Well-being: What Schools Can Do

Everybody is different when it comes to their well-being, and schools can face difficulty in getting things right for everyone – I can’t see myself in full lycra doing a downward dog with my colleagues but I’d love a bacon roll on a Friday morning. However, I think there are two things that schools should do which are more than a nod to well-being and which for me personally have helped.

Behaviour

I firmly believe that building a positive culture around behaviour is crucial to staff well-being, and I am certain that it has a significant impact on how I feel about my job.  Centralised detentions help. When these are organised and managed well, a number of things happen. Time is freed up by teachers to do other things such as marking, planning and going home. They save the time it takes to arrange and to do the detention. And a clear and consistent message is there for everyone in the school – there is a consequence to poor behaviour.

My own well-being is affected by what happens in the classroom. I love English and I love teaching English. When I can do this properly, when I can plan the optimal sequence of lessons, with no worry that the lesson will be derailed, then those hours I spend in the classroom are a joy. There’s also a real intellectual challenge in teaching well that I relish, and ineffective behaviour policies reduce the chance for this to happen. When you have to design lessons purely to mitigate poor behaviour, they are always less effective.

Also, when behaviour systems are clear and supportive, and there are fewer instances of disruption, it allows me a clear focus on supporting pupils who do struggle with their behaviour, to discuss how we can solve these challenges. It helps to build those positive relationships because there are fewer instances of disruption, fewer fires to fight. I can concentrate on the real needs of pupils that I teach. Being able to do this is part of what makes teaching rewarding. If our behaviour systems seem constructed to make these kind of things harder, then staff will be unhappy.

Behaviour management is an important role of the teacher, and I don’t abdicate responsibility in the name of well-being. Whatever the policy a school has – and I acknowledge that other ways do work – a massive consideration should be in how it supports teachers to do what they do best.

Focus on the Final Foot

Schools should encourage collaboration and the sharing of resources. I would go further and suggest that schools should provide ready-made schemes and lessons for staff to use as the foundation of what they teach. In Completing the Revolution: Delivering on the promise of the 2014 National Curriculum, John Blake makes a case for why we should have what he calls “oven ready resources”.

As well as lowering their workload, such “oven ready” resources will also help teachers focus their professional expertise on “the final foot” between them and the children they teach in the classroom. Instead of hours making different worksheets, their attention can all be on using those resources to help the children they are teaching.

I wrote more about my feelings here, but I don’t think it is right for every member of a department trying to source and resource everything from scratch, particularly new teachers. Of course, there is enormous value in thinking deeply about everything that you teach, but there is also a time cost.  Better to provide as much as we can and say, now make it appropriate for your style, for your class and their needs.

There are  workload demands in putting these resources together and ensuring that they are of decent quality, so schools need to consider this. I also understand that for some teachers – and I can be like this too- teaching someone else’s lessons might feel restricting, so we should never impose that each lesson must always be taught as is.

There are many others things schools can do that impact on workload and well-being, but these feel to me the simplest and most impactful strategies.

Making a Knowledge Organiser in English Literature: A case study

Designing a knowledge organiser is a difficult task and there are multiple decisions that affect their construction. They are complex but the idea behind this post is simple: Here is a Knowledge Organiser for Animal Farm and here’s how I made it.

Principles

I want the knowledge to be such that retrieval practice is easily facilitated, that information can be elaborated upon, and the material can be organised in multiple ways – all of which will support student revision and teacher pedagogy. I want things that are high utility, that are foundational for successful study of the text. I want to guarantee that 100% of students understand 100% of the material, but it is not the whole domain and will be supplemented by lots of explicit teaching. (I have written about the evidence behind all of this for the Chartered College if you want to read more.)

There are maybe some generalisable principles for English Literature as a whole, but I see this as an example of a Knowledge Organiser for Animal Farm, and not a template for all literature texts.

Content

Key concepts: For this section I wanted to include some of the big ideas that pupils would need to consider. The biggest problem in this area was trying to define complex political ideas such as socialism while ensuring that it fitted in a small space. There are some compromises here, but none which wouldn’t be elaborated on constantly in class. And this is the point – if that sentence on a knowledge organiser was everything then it wouldn’t be enough. But when it is a reminder of a concept I have taught fully then that is a different matter. Another thing I did was add in adjectival forms of the words in sentence where appropriate so pupils could use in a range of contexts.

