017 from Freya O'Dell @fod3

Curriculum matters from Summer Turner @ragazza_inglese

Curriculum Planning from Freya O'Dell @fod3

Designing a new curriculum - What are your big ideas? from Alex Quigley @HuntingEnglish

How to choose study texts in English - Part 1 from James Theo @JamesTheo

How to choose study texts in English - Part 2 from James Theo @JamesTheo

How to plan a knowledge unit in English from Joe Kirby @joe_kirby

How to evaluate a knowledge unit from Joe Kirby @joe_kirby

In This School, English is About from James Durran @jdurran

In trying to do so much, we do too little from Andy Tharby @atharby

Juggling the Curriculum Part 1 from Chris Curtis @xris32

Juggling the Curriculum Part 2 from Chris Curtis @xris32

Patterns and Dominant Methodologies in English from Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

Principled curriculum design from David Didau @Learning Spy

Reclaiming The Key Stage 3 Curriculum: Challenge from Jen Jayne Wilson @JenJayneWilson

Redesigning a curriculum from David Didau @LearningSpy

Taking Special Measures In English from Matt Pinkett @PositivTeacha

Teaching Key Stage 3 English Through the Trivium from Martin Robinson @trivium21c

The emptiness of the English curriculum from Anthony Radice @AnthonyRadice1

The holy trinity of English teaching: direction, immersion and habit from Andy Tharby @atharby

The Photocopier is Jammed from Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

English Assessment Systems:

Assessment in a Knowledge Curriculumfrom Jo Facer @JoFacer

Assessment Objectives - An OFQUAL Concern for OFQUAL Peoplefrom James Theobald @JamesTheo

Beyond National Curriculum Levels - One Year Onfrom Alex Quigley @huntingenglish

Comparative Judgement: 21st Century Assessmentfrom Daisy Christodoulou @daisychristo

Guide to my posts about assessment from Daisy Christodoulou @daisychristo

Moving Beyond National Curriculum Levelsfrom Alex Quigley @huntingenglish

Proof Of Progress Part 1from David Didau @LearningSpy

Proof of Progress Part 2 from David Didau @LearningSpy

Proof of Progress Part 3from David Didau @LearningSpy

Reassessing Assessment from Caroline Spalding @MrsSpalding

The Elements of Progression: Threshold Concepts Meet Mastery Learningfrom Phil Stock @JoeyBagstock

Why is teacher assessment biased?from Daisy Christodoulou @daisychristo

Writing better testsby Tom Boulter @tomboulter

Feedback in English:

Closing Real Gaps With Data Days from Mark Miller @goldfishbowlmm

Feedback: let's build it in, not add it onfrom Andy Tharby @atharby

Getting On Top Of Marking from Mark Miller @goldfishbowlmm

Giving feedback the Michaela wayfrom Jo Facer @jo_facer

How to ensure that feedback leads to real learningfrom Andy Tharby @atharby

Myths and Legends: Whole Class Feedback from Sarah Barker @MsSFax

On Valuable Feedback that Supports Teacher Wellbeing from Rebecca Foster @TLPMsF

Marking is a hornet from Joe Kirby @joe_kirby

Post mortem vs live markingfrom Chris Curtis @xriscurtis

Targets, targets and more targets from Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

We're Marking Too Much from Matt Pinkett @PositivTeacha

Written Feedback Using Mailmerge from Mark Miller @goldfishbowlmm

Cognition, Memory and English Teaching:

Improving recall in GCSE English Language and Literature: some practical suggestionsfrom Andy Tharby @atharby

Memory Platforms from Andy Tharby @atharby

Starters and the Three Part Lesson - RIP from Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

Revision and English

A five year revision plan from Joe Kirby @joe_kirby

And Now For Something A Little Bit Differentfrom Becky Wood @ShadyLady222

How and why I help my students learn quotations from Phil Stock @joeybagstock

Making Key Stage 4 Stick from Dave Grimmett @davegrimmett

Knowledge Organisers from Joe Kirby @joe_kirby

Something That Helped With Learning Quotations For the New GCSEs from Amy Forrester @AMForrester1

You Can't Revise That from Natalie Scott @nataliehscott

Multiple Choice Questions in English

Closed Question Quizzing: Unfashionable Yet Effective from Andy Tharby @atharby

How to design multiple choice questions from Joe Kirby @joe_kirby

Learning to love the humble multiple choice questionfrom Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

Why use multiple choice questions? from Joe Kirby @joe_kirby

Teaching Spelling:

21 Lists of sophisticated spellings for GCSE Englishfrom Sarah Donarski @s_donarski

Analysing Spellingfrom Jules Daulby @JulesDaulby

Logical, phonetic, visual sequencing, rules, auditory, motor? The analysis of spelling errors. from Jules Daulby @JulesDaulby

Teaching Punctuation:

I heart punctuation from Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

Literacy Shorts: Oxford Commas from Douglas Wise @DoWise

Literacy Shorts: Ellipsis from Douglas Wise @DoWise

Literacy Shorts: Parenthetical Dashes from Douglas Wise @DoWise

Literacy Shorts: Full Stops from Douglas Wise @DoWise

Literacy Shorts: Exclamation Marks from Douglas Wise @DoWise

Literacy Shorts: Colons from Douglas Wise @DoWise

Literacy Shorts: Semi-Colons from Douglas Wise @DoWise

The Capital Letter Problem - Part 1from David Didau @LearningSpy

The Capital Letter Problem-Part 2from David Didau @LearningSpy

Teaching Grammar:

Adjectives from Douglas Wise @DoWise

Grammar and the art of writingfrom Katie Ashford @katie_s_ashford

Improving the formality of students' writing - nominalisationfrom Kerry Pulleyn @kerrypulleyn

Modal Verbs from Douglas Wise @DoWise

The Problem With ISPACED from Dom Schack @Dom_Schack

Where Gradgrind Got It Right; Teaching the Trivium - On Grammar from Martin Robinson @trivium21c

Teaching Vocabulary:

Active practice - the key to vocabulary from Doug Lemov @doug_lemov

Against Pupil Friendly Language from Sarah Barker @MsSFax

Closing the language gap - building vocabulary from David Didau @LearningSpy

Defragmenting Memory from Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

How can we increase a child's vocabulary?from Katie Ashford @katie_s_ashford

Making Mathew Rich from Caroline Spalding @MrsSpalding

Root map - a vocabulary instruction model from Josie Mingay @jamingay

Spelling and vocabulary lists - What's not to like? from Dave Grimmett @daveg5478

Teaching vocabulary from Jo Facer @jo_facer

Teaching knowledge through vocabulary or why tier two words might not be enough from Phil Stock @joeybagstock

Vocabulary Lists from Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

Vocabulary: Oleaginous is the word that you heard. It's got groove. It's got meaning from Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

What's in a Word from Phil Stock @joeybagstock

What's the best way to teach vocabulary? by David Bunker @Mr_Bunker_edu

Word choice matters. Fact. from @TeachEnglish146

Why Reading Aloud to Students is so Critical to Vocabularyfrom Doug Lemov @doug_lemov

Encouraging Reading for Pleasure:

How can we get kids to read widely? from Katie Ashford @katie_s_ashford

How do we get them reading? from Katie Ashford @katie_s_ashford

Raising the profile of reading - Part 1 from Freya O'Dell @fod3

Reading - It's So Flipping Importantfrom Natalie Scott @nataliehscott

Reading Journals from Freya O'Dell @fod3

The Power of Reading from Alex Quigley @HuntingEnglish

What Books Should A School Kid Read? from Martin Robinson @trivium21c

Teaching Reading:

Alice in Readerland - Year 7 and Doug Lemov's Reading Reconsidered from Jamie Thom @TeachGratitude1

A Novel Approach from Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

A year of reading dangerously, slowly, carefully, accuratelyfrom Chris Curtis @xriscurtis

Can we teach students how to make inferences? from Andy Tharby @atharby

Close reading - our initial steps from Freya O'Dell @fod3

Five Things Every New (Secondary) Teacher Should Know About Reading from David Didau @LearningSpy

Glossing Over the Gist and Glossaries from Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

Isn't it ironic from Sarah Ledger @sezl

Question Templates - An Approach to Improving Analysis from Andy Tharby @atharby

Reading is Knowledge from James Murphy @HoratioSpeaks

Sensitivity Analysis from Doug Lemov @Doug_Lemov

Seven Steps to Improving Reading Comprehension from James Murphy @HoratioSpeaks

So What? and Tell Me More. from Mark Roberts @MrEnglishTeach

Teaching Ideas - What Has Worked For Me? from Caroline Spalding @MrsSpalding

Time from Fiona Ritson @MissR

Whole Class Reading - An Example Lesson and a Menu of Approaches from James Durran @jdurran

Teaching Rhetoric:

10 Biblical Allusions from Douglas Wise @DoWise

10 Classical Allusionsfrom Douglas Wise @DoWise

10 Historical Allusions from Douglas Wise @DoWise

Litotes from Douglas Wise @DoWise

Metonymy and Synecdoche from Mark Roberts @MrEnglishTeach

Mr Benn and the anatomy of extended writing from Phil Stock @joeybagstock

Nice or Nasty? The Case of the Ambiguous Euphemism from Mark Roberts @Mr_EnglishTeach

On Rhetoric - A Lesson Plan from Martin Robinson @trivium21c

Paragraph Pairs from Mark Miller @goldfishbowlmm

Rhetorical Questions from Douglas Wise @DoWise

Structuring Persuasive Paragraphs from Mark Miller @goldfishbowlmm

The Cliche That is Not a Cliche from Mark Roberts @MrEnglishTeach

Types of Repetition and Why You Should Teach Them - Part 1 from Mark Roberts @MrEnglishTeach

Types of Repetition and Why You Should Teach Them - Part 2 from Mark Roberts @MrEnglishTeach

We Need To Talk About Cliché- Part 1from Mark Robertson @mr_englishteach

We Need To Talk About Cliché - Part 2from Mark Robertson @mr_englishteach

Teaching Biography:

Teaching Description:

In Defence of Similes from Matt Pinkett @PossitivTeacha

I Digress - A Lesson on Digression from Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

On Scaffolded Descriptive Writing Openings from Rebecca Foster @TLPMsF

The Art of Making Strange from Mark Roberts @MrEnglishTeach

Using a Visual Stimulus for Creative Writing from Jonathan Peel @mrpeel

Teaching Narrative:

Allusion - Teach It from Matt Pinkett @PositivTeacha

A Guide to Dystopian Fiction from Mark Roberts @MrEnglishTeach

An Ode To Narrativefrom Dom Schack @Dom_Schack

A Year of Writing Creatively from Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

Daft Drafting in the Classroom from Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

Everyday Writing from Louisa Enstone @englishlulu

Flash Fiction, Not Flash Bang from Louisa Enstone @englishlulu

Here's One I Made Earlier. Using Your Own Creative Writing As Literary Texts from Mark Roberts @MrEnglishTeach

How to Create and Analyse Complex Characters from Mark Roberts @MrEnglishTeach

I Don't Want to Talk About It - How Not To Write Dialogue from Mark Roberts @MrEnglishTeach

Losing the Plot - Deus Ex Machina from Mark Roberts @MrEnglishTeach

On John Brown Rose and the Midnight Cat from Rebecca Foster @TLPMsF

Pathetic Fallacy from Douglas Wise @DoWise

Personal Narrative and Developing a Student's Own Narrative Voice from Louisa Enstone @englishlulu

Routines For Excellent Writing from Mark Miller @goldfishbowlmm

Teaching Narrative Writing at GCSE from Jamie Thom @TeachGratitude1

Teaching Narrative Writing Part 2 - Slow and Seductive Modelling from Jamie Thom @TeachGratitude1

Tell Me Why I Love Fridays from Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

Why I Love Writing At The Same Time As The Class from Susan Strachan @SusanSEnglish

Teaching Analytical Writing:

Analysis in GCSE Literature and GCSE Language is a Chimera from Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

Analytical paragraphing: should students PEE all over their work? by Tod Brennan @todbrennaneng

A Quick Word - Retrieval Practice for Single Word Quotations from Mark Roberts @Mr_EnglishTeach

Beyond the Show Sentencefrom Katie Ashford @katie_s_ashford

Ditching Pronouns - Analysing Poetry With Clarity from Mark Roberts @MrEnglishTeach

Exam Essay Questions and How to Avoid Answering Them from Mark Roberts @MrEnglishTeach

How to Train A GCSE Essay Writer Part 1 from Alex Quigley @HuntingEnglish

How to Train A GCSE Essay Writer Part 2 from Alex Quigley @HuntingEnglish

Inside Outsidefrom Mr Hanson

My Bleeping Research Project from Louisa Enstone @englishlulu

Precision in Writing - The Show Sentence from Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

Teaching Analytical Writing Structuresfrom Josh Goodrich @Thecpdparadox

The Post-It Note Approach To Planning Essays from Caroline Spalding @MrsSpalding

The Purpose of Facing One Long Sentence from Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

The 'Show' Sentence from Katie Ashford @katie_s_ashford

The Word Spectrum - Explaining, Exploring and Evaluating Word Choice from Mark Roberts @Mr_EnglishTeach

Two Simple Words to Counterpoint an Idea from Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

Using Mentor Texts from Mark Miller @goldfishbowlmm

Why Bother With Complex Terminology? from Mark Roberts @Mr_EnglishTeach

Why I Love Developing Analysis Using Tripletsfrom Susan Strachan @SusanSEnglsh

Why I Love Promoting Analysis from Susan Strachan @SusanSEnglsh

Within the murky depths of the PEAfrom Dave Grimmett @daveg5478

Teaching Context

A Simple Timeline For English Teachers from Matt Pinkett @PositivTeacha

Controlling History or Making it a Bit More Humane from Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

On Origin of Context from Mark Roberts @MrEnglishTeach

Teaching Drama:

Drama Teaching - Socialisation and Indoctrinationfrom Martin Robinson @trivium21c

Teaching Poetry:

Adore by Fiona Ritson @MissR

I Hate Poems from James Theobald @jamestheo

Orange Juice Poetry from Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

Poetry I - What is this Thing We Call a Poem from Phil Stock @joeybagstock

Poetry II - Poetry and the Poetic from Phil Stock @joeybagstock

The poetry dilemma: to teach or to elicit from Andy Tharby @atharby

What Should We Teach About Poetry from Tom Boulter @TomBoulter

Teaching Shakespeare:

Lord Of The Powerpoints - Shakespearefrom Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

Preparing Year 9 for GCSE - Teaching Shakespeare from Jamie Thom @TeachGratitude1

Revelation from Fiona Ritson @MissR

Shakespeare and meaning from monosyllabic wordsfromMatt Pinkett @Positivteacha

Shakespeare And The Perception Of Incomprehensibility from Mark Miller @goldfishbowlmm

Shakespeare In a Word from Mark Roberts @MrEnglishTeach

What a Carry On - Romeo and Julietfrom Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

Why I Love Romeo and Juliet from Becky Wood @shadylady222

Teaching Speaking and Listening

On Dialectic: Dissoi Logoi - Teaching the Trivium from Martin Robinson @trivium21c

Seventastic Speaking Experiments With Speech from Jamie Thom @TeachGratitude1

Speaking and Listening Assessments from Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

The Socratic Method; Teaching the Trivium - Dialectic from Martin Robinson @trivium21c

What is the Point of Speaking and Listening? from James Theobald @jamestheo

Teaching AQA English Language GCSE:

Paper 1

AQA Paper 1 - Exam Hacks Focusing on Effect from Chris Curtis @ChrisCurtis

Evaluation: it's a piece of cake from James Theobald @jamestheo

I am the Greatest Blogger from Mark Roberts @MrEnglishTeach

Less Than a Month to Go - Question 3 Structure Againfrom Sarah Barker @MsSFax

Let's Get a Bit of Perspective On Things from Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

Let's Get Touchy Feely About Genre - AQA Paper 1 from Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

Like Lambs to the Slaughter - Preparing Year 9 For GCSE English from Jamie Thom @TeachGratitude1

Notes on a scandal. I mean: Notes on a new GCSE spec! from Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

On Paper 1 Section A from Rebecca Foster @TLPMsF

Paper 1 Exam Hacks from Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

Paper 1 Question 1 from Sarah Barker @MsSFax

Paper 1 Question 2from Sarah Barker @MsSFax

Paper 1 Question 3 from Sarah Barker @MsSFax

Paper 1 Question 4from Sarah Barker @MsSFax

Question 3 and 4 - Bore Galore from Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

Slave - AQA Paper 1from Fiona Ritson @MissR

Some Proper Exemplars for the GCSE English Language Evaluation Question from Mark Roberts @Mr_EnglishTeach

Something That Worked With AQA Language Paper 1 Question 3 from Amy Forrester @AMForrester1

Specifically - Responding to the Language Questions from Sarah Barker @MsSFax

Structure and Evaluation Revisited from Mark Roberts @MrEnglishTeach

Structures is all about three wordsfrom Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

Structuring a Response to Question 2 and 3 in the AQA Language Exam from Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

Super, Smashing, Great - Modelling the Language of Evaluation from Mark Roberts @MrEnglishTeach

Teaching Evaluation Part 1 from Mark Roberts @mr_englishteach

Teaching Evaluation Part 2 from Mark Roberts @mr_englishteach

Teaching Evaluation Part 3: Some proper exemplars for the GCSE English Language Evaluation question from Mark Roberts @mr_englishteach

Teaching Structure - model answer part 2 from Mark Roberts @mr_englishteach

Teaching Structure for the new English Language GCSE from Mark Roberts @mr_englishteach

The new English Language GCSE: Introducing 19th Century Fiction from James Theobald @JamesTheo

The one about structure - Part 1 from Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

The one about structure - Part 2 SPOILERS!from Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

The Springboard - Paper 1 Question 5 from Sarah Barker @MsSFax

The Subject of Sentences from Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

This Much I Know About A Step By Step Guide to the Writing Question on the AQA English Language GCSE Paper 1 from John Tomsett @JohnTomsett

Tone from Fiona Ritson @MissR

Why we might need to place more emphasis on showing and telling in lessons from Chris Curtis @xriscurtis

Year 11 Mock Exams - Spedoes, Modelling Writing and Self-Assessment from Jamie Thom @ TeachGratitude

Paper 2

On Paper 2 Section A from Rebecca Foster @TLPMsF

Slave - AQA Paper 2from Fiona Ritson @MissR

Summarise, synthesis, simplify or suggestfrom Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

This Much I Know About A Step By Step Guide to the Writing Question on the AQA English Language GCSE Paper 2 from John Tomsett @JohnTomsett

Teaching AQA English Literature GCSE:

Teaching Macbeth:

Hear the One About the Dead Queen from Matt Pinkett @PositivTeacha

Macbeth: Dealing with AO2 from Mr Hanson

Shakespearean Trump Card - Teaching Macbeth from Jamie Thom @teachgratitude1

Teaching Macbeth from Kate McCabe @evenbetterif

This Much I Know About Unfettered Teachingfrom John Tomsett

Teaching A Christmas Carol:

English Language Extracts - Smashing the Superficial With Dickens from Jamie Thom @TeachGratitude1