Timeline of events: I tried to help pupils build a chronology, most of which are paralleled by events in the text. I chose to use the present tense, perhaps giving more of a sense of history as living events. You can see how the section is very easily quizzable. One consideration was whether to continue the timeline beyond the publication of the text e.g. 1953: Stalin dies or 1949 Creation of the People’s Republic of China. In the end, I felt the publication of the text was an appropriate place to end the timeline, as anything after did not feed in to the ideas as intended. Also, space. I still think it is important to explore some of the later developments of communism for that wider conceptual understanding.

Chapter summaries: I considered whether this was necessary but Animal Farm is a book where chapters are sometimes indistinguishable from each other and events are more difficult to place. Things are the same; they just get a little worse each time. I decided to summarise with a simple statement that captured the essence of the chapter. I also create a rhyming cue to help them to remember it e.g. “Chapter 8: Totalitarian State.” In hindsight, this hasn’t proved as useful when teaching so it might go on a later revision.

Character and themes: For this section, I created a clear line of argument about a character or theme. This was then supported by 2 key quotations. If it were just quotations, I don’t think it is as easy to memorise or contextualise so it would lead to rereading as studying and isolated quotations without context. The thesis was for me more effective than just a word as a cue e.g. Boxer – see here for more on developing a thesis. These quotations are possibly not always the best ones on reflection.

Ideas about Organisation and structure

In addition to definitions of these, I have tried to exemplify how we can write about them. This is to stop the listing of terminology without interesting analysis.

The Knowledge Organiser is one part of a well-designed curriculum. It should find itself fully embedded in the teaching and study that takes place. If it is integrated then it becomes highly useful interconnected knowledge which complements what is happening in class. Ideally, we should make them from scratch. Some aspects of this one come from my own understanding of what our pupils need. In making it from scratch, I deepened my understanding of the text.

I’m really interested in hearing feedback. What have I missed? How would you change it? What are you doing in your departments?

Can’t Revise, Won’t Revise

When I realised my year 11s were not revising English as much as I wanted this year, I first went to my usual strategies: 1) long rants about why they should study and 2) giving them more revision materials – as if the solution to them not studying the things I had already given them would be to give them even more things!

But after a little more discussion and some pupil interviews, it was clear just how much they were struggling with the demands of many challenging GCSEs – and every teacher expected them to revise heavily for their subject. These were pupils for whom securing a 4 in English would be an excellent achievement and for many of them the fact isn’t that they were refusing to revise, but that they didn’t know where to start. And even when they started, some didn’t really know the most effective ways to proceed. Here are some strategies I took to try and address things.

Making the first step easy

The Behavioural Insights Team have developed the EAST framework (Easy; Attractive; Social; Timely) as a way of changing behaviour. They say that the “small, seemingly irrelevant details that make a task more challenging or effortful (what we call ‘friction costs’) can make the difference between doing something and putting it off – sometimes indefinitely.”

With two English GCSEs, and 4 papers, 3 texts, 15 poems, terminology, strategy, etc to consider, you can see why some pupils struggle to get going. For those who don’t know where to start, we have to make the first step easy. And this means creating a single tangible step which can then lead logically to a next step. For example, ‘memorise quotations’ could become: Identify 5 quotations for Banquo > Write 5 quotations on flashcards > Write a cue on the other side > Use the Leitner system to memorise. The abstract becomes concrete.

But even this can fall down on the first step because pupils might not have flashcards. They might not know where to start identifying quotations. They need to know what a cue is. Any friction can lead to giving up. When setting up these initial practices with my class, I provided the quotations and also provided flashcards. (A6 size are optimal – they are easier to carry in a pocket and there is no temptation to fill the cards with lots of text.)

I have often heard some pupils say that you can’t really revise for English Language but there are definitely many ways that they can, but without a tangible first step they won’t, so this was a particular focus for me. Any urge to just hand out tons of sheets of paper was met with the question: what is their first step?

Model desirable difficulty

Even if a first step is taken, it’s really hard to sustain revision. And let’s not pretend that we are all that different from pupils. I have just checked twitter, eaten some peanuts, chosen a different album to listen to in the space of writing this paragraph. And this whole blog post has been sitting unfinished for weeks, so pupils don’t have the monopoly on procrastination and giving up.