Jacob Marley's Bowel Movementsfrom Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

Teaching A Christmas Carolfrom Alex Quigley @huntingenglish

The Ghost of Memory: Revision and Retention of A Christmas Carol from Jamie Thom @TeachGratitude1

Teaching Jekyll and Hyde:

Etiquette, Sexual Repression and Body Snatching - A Guide to the Context of Jekyll and Hyde From Mark Roberts @MrEnglishTeach

Teaching An Inspector Calls:

How I teach An Inspector Calls from Chris Curtis @xriscurtis

The Hand That Mocked... from Sarah Barker @MsSFax

What happens when we teach literary interpretations as facts by Andy Tharby @atharby

Teaching Romeo and Juliet:

Blokes and Birds - Look at them, phwoar, I mean, soar from Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

Why I Love Romeo and Juliet from Becky Wood @ShadyLady222

Teaching the AQA Poetry Anthology:

Dear AQA, It's Time to Talk About Tissue from Mark Roberts @MrEnglishTeach

Kamikaze - Some Supplementary Thoughtsfrom Sarah Barker @MsSFax

Marks of Weakness, Marks of Woefrom Sarah Barker @MsSFax

One Painting Per Poem With My Stiff Upper Lip from Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

On Speed Planning from Rebecca Foster TLPMsF

Poetry Exam Hacks from Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

Remains by Simon Armitage - A Guide from Mark Roberts @MrEnglishTeach

The English Teacher's Pub Quiz from Chris Curtis @XrisCurtis

Why I Love Ozymandias from Susan Strachan @SusanSEnglish
Teaching AQA Unseen Poetry
Dread the Unseen from Kate McCabe @evenbetterif

On Learning to Notice from Rebecca Foster @TLPMsF

Poetry - Little and Often from Sarah Barker @MsSFax

Revising Unseen Poetry from Jamie Thom @TeachGratitude1

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This page is very much under construction at the moment. In fact, it's likely that you will be able to say that about this page for some time, if not indefinitely. It's designed to be a collation of blogs about aspects of English teaching. If you come across either an aspect of English teaching which...

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This term a key priority for the department has been on creating the right environment. Displays, you see, set the tone, establish the culture, support pupil learning and celebrate success. Here is what we have been working on at the academy.

Every member of staff within the English department has a space on the Welcome to English board. Each staff member has a WeeMee. Alongside this, to support our reading culture, every member of staff has identified a book of great significance to them and explained why.

2. Our world map

When I first joined the academy we had a graphic artist come in to design the subject areas. Then, due to expansion, the subject areas moved which meant that I have inherited a world map and a historical timeline. After seeing our fab Geographer Courtney Grainger's books from around the world display, we decided to create our own using this gigantic map.

3. Pictures of our pupils in action and quotations from visitors

Opposite the map we have a picture of pupils in the library. In September I will add to this with four further images of our pupils in action. Underneath these images I have taken quotes from visitors such as Ofsted where they have recognised the work we are doing in English.

4. Quotation wall

Like many English departments, we display the key quotations from our core texts: Blood Brothers, A Christmas Carol and Macbeth to try and aid pupils' memory. Thanks to Twitter, we have a quotation wall.

5. Our historical timeline

The other graphic. We have used resources, again from Twitter, to create a social and historical timeline, detailing key events and also key literary works.
6. Vocabulary wall
We have displayed all of our core vocabulary in the corridor to help pupils. When they are arriving at lessons and leaving lessons we hope that they may just soak up one or two words around them.
7. Topic banners
In the corridor, we have topic banners for each year group and for each unit they are working on. These banners change every term and makes it easy for everyone to see what we are studying.
8. Learning aids at the front
I strongly believe in displaying all learning aids at the front or to the side of the classroom. For that reason I have displays to do with sentence structures, paragraphing, punctuation, connectives, adverbials and analysis to support pupils during the lesson at the front of my classroom. Alongside this I have my biggest resource - my classroom library!

9. Recognition board

After reading Pivotal's book on behaviour and knowing that they are coming to do some training with us in September, I decided to introduce a recognition board. I am pretty poor at recognising pupils, although I have great relationships with my pupils. Therefore, I am keen to develop this next year. Erin, as you can see, felt she deserved recognition the day I was on a course.
10. Book posters 11. Language, structure and form board
We display a copy of all of the books we study between KS3 and KS5 in every classroom to show our pupils the vast range of literature that they will be exposed to throughout their time with us.

My language, structure and (soon to be) form board is a new display for 2017-18. I am trying to create a more interactive revision based room and this supports pupils in lessons with their analysis of methods. One side has the term and on the flip is the definition. I am hoping it will be an aid for revision.
12. Exemplar essays 13. Interactive revision cards.
I want my pupils to have access to a wide range of brilliant essays. These folders will contain exemplar essays. Initially, these have been taken from the exam board but every time one of my pupils creates something spectacular their work is also added to the exemplary folder.

My next revision aid. Every core literature text has a display board and at the bottom of these display boards will be pockets with these A5 laminated revision cards covering the growth of characters and the development of a theme with key quotations. These cards will be there to support pupils revision and retention.

So this is where we are up to and there is still a whole heap of stuff to be done! Over the summer I will be working on my analysis board, our traffic light trays and our growth mindset resource area. Of course, the next thing in September will be covering the remaining walls, both inside and out of our classrooms with the amazing work our pupils will produce to celebrate and sing loudly how brilliant they are in English.

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This term a key priority for the department has been on creating the right environment. Displays, you see, set the tone, establish the culture, support pupil learning and celebrate success. Here is what we have been working on at the academy. Every member of staff within the English department has a space on the Welcome to English board.

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Easily create beautiful interactive video lessons for your students you can integrate right into your LMS. Track students' progress with hassle-free analytics as you flip your classroom!

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‘Specifically’ – Responding to the Language Questions | The Stable Oyster

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‘Specifically’ – Responding to the Language Questions | The Stable Oyster

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Preamble: I've transcribed part of a lesson, having filmed myself teaching. I wanted to demonstrate the process I went through to improve responses to AQA P1, Q2 and AQA P2, Q3. I plan to use this with my faculty, some of whom are also filming their lessons for internal CPD.

-

Whether you're an examiner for the board or marking your own mocks, you'll know that one of our biggest challenges is getting the students to write about the effect of language and structure. It's also hard to move them on from the generic comments - this makes the reader want to know more/this makes the reader intrigued/this makes the reader ask themselves 'why?' and so forth. Even our most able students fall into the trap of using this padding. Crucially, what's missing from these statements is the next part. The "... because..." and then the contextualising of the because.
An aside - 'Impact'
My colleague, Jo, suggested to me that the problem lies in the word 'effect.' Perhaps we need to encourage them instead to consider the 'impact'. An impact is immediate. It's something that hits you. The word 'impact' also makes explicit the relationship between the reader and the text. It's something to consider.
Contextualising, using specifically
This section refers to a set of exam papers I put together. You can click here for a link to the set. There are exam questions for them all on the accompanying PowerPoints. If you want the Word documents then send me a DM on Twitter.

I have started to use the word 'specifically' to get the students to drill down into the language question. They're not being specific enough in their responses, so I've introduced the word 'specifically' to encourage them to really think about the effect of language.

This blog is really a description of what I've done with my year 11s over the last term. With regards to the inclusion of a transcript, I find it helpful when I read others' blogs with lesson transcripts, so I thought I'd try it here.
Visualiser modelling
The student response below is taken from E3 in the attached files.

I usually put a real response under the visualiser. This is a routine part of almost all of my lessons. The students volunteer to have their displayed. If this is not part of your classroom culture then perhaps this won't transfer so easily. Here's the response that relates to the transcript:

"The writer uses the phrase 'streets so smooth and tarred that he itched to lay his cheek down on them' to give an effect on the reader. It really makes the reader want to read on and wonder why the road is so appealing. The word 'itched' shows that he Ugwu really wants to touch the road."

Transcript

SB: Marek, you've not actually addressed the question in your opening sentence. What is Adichie showing here? [Student gives a response, inaudible] Right - good - let's edit that. "Adichie describes Ugwu as excited about leaving the village..."

Now let's edit the quotation. It doesn't need to be this long. How could we cut it back? [inaudible again] Good! "...he itched to lay his cheek down on them."

Jessica: Miss - wait - you don't know it's about the streets now!

SB: You're right. I hadn't noticed that. How can we make it make sense? Read out to me what you'd write, including the punctuation.

Jessica: I'd say, "Adichie describes Ugwu as excited about leaving the village, even about the tarred streets: "he itched to lay his cheeks down on them.""

SB: Thanks. Now, do we really need the line "to give an effect on the reader"? This could apply to anything and the response loses nothing if we delete it. [At this point, we all turned to another extract and considered if this line would fit for that one. They decided it would and I covered the word 'generic']

The same is true of "...want to read on and...". Let's get rid of it - again, it would work with any extract. It's generic and so you won't be awarded marks for it.

We need to add "because" after the word "appealing". It's not enough to assume that the examiner knows that you can infer that Ugwu liked the streets. Let's explain why. Jessica, what does 'itched' suggest?

Jessica: It's like a burning desire, Miss. A deep, burning desire.

SB: Great. Let's add it. Is he actually itchy? No. So we can use some subject terminology here too. "The metaphor 'itched' implies a deep, burning desire within Ugwu."

Now we have a decent, specific comment but we need to bring it back to Ugwu and his journey. What, specifically, are we learning about Ugwu here? Yes, Mohamed? Use a sentence starting with "specifically," please.

Mohamed: Specifically, it demonstrates that everything is new and exciting and he wants to experience everything around him to the full extent.

SB: Great. Now, let's get back to the word "itch" and link it to his feelings about leaving the village. I'm going to start you off with "He is totally overwhelmed, almost as though..." yes - Mohamed again - go for it.

Mohamed: He is totally overwhelmed, almost as though...he feels a physical 'itch' to fully experience something as simple as the streets.

[End of transcript]

Our final paragraph looked like this:

"Adichie describes Ugwu as excited about leaving the village, even about the tarred streets: "he itched to lay his cheeks down on them." It makes the reader think that the street was really appealing to Ugwu, because the metaphor 'itched' implies a deep, burning desire within him. Specifically, it demonstrates that everything is new and exciting and he wants to experience everything around him to the full extent. He is totally overwhelmed, almost as though he feels a physical 'itch' to fully experience something as simple as the streets."

This is a level 4 response. It's not perfect but it's decent. It's a huge jump up from the starting point.

Embedding "Specifically"

I now have the following words on my board (laminated and blu-tacked):

Because

Specifically

Almost as though

...and a few others. If you want these, you can click here for a copy - it's not a lot but will save you a 10 minute job!

These can also be used as analysis prompts when modelling for the class. The following photo is of a P2 analysis I led my Y11 through. The crossed-out part was from a student's answer. He volunteered to have his work on the board, having identified a particularly generic response. You can see here how we've developed responses, using these key words. If you'd like a copy of the papers I have made for P2, using the AQA booklet, click here.

Again, it's not perfect but you can see the starting point and how they progressed.

Below, are two more examples from my students' books (published here with their permission). Again, they're not perfect but these were done independently after just three lessons of this approach. Relevant context of each child is provided.

Example A - Y11 girl, KS2 level - 5b. Target estimation from FFTd: 7

Example B: Y11 girl, PP, KS2 level - 4. Target estimation from FFTd: 5

The biggest pattern in papers I've marked, across all abilities of students, is their failure to really grasp the effect. While these examples are rather short, they're incredibly well-developed compared to the "makes the reader want to read on" that we started the year with.

Do contact me with any comments or questions on this.

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'Specifically' - Responding to the Language Questions

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Preamble: I've transcribed part of a lesson, having filmed myself teaching. I wanted to demonstrate the process I went through to improve responses to AQA P1, Q2 and AQA P2, Q3. I plan to use this with my faculty, some of whom are also filming their lessons for internal CPD.

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This is just a short excerpt for the about page.

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Why I love…The A5 Fiction/A4 Non-Fiction Evaluation Question – susansenglish

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Why I love…The A5 Fiction/A4 Non-Fiction Evaluation Question – susansenglish

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I don't actually love this question...yet! It is difficult to know how to teach it and I'm really grateful to the Monday night #engchatuk for helping me clarify my thinking on this question. I find it difficult as Evaluate suggests that students should be looking to explore the balance of ideas in the text and offering their opinions in relation to this; however the question doesn't lend itself to this. In actual fact the question seems to promote the students going strongly down one side of the argument. The way that the question is worded is Statement - and How far do you?.
A typical question might look like:
A5 - "Aunt Pegg is doing a good job at looking after naughty lazy children." How far do you agree with this?

Immediately I think that the students are being encouraged to decide whether you agree with this statement or not. If you know the Aunt Pegg extract (see attachment) you will know that she is doing a good job of keeping the unruly children under control, but that the biased viewpoint of the children mean that they are upset with her and feel undermined and controlled.
How do I approach this question?
I ask students to make an instant judgement. How far do they agree with the statement? Then, I also encourage them to think about the following questions and use the following prompts to get them beginning to formulate opinions

What are you being asked to think about in the statement?

What do you think of the statement?

Can you select a range of quotes to support your ideas?

What might other readers suggest?

Why might they suggest this?

Can you justify your opinions with a reason?
How can you justify these opinions?

I will explain that when you are being asked to evaluate this means that you must offer opinions about the text and use quotes to support the opinions you are giving. I will remind them of how we approach the analysis questions and we will look to adapt the structure to suit the evaluation question.

Link to the question - becomes - link to the statement with a reason for your thoughts

Terminology - We don't need to use this for evaluation

Quotes - here I will remind the students that they need a range of short snappy quotes (I will here ask them where the quotes should be from) this question requires students to choose quotes from across the whole extract, so I will ask them to make sure that they track across the whole extract and don't just choose quotes from one place in the text. I will make links with the Literature paper and remind them that they have to choose quotes from the top, middle and bottom of the extract in the same way as I ask them to do this for R&J, ACC and BB. In this way I hope to reinforce previous learning and embed links subtly between the Language and Literature papers.

Link to the meaning - becomes - explore your opinions using evaluative language

zoom in/writer's intentions/explore the effect - becomes - offer an alternative readers opinion with reasoning (although I will remind the student to be judicious in their use of this) to ensure that they have covered a wide enough range of quotes across the whole text

I will provide the students with this prompt sheet ( Evaluate example Q Guidance.docA5 with many thanks to@MissJLud who I downloaded and adapted the original from) for offering an evaluative opinion and then go through the evaluate steps again which are:

Link to the statement with an opinion

Quote - short and snappy from across the whole text

Offer opinions about the quote and what you think about it (supporting reasons)

Offer alternative reader views with supporting reasons

Here, I will reinforce that it is easy to pick up marks on this question as they will always be led to have an opinion on the text in front of them.

Then, I will model on the board unpicking the question. To do this I will ask students to write the full question in their books and ask them to underline what they have to focus on and whether they should be arguing for or against the statement.

For the example above this will mean that it looks like:

A5 - " Aunt Pegg is doing a good job at looking after naughty lazy children." How far do you agree with this?

Aunt Pegg - must make reference to her throughout the response - therefore you must choose quotes that show what she does

Good job - this is the part where you either agree or disagree or give a nuanced view of what she is doing

Looking after naughty lazy children - this is where you can evaluate whether they are naughty and lazy and how this is shown in the extract

Then, I will model an evaluate question on the board or under the visualiser. I will get the students to tell me the quote they would like to use and to build the opinions together to help show them how to do this. I will use the prompts that I have gone through with the students.
What is the link to the statement?
Aunt Pegg is shown in the extract to be looking after the children who seem naughty and lazy, due to the freedom their parents allow them.
What do you think?
She appears to be doing a good job of curtailing the children and their streak of naughtiness when the extract states
What quotes supports this opinion?
"Stop thief"
How does it support this opinion?
Due to the way this stops the children in their tracks. They have misguidedly tried to break away from the restrictions the Aunt is enforcing and have not been successful.
What might other readers think?
Alternatively, other readers may feel this was unjust and too harsh, as she is creating a scene and appears to care very little for why the children are making a break for it.

The whole example will look like this.

Aunt Pegg is shown in the extract to be looking after the children who seem naughty and lazy, due to the freedom their parents allow them. She appears to be doing a good job of curtailing the children and their streak of naughtiness when the extract states "Stop thief" due to the way this stops the children in their tracks. They have misguidedly tried to break away from the restrictions the Aunt is enforcing and have not been successful. Alternatively, other readers may feel this was unjust and too harsh, as she is creating a scene and appears to care very little for why the children are making a break for it.

Then, having asked the students to write it down in their books at the same time as me, I will ask them to unpick (using a green pen) what the steps are and where they are shown in the example by annotating the steps as they occur. Although we have con-constructed the example this is a further layer of understanding how to create a quotation based, opinion and evaluate response that I think is useful.

Then, I will ask students to select a range of quotations that they could use to explore the question. I will take feedback on these quotations. Then, I will ask the students to write two opinions next to the quotes.

Finally, I will ask them to create their own evaluate paragraphs using the model from earlier in the lesson and making sure that they have offered a range of opinions and used a range of quotes from across the whole extract.

After they have done this, I will get them to swap and repeat the green pen annotation on a peers work and ask them to decide: How well has the evaluation been completed? Why? How could the evaluation be improved? Why? as well as having annotated the paragraph examples for the evaluation steps.

During the process, I will have explained to the student how to use language to evaluate and explored the prompt sheet and explained how this can help them too.

To check understanding of evaluate I might explore how evaluating a text differs from analysis and ask the students to explain to me how this is different and why they need to be careful not to just analyse the text.

This is my thinking to date on how to teach the evaluate question. I did use I think/I feel prompts as well for a time, but it didn't feel particularly 'academic' in style and I was worried that it didn't quite hit the evaluate spot, so I have steered them away from these types of sentence openers.

I'd be really interested to know how others are approaching this question and whether my thinking is along the right tracks on this. Thanks for reading. The other blogs on this paper are here:

Blog 1 on this Fiction Paper was about the Comprehension Style Questions and can be found here: A1 Comprehension Link

Blog 2 on this Fiction Paper was about the Analysis of Language A2 & A3 questions and can be found here: A2 & A3 Language Analysis questions

Blog 3 on this Fiction Paper was about the Tension and Drama A4 question and can be found here: A4 Tension and Drama Structure Analysis

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Why I love...The A5 Fiction/A4 Non-Fiction Evaluation Question

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I don't actually love this question...yet! It is difficult to know how to teach it and I'm really grateful to the Monday night #engchatuk for helping me clarify my thinking on this question.

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Recently, I have been looking at our departments marking procedures and how best to be effective markers (obviously reducing workload is key!).

I designed this crib sheet as a way to provide quicker feedback to the whole classroom rather than writing comments in each book, so reducing marking time from 2-3 hours per class to less than an hour. Now I actually really do miss writing comments, leaving questions and the other bits in their books but it really wasn't a workload issue I could continue with (especially as I have my first child on the way!).

Therefore the crib sheet allows me to go through each students' book and I make comments on the whole class sheet using the sections below.