But we do need to make it easier for pupils not to give up.  When things get tricky, pupils will always default to the easiest option, so they will reread notes to feel that they are fluent, they will revise subjects they like or are successful in, they will avoid the tricky topics. All because they are hard and it is not enjoyable. One way is to help them understand that it’s not too much of a problem if revision is difficult. In fact, it’s quite helpful.

The Leitner system is an effective way of building in retrieval practice, but it can be a challenge when trying to memorise a lot of new material, because there will be quite a lot of failure. (If you are not sure what I am talking about here, watch this short video).

When introducing any strategy like this, I would recommend spending a lesson using the strategy, pausing regularly to discuss what is happening, reflecting with pupils before, during and after the process. With my class, this was important because it gave them a reference point for when they were struggling on their own. Because we started with a small number of quotations/ flashcards, there was an element of success too.

The pupils who always seem to find revision and study easy are those who can self-regulate. Zimmerman (2002) sets out these features of a self-regulated learner: Setting short and long term goals; using appropriate strategies to attain these goals; monitoring their performance; restructuring their physical and social context; managing time efficiently; self-evaluating; attributing causation to results; adapting future methods. None of these come easily, so modelling each stage can help to stop pupils giving up.

When sharing or devising revision strategies with pupils, try to identify those that have elements of this built in. For example, the Leitner system has the monitoring part and also allows pupils to adapt their methods. Techniques like exam wrappers can also account for lots of stages in this cycle.

Build revision in

By the time pupils get to what Sir Alex Ferguson would call ‘squeaky bum time’, they have filled several exercise books and have a locker or a desk drawer overflowing with revision materials and handouts. Mine are no exception. I have changed quite a lot about teaching GCSE from the start for future classes, which I have written about here, such as using exercise books as revision guides, so I wanted to build in similar principles for anything that I handed out. Anything given as a resource or a task in class would be designed to become a revision resource.

An example is this handout for a lesson on George Orwell. I would previously have given a handout with all the information and maybe some reflection or consolidation activities linking to the text. I still did those, but I wanted this useful knowledge to last and not be forgotten. So an adaptation of the Cornell note-taking system was created. The summary helps with the immediate consolidation, but the design of cues should facilitate retrieval practice later on. It turned a simple sheet of text into a revision resource. Joe Kirby has written about Renewable Resources as an important tool to reduce teacher workload and students using these resources as part of later revision certainly reduces workload.

The goal in all of this was not for me to do the work, but for me to get things going. I jump-started the car but they drove it.*

 

 

*I like this last line but please don’t think about this metaphor too much as it probably isn’t as profound as I think it is.

From here to there: structuring simple narrative shifts

Conceiving, planning and writing a decent narrative in the space of 45 minutes is incredibly difficult. One reason is that students don’t have lots of experience of short narratives. They watch feature length movies and (if they read) they read novels. So their idea of a narrative is one of lots of things happening. Yet sometimes the only major thing that ‘happens’ in a narrative is a shift in perspective, in attitude, in tone. Edit: Please read Nick Wells’ post on Shifts in Fiction for more on this.

This week, I have built a series of lessons for my year sevens around a short film called The Present, using it as a model to teach some aspects of narrative writing. In one lesson, we experimented with different paragraphs, focusing on the boy’s change of attitude towards the dog.

Sequence 1:

First paragraph: Attention on game – dog is in background > Second paragraph: Attention split between game and dog > Third paragraph: Full attention on dog.

Or sequence 2:

First paragraph: Describe how stupid the dog’s behaviour is > Second paragraph: Describe how funny the dog’s behaviour > Third paragraph: Describe how AWESOME the dog’s behaviour is.

Instead of just writing about all the things that were happening, there was a conscious focus on how the attitude of the boy shifted, and how we might present this.

While students may not have encountered many short stories, they have read, seen and witnessed many of these moments where we go from here to there, where there is a perception or an attitude shift.

For example, Susan Boyle on Britain’s Got Talent has 232,719,477 views at the time I am writing this. There are not many better examples of a shift in perception than her story. From here: everyone is laughing and cynically judging > she sings > to there: standing ovations and adulation. How does that narrative work from her perspective? From Simon Cowell’s? From an audience member’s? There are many clips which follow a similar narrative arc on these types of shows. And any dramatic scene or sequence from a book has simple shifts like this.

Imagine that we watched only the beginning and end of that Susan Boyle clip, or did the same for The Present. Then we would be left with the black box and could try to figure out what happened to cause that shift. In exploring the black box, we can then develop interesting narratives.

You could provide prompts to generate these interesting narratives:

  • From hate to love
  • From despair to hope
  • From mistrust to horror

In exams, students will have photo prompts. When we have photo prompts, it’s interesting to consider whether this is the ‘here’ or the ‘there’. Is this picture the ‘here’, and we start from laughter and move towards something else? Perhaps one of their photographs shows someone in the background. Perhaps it isn’t their camera and the photos take a sinister turn. Or maybe it is the ‘there’, and the laughter has been a shift from some growing tension.

It can also be a useful strategy to try to turn some recurring default narratives into something more interesting. Let’s take the old favourite boy-plays-in-cup-final-and-scores-the-winning-goal narrative. What will be the most interesting shifts here?  From here: the optimism when stepping up to the penalty> the miss> to there: desolation and shame. From here: the father expecting his son to miss>goal> to there pride and guilt.

So that is my new strategy: ‘From here to there’. Next week, I will share an additional strategy for building narratives about two men with moustaches: ‘to me to you’.

The Pieces of a Thesis

The thesis statement is the expression of the line of argument to be made in the essay. It’s an important tool in the construction of a good essay, and helps to hit some of the criteria at the upper end of the (AQA) markscheme e.g. “Critical, exploratory, conceptualised response to task and whole text.” But the statement can’t come until the idea is fully conceptualised, so how do we get students to the position where they can conceptualise the line of argument, then create the thesis statement?

Lessons

A good approach when teaching an individual lesson is to frame it around a thesis of its own. So, instead of teaching a lesson on propaganda in Animal Farm, you might frame it as a thesis: corrupt leaders use propaganda and lies to gain and maintain power. This means that new information can attach itself to a clear line of argument, meaning that it can be used to help form the thesis statement later. Instead of a lesson on Ignorance and Want in A Christmas Carol, it is framed as a thesis: Ignorance and Want are used by Dickens to emphasise the consequences of mankind’s abandonment of the poor.

I think it is important that we read the book before we study it. That way, any lesson can start from the whole rather than a part. We cannot have a full conceptual understanding without knowing the whole text.

Time spent explicitly teaching and modelling planning is time well spent. It never feels like it, when we have so much content to cover, but plans that originate as mind-maps won’t have that clear argument throughout. One way is to model the construction of a thesis statement in multiple iterations. The first shows a thesis statement of sorts and how we can improve/adapt it each time.

  1. Napoleon is a negative character.
  2. Napoleon is a cruel leader.
  3. Napoleon is a cruel leader who manipulates the animals.
  4. Napoleon is a cruel leader who manipulates the animals through fear.
  5. Napoleon is a cruel leader who manipulates the animals through fear and propaganda.
  6. Orwell presents Napoleon as a cruel leader who manipulates the animals through fear and propaganda.
  7. Orwell uses Napoleon to criticise the way that cruel leaders keep power through fear and propaganda.

But I think the place where we can develop this most is in our students’ revision.

Revision

It is useful to design revision materials in such a way as they help students to form lines of argument about characters, themes, events in the texts that they are studying.

Knowledge Organisers are useful tools, but the presentation of them in hierarchical lists can be a little unhelpful when trying to organise them into more complex conceptual ideas. In our Animal Farm Knowledge Organiser, we have placed key quotations next to a line of argument in order to reinforce the idea that we don’t just memorise a quotation or a fact about a character in isolation. Instead of memorising a quotation about a character, they are memorising a quotation that supports an idea about that character.

These can make very simple Do Now activities in class. You can share the quotation and ask how they support the argument. You can have the statement and ask them to write out the corresponding quotations. You can ask them to write down any other quotations which also explore the theme or those which oppose it.

We should encourage students to make flashcards to memorise quotation. Then we have a tool for all sorts of activities to help create conceptualised responses. For example, a simple activity (for class or study) is to give a thesis statement and ask them to go through each quotation and ask the question ‘How does this quotation support the statement?’ (This is also a useful strategy for remembering the quotation itself: see this blog on memorising quotations I wrote for Bradford Research School) We can provide statements and exam questions for students, but the goal ultimately is to ensure that they can do this for themselves.