The benefits are that it gives me a snapshot of the whole class's progress, allows me to 'fine tune' my lesson planning and it also gives activities and tasks for students to complete within DIRT the next lesson.

Using this I do the following which we complete in lessons for 20-25 minutes, you can also get a feel of what it looks like in students books. Students' are given an A5 copy to stick in under the title of 'DIRT' and using a red pen they review their SPaG, answer questions I have created from reading their books, finish any work or complete an extension activity. We always finish with a spelling test to hammer home those misspelt key words.

Pupils books look something like this - we do this every 2 weeks or so.

Now, that does not mean I use this for assessments - my focus is on providing more detailed and worthwhile assessment feedback, with this being reserved for standard lessons etc. For more on what I'm trying in assessments, check out the rest of my blog.

Attached is ppt. resource

Marking Crib Sheet ppt. Marking Crib Sheet V2

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Recently, I have been looking at our departments marking procedures and how best to be effective markers (obviously reducing workload is key!). I designed this crib sheet as a way to provide quicker feedback to the whole classroom rather than writing comments in each book, so reducing marking time from 2-3 hours per class to...

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When is a cliché not a cliché? That's a question I asked my pupils during a recent lesson. They had been reading through an article from The Guardian that appeared to be full of the little horrors. They had taken great delight in criticising the writer's hackneyed turn of phrase.

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On Self-Quizzing Homework | The Learning Profession

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On Self-Quizzing Homework | The Learning Profession

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One of the best things we've done this year is introduce self-quizzing - an idea I took from reading Joe Kirby's chapter in 'Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way' entitled 'Homework as Revision'. I thought, after the reaction to a couple of tweets I've posted about it, I'd write this post explaining our approach to...

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AQA English Language Scheme of work – free download – Luke Richardson

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AQA English Language Scheme of work – free download – Luke Richardson

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I designed this scheme of work for either a year 9, 10, or a lower set year 11 class who find the kinds of the texts that AQA put in the specimen papers too difficult. In that way it's an introduction / step up to the paper. It is organised into five lessons but whenever I've taught it it's taken longer than that - reorganise it however you want.
Click here, enter you e-mail address and I'll send it over to you.
Once you're on my mailing list I'll also share with you my blog posts, teaching resources and creative endeavours. I promise not to give your e-mail address to anyone else or contact you too often, and of course you're welcome to unsubscribe at any time.

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AQA English Language Scheme of work - free download

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I designed this scheme of work for either a year 9, 10, or a lower set year 11 class who find the kinds of the texts that AQA put in the specimen papers too difficult. In that way it's an int...

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Marking with codes

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TM4T Using Your System 3.2.4.2 - Short Form Marking - T I M E management for T E A C H E R S

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A comprehensive 500-page Time Management site aimed at UK teachers covering everything from Planning to Personal Organization; includes Principles, Techniques, and detailed Step-by-Step guides. 50 Stress Managagement techniques for busy teachers. Stress Management for Teachers.

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Aimed at students studying English at 'A' Level/University. Discussion Forums and unique Online Seminars to build confidence, creativity, and individual analytical style.

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Mary Shelley's Frankenstein – in charts | Books | The Guardian

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Mary Shelley's Frankenstein – in charts | Books | The Guardian

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Two centuries after the publication of Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, the monster she created still stalks our imaginations. Adam Frost, Sergio Gallardo and Edu Fuentes piece together the facts behind the myth

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Two centuries after the publication of Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, the monster she created still stalks our imaginations. Adam Frost, Sergio Gallardo and Edu Fuentes piece together the facts behind the myth

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Critical postcards for A Level English Literature.docx

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Critical postcards for A Level English Literature.docx

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Critical postcards for A Level English Literature.docx

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It's basically an ode, but it doesn't say ode in the title. What's it about? In this poem, Keats is talking about the beauty of autumn, a season that doesn't get much attention. You've probably read a poem about summer before, but Keats wants to remind us that autumn has its own unique allure.

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Feminism and Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century - History of Feminism - History of Feminism

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The literature of 1776-1928 inevitably reflects a wide range of responses to women's experiences, especially of home and family. Marriage is the key theme of the novel of the long nineteenth century, which records a questioning of society's assumptions about the appropriateness and availability of marriage, especially for middle-class women with aspirations to fulfil themselves in other ways.

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The context of John Keats' work - Keats' Kingdom

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An Inspector Calls (Complete BBC Edition, Bernard Hepton, 1982) by JB Priestley

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5 Reward Card for Every $50 You Spend on Textbooks at BN.com Shop now "

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Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on William Shakespeare's Macbeth. Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Brief Biography of William Shakespeare

Shakespeare's father was a glove-maker, and Shakespeare received no more than a grammar school education. He married Anne Hathaway in 1582, but left his family behind around 1590 and moved to London, where he became an actor and playwright. He was an immediate success: Shakespeare soon became the most popular playwright of the day as well as a part-owner of the Globe Theater. His theater troupe was adopted by King James as the King's Men in 1603. Shakespeare retired as a rich and prominent man to Stratford-upon-Avon in 1613, and died three years later.

Historical Context of Macbeth

When Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, King James of Scotland became King of England. James almost immediately gave his patronage to Shakespeare's company, making them the King's Men. In many ways, Macbeth can be seen as a show of gratitude from Shakespeare to his new King and benefactor. For instance, King James actually traced his ancestry back to the real-life Banquo. Shakespeare's transformation of the Banquo in Holinshed's Chronicles who helped murder Duncan to the noble man in Macbeth who refused to help kill Duncan is therefore a kind of compliment given to King James' ancestor.

Other Books Related to Macbeth

Shakespeare's source for Macbeth was Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, though in writing Macbeth Shakespeare changed numerous details for dramatic and thematic reasons, and even for political reasons (see Related Historical Events). For instance, in Holinshed's version, Duncan was a weak and ineffectual King, and Banquo actually helped Macbeth commit the murder. Shakespeare's changes to the story emphasize Macbeth's fall from nobility to man ruled by ambition and destroyed by guilt.

Full Title: The Tragedy of Macbeth

When Written: 1606

Where Written: England

When Published: 1623

Literary Period: The Renaissance (1500 - 1660)

Genre: Tragic drama

Setting: Scotland and, briefly, England during the eleventh century

Climax: Some argue that the murder of Banquo is the play's climax, based on the logic that it is at this point that Macbeth reaches the height of his power and things begin to fall apart from there. However, it is probably more accurate to say that the climax of the play is Macbeth's fight with Macduff, as it is at this moment that the threads of the play come together, the secret behind the prophecy becomes evident, and Macbeth's doom is sealed.

Extra Credit for Macbeth

Shakespeare or Not? There are some who believe Shakespeare wasn't educated enough to write the plays attributed to him. The most common anti-Shakespeare theory is that Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, wrote the plays and used Shakespeare as a front man because aristocrats were not supposed to write plays. Yet the evidence supporting Shakespeare's authorship far outweighs any evidence against. So until further notice, Shakespeare is still the most influential writer in the English language.

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Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on William Shakespeare's Macbeth. Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides. Shakespeare's father was a glove-maker, and Shakespeare received no more than a grammar school education.

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English & Media Centre | An agenda for knowledge – organising without false limits | Blog & News

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English & Media Centre | An agenda for knowledge – organising without false limits | Blog & News

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Nothing is more important than knowledge. It's very easy to say that; it trips off the tongue.

However, it's much harder to define what that knowledge should be. Knowledge is boundless, so choices have to be made. What those choices should be is open to debate. Should knowledge look outwards towards the world, and what's useful, in adult, working life? Should it mirror or prepare for academia, following the structures of knowledge that apply in the academic study of the subject? Should it aim to provide a broad, liberal education, offering the kind of cultural awareness that fulfils expectations of a well-educated citizen? Is knowledge of any kind a 'good', a way of inculcating a thirst for learning that will continue into adult life, in other words what you know being less important than the fact of knowing more in any field? Whatever one's view on these ideas about knowledge, it's difficult, in a subject like English in particular, to delineate basic minimum knowledge without setting up unnecessary limits, or suggesting that the knowledge, of whatever kind, is simple, tidy and clear-cut, as opposed to complex, open-ended, wide-ranging and sometimes messy at the edges.

Without wishing to repeat my earlier blog on this, I'll simply restate my view that knowledge, whatever its content-base, should be a synthesis of information, conceptual understanding and skill. The three are intimately related. Knowledge involves bringing new information into your existing conceptual framework and changing that framework in the light of the new material. It involves changing and developing thought processes and ways of seeing, so that you apply new thinking to fresh situations. Fact retention is part of this process, but just the starting-point rather than the ultimate aim. It takes information, skill and understanding combined, what Arthur N. Applebee calls 'knowledge in action', to make use of new information, turn it into insights and apply them in fresh contexts. If you can't do that, your knowledge is of limited use. Understanding and skill are needed to make information work for you.

Understanding what's significant and what isn't

I want to consider one key aspect of this in relation to English literature, to show how information, on its own, isn't enough, even in the narrowest terms of knowledge for examination success. A key element in what students are required to do, in order to get high grades at GCSE and A Level, is to make judgements about what is significant or not. The words 'significant' or 'judicious' crop up again and again in specifications and in examiners' reports. The examiners are looking for good judgement on what is worth saying. Points made have to be well chosen ones. This is no faddish requirement that comes and goes. It is at the heart of what it means to have genuine knowledge in the subject. If students latch onto insignificant aspects of a text, in an unseen, or in essay on their set text, they will have failed to recognise what matters, the key, essential aspects that make this text special, make it stand out from others, or fall within a tradition or set of conventions. Understanding about what is significant is... hugely significant.