Another activity is to pick two (or more) quotations from the stack at random and ask which argument would be supported by these quotations.

To prepare for extract questions, we should pick pages and scenes that we want to explore further. If the extract is on Lady Macbeth, we ask what aspect of Lady Macbeth do we see here? Does this contrast, parallel, echo, develop from, lead to something else? Which quotations support this? It’s quite easy for students to do this themselves, and this allows them to develop an ‘extract to whole’ approach.

If studying poetry, students can easily come up with thesis statements for individual poems and memorise quotations for each poem. It’s important that their revision prepares them for the comparative focus of the exam. So, poems should generally be studied in pairs. Select any two poems and write a thesis statement comparing the poems. When memorising quotations, we should always ask, which other poem does this quotation link to and why? By studying poems in this way, it is much easier to develop that conceptualised, comparative response.

The two main problems with using quotations in essays is a) they don’t know enough so they use the only ones they know (“solitary as an oyster” anyone?) or b) they know loads but can’t choose the right ones for the essay, so the essay becomes a series of disparate points rather than a conceptualised sustained essay. These strategies help them to memorise more quotations, but also to help them pick the apposite ones to support their ideas.

A Visit From Imtiaz Dharker

I spent a lovely hour on Friday listening to Imtiaz Dharker, who visited Dixons Kings as part of the Ilkley Literature Festival. I came hoping for the cheat-sheet on Tissue, but I left her talk with a renewed love for poetry and especially for Tissue. Here are some of her words and some of my thoughts.

“Poetry travels without a passport.”

Dharker read some of her poems, including Tissue, Blessing and This Room, explained the inspiration behind them and shared moments from her life. A running theme from the talk was the way that we tend to close ourselves off, pigeonhole each other, say how things should be. “Listen for the human voice that cuts across borderlines,” says Dharker. Dharker says that she is a “Scottish Muslim Calvinist adopted by India and married into Wales” and that, like her own, “your identity is always travelling.” I had no idea that This Room and Blessing, two poems I have taught in the past, were based on her own experiences in India. It was nice to draw this line through those poems and now Tissue, all poems about breaking free, casting aside restrictions that we may face. We see this in Tissue, the way that “The sun shines through/ their borderlines” and we see the “breaking out” and “lifting out” of This Room and the “flow”, “rush” and “bursts” of Blessing. Poetry describes this freedom but poetry is this freedom. It certainly freed Dharker: “Poetry gave me a different kind of freedom.”

 “Listen for the human voice”

Sometimes it’s hard to explain what poetry is or to put into words why it matters. Who better to do this than a poet: “Poetry says things that the heart knows before the mind has a chance to catch up.” The idea of poetry giving a voice is important as when Dharker was a child she used to have ideas, but “my tongue couldn’t catch up.” A moment that changed her relationship with poetry and the world was when her teacher Miss Murray noticed her poem, loved it, typed it up and published it in the school magazine: “It changed my whole world. It changed everything.”

 “One of the jobs of poetry is to pay attention to the detail”

Dharker explained the inspiration for Tissue – a note from her father in the back of the Quran. This was seen at the time when she and her father were out of touch and she hadn’t spoken to him for a long time. This “flimsy piece of paper” brought home to her that it is family and relationships that matter, not the structures we build, not bricks and mortar and stone. Tissue is “written like a love poem” to remember her father. The connections between the most precious and the flimsiest things is explored. Paper is precious and flimsy. Human connections are precious and flimsy. Tissue as a love poem is a wonderful lens to view it through.

Dharker patiently and enthusiastically answered our students’ questions about Tissue. After the talk, some students stayed and had their anthologies autographed. At least one starstruck teacher asked for a selfie, but he will remain nameless…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Changes for a Stronger Foundation at GCSE

I’m not a believer in doing lots and lots of new things for the sake of it. If things are working, leave them alone. But there are times when it is good to reflect on what is working and if it means significant changes then so be it. For September, I was asked to tweak the scheme of work I created on Animal Farm a couple of years ago. It would have been fine to change the odd thing, but I realised that this was an opportunity for us to make a few more ambitious changes in how we start the GCSE course. Here are some of the changes.