This is something that at EMC we have been addressing on A Level and GCSE CPD courses for many years. We come back to it frequently with teachers whose results haven't been as good as hoped for, and who blame poor writing skills for this. We have discovered, through our work with schools, that when students' results are disappointing, it is often not so much to do with their poor writing, their lack of structure, poor punctuation, inadequate paragraphing, inability to write a good opening paragraph or embed quotations, to follow up on evidence with a sentence of analysis, or any of the other elements of writing that we have become so obsessed with in recent years. The truth is that the P in PEE, or PEEL, or PETAL or any other formula, has been sadly neglected. Points are what essays hinge on - having good, relevant and significant ideas to put across. Any old point won't do, like noticing a tiny bit of alliteration in a poem, or making a big deal out of the use of caesura, stichomythia, iambic pentameter, enjambment when there are much more significant features leaping out at an expert reader. Latinate terms used only to prove that you know Latinate terms are worse than useless. The same is true of grammatical constructions, whether it's a tricolon, or asyndeton. An exaggerated focus on the terms makes it highly likely that students will want to make sure they get them in, and end up talking about what is insignificant rather than what's significant, often with no real thought about effect. It's topsy-turvy. Observe something important and make a good point about it, don't remember lots of terms and then search for examples in the text to show that you know the label. If a term helps you to explain what you've observed, then brilliant! Terms, including Latinate ones, can be learned along the way, as a shorthand, to act in the service of ideas. In a nutshell, knowledge of terms and drilling in essay technique are irrelevant if students don't understand what is significant about a text.

Can a knowledge organiser help define significant knowledge?

In theory, knowledge organisers could be a great way of providing a summary of significant knowledge about texts or topics, so long as it's just a summary - the bare bones of what is a much richer set of discussions. The problem also remains defining what is significant knowledge, rather than assuming that because there's stuff written on a neat looking grid, it's automatically captured what's most important about the text or topic. Equally, there's often an elision in knowledge organisers between 'what's important in the text' and 'what's important for students to learn'. This conflation can lead to some oddities and confusions.

I have no fundamental objection to knowledge organisers. In fact, I think they could be very useful in helping students understand what's most important to know about a text, but I sometimes find those posted online disappointingly thin and random in the knowledge they identify. They don't seem to capture the most significant aspects of the texts or topics they cover. I've been asking myself, 'what would a good knowledge organiser look like?' and realise that, in fact, EMC has, in a way, been advocating a particular form of knowledge organiser for many years, not with that name, and with some major differences, but nevertheless having many of the same features and possible benefits.

An agenda for the study of a text

Over many years, we have advocated a number of approaches to help students recognise what's most significant and interesting in a text. These have been designed to teach students how to make judgements, sift knowledge and decide what to apply to any given text or topic. One of the most powerful of these approaches has been the idea of an 'agenda' for the study of texts.

The agenda is a working document, not a definitive, final summary of key aspects but something to be added to and developed over the course of study, with students contributing to its development. It is introduced early in the study of a text, put up on the wall, on a flipchart, or made readily available on a whiteboard, as a shared set of understandings or ideas for the whole class to refer to in the course of studying the text. It starts with some initial observations, perhaps with the identification of emerging themes and stylistic traits, on the basis of a shared reading of the first chapter, or after reading short fragments from the text. The teacher can, at this early stage, tease out significant elements that students might look out for, think about and be alert to as they're reading the text. It makes the first reading an active one, in which the students are aware of what is especially interesting about this text, in relation to others. As time goes on, in the course of reading and study, more key elements emerge and are elaborated upon. So for a novel this might include the key themes, aspects of style, narrative techniques, voice, methods of characterisation, symbolism and so forth. The 'agenda' gradually fills out, and gaps are filled in, so that by the time students do their exams, they have a great, succinct overview of what is important to 'know' about that text. Usually the agenda is no more than one to two sides of A4 of headings but behind that is a huge amount of discussion and reference to the text that has led to this synopsis of key ideas.

You could definitely say that the agenda is a form of knowledge organiser. It itemises aspects of a text that are worthy of consideration. But it has some important elements that differ from some of the knowledge organisers currently being shared on the internet.

First, it is provisional, not fixed. It is clear from the start that it will develop and that students will contribute to that development, adding to it, making it more sophisticated and subtle, questioning the ideas raised and refining them. There is scope for students to change the agenda, and for teachers themselves to discover new things, whether through class discussion, their own secondary reading or conversation with other teachers, and add these to the agenda. It opens possibilities rather than narrowing them down to a fixed list. It allows for higher than anticipated expectations being fulfilled.

Second, its stated aim is to focus on what's significant in the text itself, rather than muddling that up with what students should be learning through the study of a text. Knowledge organisers on texts tend to be more along the lines of 'here's what I think students should learn while studying this text', rather than, 'here's what's significant to know about this text.' It may seem like a subtle difference but I think it's an important one. The first is the teacher's agenda for what they want students to learn. The second identifies what's of key interest in the text itself. For example, in an agenda on Jane Eyre for A Level you might start with the identification of the overriding narrative voice - a first person retrospective voice. By the end of the study of the text, this bald idea will undoubtedly have expanded, to include subtle shifts at different points in the novel. The aim isn't to learn the term 'first person retrospective voice' but rather to discover what's distinctive about the voice of this novel. It allows you to reject the idea of retrospection if it no longer applies at key moments in the novel, when the voice becomes more immediate and direct, as if recounting something happening in the moment, or to take into account the way the voice seems to vanish and become almost like a third person narrative at times, with most of the story told through dialogue. Students using an agenda like this will think critically about the text, rather than simply using a label like first person retrospective voice and thinking 'job done' because they've used the right label. Labelling isn't what we want them to do in English.

Finally, and most importantly, the agenda places the emphasis fairly and squarely on significant knowledge about a text. It's not based on facts - the names of the characters, or the plot - who does what, when and how, nor on the life of the author, nor on broad, sweeping statements about the times in which he or she lived. It doesn't set out facts, in other words. Knowledge of these facts is assumed. The expectation is high, that students will know the names of key characters and what happens in the plot. These facts are just the starting-point, the most limited kind of information, upon which really rich knowledge is based. So having a knowledge organiser that is predominantly about the facts of the text seems to set the bar way too low. It's nothing like challenging enough for most students.

So, knowledge organisers (or agendas)? Yes definitely. But let's make sure they really are about knowledge in its richest, deepest sense rather than a limiting, thin accumulation of not very significant facts.

An example agenda for

This was constructed as a starting-point for teachers to develop with students.
Themes

Women and their place in the world

Men and masculinity - men as father-figures, oppressors, suitors

Parents and families, the orphan or motherless child

Education

Class, servants and carers

Childhood and adulthood

Love, sex and sexuality, marriage

Loss of innocence

Duty versus desire

Religion

The mysterious & supernatural

Changing environments

England and the wider world/colonialism

Violence

Madness

Genre

Romantic fiction - (including the Byronic hero)

The Gothic (settings, terror, the vulnerable heroine, ancestral guilt etc.)

Rites of passage novels

Elements of the 19th century social realist novel (e.g. the Logwood scenes)

Characterisation

Character contrasts and foils e.g. St John Rivers/Rochester, friends/sisters

Character types explored (and subverted?): the mother-figure, the potential romantic hero, the plain quiet heroine, male aggressors, female role models, family members

The mad wife

The absent mother-figure/surrogate or failed mothers: Bessie, Mrs Read, Miss Temple

Impact of 1st person voice on exploration of character - all seen through Jane's point of view

Use of names to signal key qualities of characters, for example Miss Temple

Narrative voice: single first person voice with shifting narrative perspective (sense of adult reflecting back stronger at times); direct address to the reader

Prose style: elements of metanarrative (e.g. address to reader); broader reflections on the place of women; though a recollected account, the present tense sometimes used at moments of intense drama or emotion

Structure: linear, episodic structure associated with rites-of-passage novels; the use of changing settings signals, new episodes; use of narrative time - broadly chronological telling

Symbols and motifs: doors opening and shutting (connects to episodic structure), colours (red, black, white), natural imagery, the moon (female symbol), symbolic use of weather (e.g. the storm and splitting of the chestnut tree), narrative as a motif (e.g. Jane reading picture books at the start of the novel), the attic and its significance, houses, dreams, the wedding veil

Settings and shifting settings: both the Gothic and the realistic elements in the novel represented in the settings at different points; settings part of the episodic structure of the novel

Ending: conventional romantic fiction ending, with a twist - the hero softened, subdued by injury and thus the heroine is in a position of greater power within the marriage.

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An agenda for knowledge - organising without false limits

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Nothing is more important than knowledge. It's very easy to say that; it trips off the tongue. However, it's much harder to define what that knowledge should be. Knowledge is boundless, so choices have to be made. What those choices should be is open to debate.

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How to tell you're reading a gothic novel – in pictures | Books | theguardian.com

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How to tell you're reading a gothic novel – in pictures | Books | theguardian.com

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How to tell you’re reading a gothic novel – in pictures

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Are some novels more gothic than others? We return to the genre’s roots in the 18th century for this definitive guide to gothic fiction

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War Poetry: Ted Hughes: 'Bayonet Charge'

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War Poetry: Ted Hughes: 'Bayonet Charge'

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I have already Ted Hughes's 'Bayonet Charge'. What follows is a set of loose notes. Anyone inclined to explore Hughes's treatment of war more generally can read my essay on that very subject said my piece about the AQA GCSE poetry syllabus and what it calls the 'Conflict' cluster. (I take 'cluster' to be the AQA's decorous abbreviation of a more accurate military term which, alas, cannot be used on a family-friendly blog.) Now I will do my best to help those unfortunates brought to this site in search of information about one particular poem: here.

1. 'Bayonet Charge' was published in Hughes's first collection, The Hawk in the Rain (1957). It belongs among a group of poems dealing with the First World War, in which the poet's father and uncle fought. Hughes grew up believing that 'the whole region [West Yorkshire] was in mourning' for that War.

2. 'Suddenly he awoke and was running'. Which is the dreamworld and which the reality? The poem wants to confuse the two: Hughes's protagonist wakes into nightmare.

3. '[R]aw / In raw-seamed hot khaki'. Here is the first-but at this stage still fairly inconspicuous-debt to 'Spring Offensive', Wilfred Owen's only poem about a bayonet charge. The repetition of 'raw' mimics a similar repetition in line 2 of Owen's poem: 'eased of pack-loads, were at ease'. And the word 'hot' prepares for a poem of suddenly changing temperatures: 'molten', 'cold', 'flame'. This technique is straight out of 'Spring Offensive': 'warm', 'sun', 'hot', 'burned', 'flames', 'cool'.

4. The first stanza is nothing if not sweaty. '[H]is sweat heavy' prepares for the perplexing image of lines 7-8: 'The patriotic tear that had brimmed in his eye / Sweating like molten iron from the centre of his chest'. It is hard to manipulate this image into anything approaching sense. Can tears sweat? Why has the tear been relocated from the eye to the chest? The poem clumsily seeks to convey the message that patriotism has given way to a visceral panic. There may be a distant memory of Sassoon's advice to Owen: 'Sweat your guts out writing'. Certainly, the reference to 'Bullets smacking the belly out of the air' contributes to that determined anatomical insistence.

5. 'He lugged a rifle numb as a smashed arm'. Keats said that we hate poetry which has palpable designs upon us. Hughes's designs, here, are all too palpable as he evokes the wounded body. But would a smashed arm really be 'numb'?

6. 'In what cold clockwork of the stars and the nations'. The stars and the nations-which is to say the powers celestial and terrestrial-are cold and mechanistic. They feel nothing.

7. 'He was running / Like a man who has jumped up in the dark and runs / Listening between his footfalls for the reason / Of his still running'. This simile offers little reward to the reader patient enough to unpick its convoluted syntax. The image is virtually tautological: he was running like someone would run if he found himself in the same situation as our protagonist.

8. 'Then the shot-slashed furrows // Threw up a yellow hare'. Yellow? Even the best animal poet since John Clare will not persuade anyone of that. The hare does bring to our attention one curious fact: it is the only other living creature in the poem. No soldiers are mentioned. For that matter, there are no corpses, either. The eye which is at liberty to spot a flushed hare might be expected to notice bodies of one kind or another. Perhaps, then, this poem does describe a dream?

9. 'And crawled in a threshing circle'. Cf. 'Spring Offensive': 'And crawling slowly back'.

10. 'He plunged past with his bayonet toward the green hedge'. Cf. 'Spring Offensive': 'plunged and fell away past this world's verge'. Or, if you prefer, cf. 'Dulce et Decorum Est': 'He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning'.

11. 'King, honour, human dignity, etcetera / Dropped like luxuries'. Yes, of course they did, but even Hughes knows that he is going through the motions. That word 'etcetera' admits that we have heard it all before, that the treatment is hackneyed, that 'Bayonet Charge' is too much a performance, a reconstruction. It has been done elsewhere, and more successfully.

12. 'To get out of that blue crackling air / His terror's touchy dynamite'. Odd that at the moment of defeat, Hughes ends the poem with its finest lines. ('[B]lue... air' convinces as 'yellow hare' does not.) The enjambment deliberately misleads: the reader might expect the protagonist simply to want to 'get out of that blue crackling air', that is, to escape from the battle. The continuation of the sentence conveys the panicked inventiveness of a protagonist who is still, despite everything, an active agent. We are left with the bizarre, powerful image of the soldier scrabbling at the air in an effort to rid it of his own desperate terror.

Hughes wrote far better poems than 'Bayonet Charge'. Owen wrote far better poems than Hughes about the War, as 'Spring Offensive' demonstrates. The question for the AQA examiners must be: why favour the copy over the original?

Postscript: for an account of Jane Weir's 'Poppies', see here. And here is my reading of Wilfred Owen's 'Futility'.

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I have already Ted Hughes's 'Bayonet Charge'. What follows is a set of loose notes. Anyone inclined to explore Hughes's treatment of war more generally can read my essay on that very subject said my piece about the AQA GCSE poetry syllabus and what it calls the 'Conflict' cluster.

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Student Page – Index to Blogs / GCSE Help! | alwayslearningweb

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Student Page – Index to Blogs / GCSE Help! | alwayslearningweb

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How Japan's youth see the kamikaze pilots of WW2 - BBC News

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How Japan's youth see the kamikaze pilots of WW2 - BBC News

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During World War Two, thousands of Japanese pilots volunteered to be kamikaze, suicidally crashing their planes in the name of their emperor. More than 70 years on, the BBC's Mariko Oi asks what these once revered men mean to Japan's youth.

Irrational, heroic and stupid: this was what three young people in Tokyo said when I asked them about their views on the kamikaze.

"Heroic?" queried Takumi, of his younger brother Shunpei's choice of word. "I didn't realise you were so right wing?"

It is difficult to verify the figures but it is believed that 3-4,000 Japanese pilots crashed their planes into an enemy target on purpose.

Only 10% of missions were believed to be successful but they sank some 50 Allied vessels.

Decades after the war, opinions on the kamikaze pilots remain divided, partly because their legacy has been used repeatedly as a political tool.

"During the seven years of the Allied occupation of Japan, the kamikaze reputation was one of the first things that they went after," Prof MG Sheftall from Shizuoka University explained.

The suicidal tactic was portrayed as "insanity".

"But when the Allies left in 1952, the right wing nationalists came out strongly and they have carried out multi-generational efforts to seize back control of the narrative," he says.

"Even in the 1970s and 80s, the vast majority of Japanese people thought of the kamikaze as something shameful, a crime committed by the state against their family members.

"But in the 1990s, the nationalists started testing the water, seeing whether they could get away with calling the kamikaze pilots heroes. When they didn't get much push back, they got bolder and bolder," he added.

Would you fight for your country?

A survey of several countries in 2015 by Win/Gallup found that 11% of Japanese people would be prepared to fight for their country.

In the 2000s, films such as For Those We Love and The Eternal Zero were released, portraying the kamikaze as just that - heroes.

But even Shunpei, the teenager who said they were heroic, admitted that his views had been affected by films and said that if Japan went to war tomorrow, he wouldn't be prepared to die for his country.

"It's because I cannot do it, " he said. "I find them heroic and courageous."

In fact, only 11% of Japanese nationals would be willing to fight for the country at all, according to a global survey by WIN/Gallup International. That places Japan at the bottom of the list.

The result is hardly surprising given that Japan's post-war generation was brought up under a pacifist constitution which banned the nation from having a military.

'I didn't want to die'

But is it true that all kamikaze pilots, who were mostly aged between 17 and 24, were wholly willing to die for their country?

When I spoke to two rare survivors, now in their 90s, the answer appeared to be no.

"I would say 60-70% of us were eager to sacrifice ourselves for the emperor, but the rest probably questioned why they had to go," 94-year-old Osamu Yamada told me at his home in Nagoya. Before he carried out his mission, the war ended.

"I was single at that time and had nothing holding me back so I had one genuine thought in mind and that is I must give myself up to defend Japan. But for those who had families, they must have thought very differently."

Keiichi Kuwahara, 91, was one of those who couldn't stop thinking about his family. He told me about the moment he was told to be part of the kamikaze unit.

"I felt myself going pale." He was only 17. "I was scared. I didn't want to die."

"I lost my father the year before, so it was only my mother and my older sister working to support the family. I was sending money to them from my salary. I thought, what will happen if I die? How will my family eat?"

So when his engines malfunctioned and he was forced to come back, he was relieved.

But on paper, Mr Kuwahara was considered to have volunteered. "Was I forced or did I volunteer? It is a difficult question to answer if you don't understand the essence of the military," he said.

Prof Sheftall says the pilots were asked to put their hand up in a big group if they didn't want to volunteer. Amid peer pressure, hardly anyone was able to say no to the mission.

The kamikaze are often compared in modern time to terrorists who carry out suicide missions, but Mr Kuwahara said that's not accurate.

"I think the two are completely different," said Mr Kuwahara. "Kamikaze actions were taken only because it was wartime. With the so-called Islamic State the attacks are unpredictable."

Mr Yamada thinks the word kamikaze, which means "divine wind" in Japanese, is misunderstood and used inappropriately in English without understanding the historical context of what Japan was facing at the time.

"It hurts me because kamikaze was my youth. It was an innocent thing. It really was something pure. It was much more sublime. But now it is being discussed as if we were induced," he said.

After the war Mr Kuwahara, who had been reluctant about his mission, said he felt liberated and that he needed to think about how to rebuild the country.

But Mr Yamada took a while to adjust.

"I was disoriented, I felt powerless, I lost my sense of self, as if my soul was pulled out of me," he recalled.

"As kamikaze pilots, we were all prepared to die, so when I heard that we were defeated, I felt like the bottom had fallen out of my world."

It was the necessity to work, get food and survive in post-war Japan that kept him going.

And the very man he had been willing to die for, Emperor Hirohito, ultimately played a role in him moving on from the war because he set an example by shaking hands with the Americans.

"The emperor, his majesty, was the heart of Japan. I think the presence of Emperor Hirohito helped the Japanese to recover from the war," he said.