Reading the book before we study the book

The change that felt most significant was to begin by reading the book from start to finish without studying it. It’s very difficult to study a text until it has been read fully because so many important elements of the text remain hidden. We cannot comment properly on structure, characterisation, context and themes until we see how things pan out over the course of a text. Take Old Major’s speech in Chapter 1. We can study it in isolation on first reading as a rousing speech, a piece of rhetoric. Yet if we study it after reading the book, a line like this reads quite differently: “You, Boxer, the very day that those great muscles of yours lose their power, Jones will sell you to the knacker, who will cut your throat and boil you down for the foxhounds.”

In addition, when we study a book as we read it, there is an arbitrariness in what we study when. We read a few pages or a chapter then do a lesson based on what we have just read. This can lead to lessons which are dictated by the page number not a deliberate decision. And every lesson is weaker because it is only based on a chapter or what has come before; it is never about the whole book. In the old scheme, we studied Old Major’s speech first only because it comes first in the book. Now it is one element in a lesson that focuses on how power corrupts noble ideas.

Using exercise books as revision guides

Last year I was horrified when year 11 students started clearing out their lockers before their exams were over. There was a skip full of exercise books and I was disappointed that this rich revision resource was wasted. Students clearly didn’t value their books. We need to remind students that they can go back and read answers, read feedback, look at exam questions and resources glued in their books, and we can make explicit how to use exercise books as their ready-made revision guides. We can also design tasks which lend themselves well to restudy.

One way we have encouraged this is by using the Cornell note-taking method as we read the book. After each chapter of the book, we ask students to write up their notes. We explicitly model what good examples of these notes should look like and what each part of the notes is designed to do. In making the rationale explicit, we hope to ensure these students value their notes pages from day one and their exercise books are not quite as disposable.

Explicitly teaching revision strategies

As well as an assembly for all students into the most effective revision strategies, we have explicitly taught how revision should look in English as part of this scheme. We have tried to concentrate on three clear and simple messages around revision using Knowledge Organisers: Retrieval; Elaboration; Organisation. (You can see in this post from our school blog.) General principles like these then get exemplified in lessons. For example, how do we revise quotations in English? We can’t just say ‘use flashcards’ – we have to model how to make them; how to use them; how to reflect on whether they have been successful. It has taken quite a bit of lesson time to teach these strategies properly, but I hope that the benefits will be seen over the next two years. I certainly don’t want to be frustrated in a year about a lack of revision when we can be very explicit from the start about what is expected.

Starting with the Knowledge Organiser

The magical land of gained time gave me an opportunity to really get to grips with a proper Knowledge Organiser. I have spent a lot of time trying to get the general principles of these right as part of my work with Bradford Research school and the Animal Farm Knowledge Organiser helped me to explore it practically. To be honest, it is really hard to produce a decent knowledge organiser, and mine went through several iterations. By really getting to grips with some of the most fundamental aspects of the text, it put me in a much better position to design the scheme. Do Now quizzes, homework tasks and revision were much easier to produce when I had a clearly designed Knowledge Organiser. My knowledge of the text improved. When I created the last scheme, the Knowledge Organiser was an afterthought and was little more than a revision guide.

It’s dangerous to make any bold claims about the effectiveness of these approaches a couple of years before these students sit their exams, but I’m confident that we are laying a strong foundation by reconsidering our approach in this way.

Evidence to Essence

With so many quotations to consider learning for GCSE English Literature, we have to find ways to prioritise and the best quotations to focus on in our study are those which are high-utility – they can be used in a wide range of essay questions and they offer lots of exploration for analysis and links across the text.

One example of high-utility quotations are images which help us move from evidence to essence, the quotations that take us right to the heart of a theme or a character. We can say lots about them on their own or in the scene they appear, but they also allow us a lens, a viewpoint, to deal with the character or theme across the text.  I’m going to illustrate this with examples from Romeo and Juliet.

Tybalt is a storm

In Act 1 Scene 5, Capulet asks Tybalt, “Why, how now, kinsman! wherefore storm you so?” when he is enraged by Romeo’s presence at the ball. Shakespeare’s use of the word ‘storm’ is so apposite because not only does it describe how he is feeling and acting at this moment in the play, but it encapsulates the character so perfectly. And by using this lens, we can then explore the storm and how it is seen elsewhere in the text. If we think of the way a storm builds, the way we can see the sky darkening and the air changing, so we can feel Tybalt’s dark presence on the rest of the play. He’s only in three scenes (if we exclude his corpse in Act 5 Scene 3) and speaks 17 lines and a total of 205 words, yet we know he is lurking, ready to enact revenge. The storm brewing is a symbolic reminder too of fate and the presence of death introduced in the prologue.