For Japan's post-war generation, the experiences of former kamikaze pilots are unimaginable, even to their own family members.

"But when I think about his life, I notice that my life isn't mine alone," Mr Yamada's granddaughter Yoshiko Hasegawa told me. "I am obliged to live for those who could have been born as the children and grandchildren of the soldiers who died during the war."

Mr Kuwahara's grandson, meanwhile, is unaware of exactly what he went through as a 17-year-old trainee pilot.

"But that's the peaceful Japan I wanted to create," he said, smiling. To him, his grandson's ignorance is proof that the country has moved on from its painful past.
You can hear Mariko's documentary "The Last Kamikazes" on the BBC World Service on Tuesday 7 November. You can listen again via the World Service website or World Service Documentaries download.

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How Japan's youth see the kamikaze pilots of WW2

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During World War Two, thousands of Japanese pilots volunteered to be kamikaze, suicidally crashing their planes in the name of their emperor. More than 70 years on, the BBC's Mariko Oi asks what these once revered men mean to Japan's youth.

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This much I know about…a step-by-step guide to the writing question on the AQA English Language GCSE Paper 2 | johntomsett

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This much I know about…a step-by-step guide to the writing question on the AQA English Language GCSE Paper 2 | johntomsett

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I have been a teacher for 28 years, a Headteacher for 13 years and, at the age of 52, this much I know about a step-by-step guide to the writing question on the AQA English Language GCSE Paper 2.
In my previous post, I outlined a step-by-step guide to crafting answers to the AQA English GCSE Paper 1 writing task, question 5. In this post I outline a similar guide to writing an answer to the question 5 writing task in the AQA English GCSE Paper 2. It is designed for our students in the academic tier above our SEND students - the ones who have never quite engaged with their studies, the ones who rarely do any school work beyond the school day, the ones who find GCSEs a genuine struggle.
The step-by-step guide to question 5, the writing question, is an example of embedding in the students' brains a metacognitive process for tackling the 40 mark writing tasks. It will not, necessarily, make them better writers; however, it does help them demonstrate their writing at its best when under pressure in the examination hall.
The one specimen English Language Paper 2 we have from AQA has the following exemplar question 5:

What I have emphasised relentlessly to my students is to guard against spouting wildly upon the subject they have been asked to write about. Homework, the subject of the exemplar question, is a provocative topic which students can easily ramble on about, with little structure to their response.
I stress repeatedly that this task is a test of their ability to write deliberately in a certain form, for a specific audience, for a defined purpose. They have to identify the Form, Audience and Purpose (FAP) of the piece of writing before they do anything else.
I explain that the FAP will alter the style of their writing. I demonstrate this using the proforma below:

They then practise writing their own sentences using this similar blank proforma:

The other thing I teach explicitly is Janus-faced sentences. One of the two original thoughts I've ever had is the concept of Janus-faced sentences. In order to signpost the thread of the argument which should run through the answer to Paper 2, question 5, I teach students to begin each paragraph with a sentence which looks back to the previous paragraph's point and forward to the next point in the new paragraph.
Once I have taught these two deliberate features of writing to persuade, I model the step-by-step process to writing an answer to the Paper 2, question 5 task:

The mind mapping step is key. I spend a long time helping the students think beyond the first obvious thoughts through mind mapping topic after topic. As you can see from the following example questions, we have been doing a lot of thinking...

Even if the ideas the students have are a little thin, if they can express them deliberately in a style which suits their FAP, they can score highly.
I have seen good signs of deliberate writing. The following example demonstrates how one of our students has worked deliberately on beginning his paragraphs with Janus-faced sentences:
...and they will provide all the fun you will ever need. All the fun will ensure that your memories will be looked back on and treasured. On average 95% of teenagers have loved their new experiences and at least 80% of them want to try multiple new ones! The memories are forever and if you have no good ones, then what is there worth remembering? So, if you aren't convinced by the lure of great memories, then consider going somewhere with your friends. No one can deny it - going on holiday with your friends is the best type of holiday. Imagine the possibilities, the locations you can visit with your best friends; how you will be able to do what you want and how exciting it will be. Please don't waste your childhood, explore! Although these holidays with friends can be great, they also have their setbacks...
The students now have a firmly embedded tool with which they can approach the 40 mark question with confidence. They can write deliberately, having understood how the Form, Audience and Purpose of a piece of writing dictate their style of writing.

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This much I know about...a step-by-step guide to the writing question on the AQA English Language GCSE Paper 2

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I have been a teacher for 28 years, a Headteacher for 13 years and, at the age of 52, this much I know about a step-by-step guide to the writing question on the AQA English Language GCSE Paper 2.

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Phew...this one felt like a slog at times but it's done! 19 lessons, fully resourced with homework added in as well as revision/consolidation resources. Other than saving me a lot of time over the course of the first term, I hope it saves you guys some time as well. I've put together a quick commentary of the lessons to clarify any points.

Quick Notes

I developed this with my own classes in mind - a lower set with target grades ranging from 3-5.

All of the PowerPoints are in Kristen ITC so if you don't have this font installed, it may be formatted slightly differently.

The unit is integrated with some Paper 2, Question 5 language skills as well.

I haven't fully annotated any of the poems as I will be using a visualiser for that but the PowerPoints have key things to look at/analyse as well as some activities.

Consolidation homework to be completed after every poem (WPCSLIP)

Lesson 1: Welcome

A general overview of the SoW and expectations. A lesson to get the pupils sorted with books etc.

Lesson 2: Ozymandias

Beginning to understand the poem and eventually leading to a short paragraph analysing the language/structure of the poem.

Lesson 3: HOW to write a response

Mostly a skills lesson with a checklist for writing to support. Self-assessment at the end by colour coding their responses.

Lesson 4: Charge of the Light Brigade

Moving towards developing analysis of features & consolidation with a CLOZE paragraph.

Lesson 5: Storm on the Island

A focus on the contextual factors of the poem and writing a response against the AQA mark scheme. Self-assessment/peer-assessment opportunities.

Lesson 6: My Last Duchess

Using statements about power & gathering evidence from the poem - language skill. Analysing the key lines of the poem - emphasis on language/structural features used.

Lesson 7: London

Lots of contextual information on this one - designed to be a carousel activity. Slides can be printed off on A3 for ease. Students then focus on the language features used and analysing the effect this may have. CLOZE paragraph to consolidate. This can then be used to edit the CLOZE/improve it against the mark scheme.

Lesson 8: Checking Out Me History

Top Trumps between the different historical figures; students given a statement and asked to write a speech in response using the structure strips which you can find at the end of this post.

Lesson 9: Paper 2, Question 5 response to COMH statements

Writing their speech with extra challenge tasks. Self-assessment before being taken in for teacher assessment.

'Lesson' 10: Bayonet Charge (Homework)

Structured questions to take pupils through the poem with a WPCSLIP to complete afterwards.

Lesson 11: Review homework & creating statements

Ensuring understanding of their homework and then consolidating that understanding by creating statements which pupils find evidence for/against. Can be used as a 'warm up' or as an assessment piece.

Lesson 12: The Prelude

A focus on the juxtaposition of language but also the use of plosive sounds vs. sibilance as well. A CLOZE paragraph without the word bank - pupils to begin developing their own responses. Then used as a springboard for writing a second paragraph.

Lesson 13: Kamikaze & beginning to compare

A focus on Kamikaze & the power of nature. Using this to compare the poem to The Prelude & writing a paragraph with some scaffolding. Self/peer assessment and using this to close the feedback loop.

Lesson 14: War Photographer with P2Q5 task

Using a P2Q5 task as a springboard into War Photographer. Focus on the issues/themes first before getting into the language. I have a polaroid camera that I also use to get the pupils to understand the 'half-formed ghost' line.

Lesson 15: Poppies with comparative paragraph

Looking at the juxtaposition between domesticity and war - using this to compare War Photographer and Poppies.

Lesson 16: Exposure

Context - carousel lesson for pupils to mindmap factors. Exploding key quotes & moving into analysis.

Lesson 17: Remains

Linking through the idea of PTSD. Building independence - tackle it as an unseen poem with limited scaffolding.

Lesson 18: Tissue

I've left lots of slides on this one from when I went through the poem with my Y10 (mid/lower ability) group last year and I added their analysis onto the slides as we went. Hopefully useful!

Lesson 19: The Emigrée

Tackling this as an unseen poem and then reviewing as a whole class. Using this to write x2 paragraphs exploring the theme of 'loss' - possible to do a comparative essay on Poppies(?)

I left the remaining week in the term as a spill over/mop up week.

Revision cards with key quotations and questions to structure their analysis.

WPCSLIP to consolidate understanding of each poem. I print these on bright pink so that they are easy to find in their books. Can easily be done as a classroom activity but I set these for homework each week.

Structure Strips - inspired by Mr Lockyer on Twitter, I've developed the structure strips for Language P2Q5. So far, I've only done it for newspaper article and a speech but they can be edited to fit your needs!

Poetry speed dating! I LOVE this. I did this as an end of term 'party' type activity. I have some small LED candle lights which I put out and got some fruit juice & cups so they could 'break the ice'. Each pupil was given a different poem and their job was to find as many matches as they could using this sheet to help structure their conversations. It was a lot of fun and the kids really got into it!

You can download all of these resources FOR FREE from this link here.

If you would like to contribute via. PayPal then please do so but there is no obligation although it would be very much appreciated!

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Phew...this one felt like a slog at times but it's done! 19 lessons, fully resourced with homework added in as well as revision/consolidation resources. Other than saving me a lot of time over the course of the first term, I hope it saves you guys some time as well.

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A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens - Listen and Read