Now for some further interesting ideas. The only other use of ‘storm’ in the play is in Act 3 Scene 2. Juliet asks “What storm is this that blows so contrary?” as she takes in news of Tybalt’s death. Then Capulet, seeing Juliet’s tears in Act 3 Scene 5, states “But for the sunset of my brother’s son/ It rains downright.” The storm has ‘passed’ but the rain has started!

Romeo has a soul of lead

In Act 1 Scene 4, Romeo states “I have a soul of lead.” There are lots of things we can say about this quotation and how it shows how Romeo is feeling, we can analyse the connotations of lead, what it means to have a heavy soul etc. But moving from evidence to essence, this image encapsulates Romeo as someone who cannot escape a burden. Take this, and we can explore the various ‘burdens’ that Romeo carries, the things that weigh heavy on him:

  • Love for Rosaline: “bound more than a mad-man is”; “Under love’s heavy burden do I sink.”
  • Fate: “death-marked love”; “Some consequence yet hanging in the stars”; “fortune’s fool”
  • His family name: “Is she a Capulet? /O dear account! my life is my foe’s debt.”
  • The law: “Ha, banishment! be merciful, say ‘death;’ /For exile hath more terror in his look”
  • Love for Juliet: “Thy beauty hath made me effeminate/ And in my temper soften’d valour’s steel!”
  • His temper: “fire-eyed fury be my conduct now!”
  • Loyalty to Mercutio: “Either thou, or I, or both, must go with him.”

You can see how useful this image is a wonderful springboard for exploring a wide range of ideas across the text. In Act 5 Scene 3, Romeo speaks of a “lightning before death” and it is only with his death that he relinquishes the burdens. There is also the huge ‘burden’ of the genre and the fact that Romeo, as a tragic hero, is bound and beholden to the rules of the tragic hero. His burden is his hamartia, his fatal flaw: impetuousness.

Love and Death

Romeo’s final soliloquy in Act 5 Scene 3 is up there with “To be or not to be…” and “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…” in the realm of Shakespeare’s greatest explorations of life and death. In here, death is many things: a conquering army; a monster; a lover; a monstrous lover; a pilot; a guide. A good exercise with students is to consider which one of these best encapsulates the idea of death in the play – which image gets to the essence?

We can do the same for love. Is love best encapsulated as “a smoke raised with the fume of sighs”, “a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes”, “a sea nourish’d with lovers’ tears”, “a madness most discreet”, “a choking gall” or “a preserving sweet”? Or something else entirely?

These are images that are explicit in the text. We can find others, some of which work well to encapsulate a character e.g. “solitary as an oyster”* and some less effective – I’m not sure if “Juliet is the sun” is the best to get to her essence, perhaps “yet a stranger in the world” is better? We can also think of our own metaphorical lenses to view characters through. An example of this I use is that Jacob Marley is a mirror. While not explicitly stated in the text, we can view him as a mirror to Scrooge and a mirror to the reader. By seeing him like this, it elevates our responses a little and helps us to explore Dickens’ intentions and the context a little better.

What do you think? Which images from texts you are studying best encapsulate the characters/ themes?

*Not from Romeo and Juliet, although I would like to see a cameo from Scrooge in the play.

Focus on the Final Foot: Why I’m in Favour of Ready Made Resources

Last week I read this article from John Blake: “The solution to the workload crisis? Stop teachers designing their own lessons.” I found myself agreeing with the sentiments, so I read the full report: Completing the Revolution: Delivering on the promise of the 2014 National Curriculum. I thought it was sensible and attempting to address some very real problems in education – I would recommend reading it.

I understand the issues that some people have with what Blake terms “oven ready resources” and the fear of robotic automatons reading from a script, but my concerns at present are the unhealthy hours that teachers work. Something has to give. My sense is that far from being a restriction, having some well crafted, quality-assured resources and curriculum programmes will help to sharpen up the way that we teach material and improve our work-life balance. The report calls this the Final Foot:

As well as lowering their workload, such “oven ready” resources will also help teachers focus their professional expertise on “the final foot” between them and the children they teach in the classroom. Instead of hours making different worksheets, their attention can all be on using those resources to help the children they are teaching.

In my school, we have well-resourced lessons, and the benefit of these is enormous, letting me concentrate on this so-called final foot. Here are a couple of examples to illustrate it.

Brushing up on subject knowledge

In my post last week, I listed some sources for finding out about George Orwell and the context for Animal Farm. While I try to be efficient by listening to audiobooks and podcasts on the commute, time is finite. Rather than deskilling me and making me less likely to understand what I am teaching, having a good starting point for a lesson frees me up to pursue those aspects that increase my understanding and therefore improve my teaching.

Recently I taught The Charge of the Light Brigade, starting with a pre-planned lesson that already had retrieval practice questions in the Do Now, a model answer which was ready to unpick and even something simple: the poem copied and pasted on slides ready for me to annotate in class. This meant I had more time to think deeply about the poem, reread some notes and explore the context further. It took me to the original Times article which Tennyson would have read. You can see echoes in the language/tone of the poem in the article e.g. “ they flew into the smoke of the batteries”; “exhibition of the most brilliant valour, of the excess of courage, and of a daring”. I learnt much more about the Crimean War and understood that the Crimean War was the first where newspaper reports were ‘live’, albeit taking three weeks to arrive. From then I pursued the shift from event to news to poetry and the complications of stories told third hand, then the links to Ozymandias.

Crafting explanations

A good explanation can be the making of a lesson, but it can often be an afterthought – the planned lesson is seen as the endpoint. It’s all very well having a lesson ready and the notion that you’ll explain dramatic irony here or tell them what a subordinate clause is there. Yet there is an art to explaining these things – use the wrong words and they just don’t get it, or worse a misconception becomes ingrained (see other pitfalls in this great piece by Tom Boulter). A great explanation needs examples and non-examples, it needs analogy, it needs prior thought about the misconceptions that might arise. I think teachers should practise more, and a great explanation gets better with practice. These things can happen when teachers plan their own lessons, but when teachers plan all their lessons from scratch, this’ll happen less, or in the evening or weekend.

An example of a great explanation is this one from @positivteacha on iambic pentameter. You can see how deeply he has considered the sequencing of it and the examples he uses as exemplification. I used this to reconsider my own teaching of iambic pentameter when looking at Ozymandias. I used these lines to explain the metre: “Who said: ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone’” and “And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command” then asked them to see whether the following line was written in iambic pentameter: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:” which led to some great moments of discussion. Then three questions to explore: How does the regular iambic pentameter combine with the irregular rhyme scheme to reinforce Shelley’s ideas?/ How does the iambic pentameter serve to diminish Ozymandias’ power?/ How does the regular iambic pentameter help to reinforce the idea of the everlasting and inevitable power of nature? Having ‘taught’ iambic pentameter for many years, this is the first time I gave it any real degree of thought. Again, this could happen without pre-planned lessons, but I’m not sure it would.

 

We have this norm in teaching, where it is taken as a given that teachers work long hours. Most professions wouldn’t entertain the thought – the job finishes when it does. We all want to do our best, but when this means that we have zero time for ourselves, our profession is unhealthy and our lives are unhappy.

Would I prefer to plan all my lessons from scratch? Probably. But the reality is that it takes time, and that time often comes in the evenings and weekends. Whether you are someone who disagrees with John Blake on this issue or not, I am firmly in the camp that teaching at present is an unsustainable profession, so I would welcome a range of high quality curriculum and lesson resources. It will make me a better teacher.

As Blake concludes the report:

No textbook or worksheet will ever substitute for a positive relationship between teacher and pupil but these “oven ready resources” can underpin those relationships by reducing teacher workload on activities which can be done effectively by external bodies. That then expands the time and energy available to teachers to deploy their professional skills where they will make the most difference, in “the final foot” between them and their pupils, in the classroom.

Written in the Tsars: Context in Animal Farm

In addressing context in Animal Farm, there is a temptation to write about a character/event and then just tick off the context with a match to Russian history. Orwell uses Napoleon to represent Joseph Stalin– that kind of thing. Even when there is a huge depth of knowledge about historical events, it can still feel like a bolt on. I’m keen to improve this, and this blog is my way of thinking through how I will approach it with my students.

Making more insightful comments about Russia

A knowledge of the Russian Revolution, which manifests itself in these comments matching events in the book to events in history, is not a bad thing. We should still integrate that knowledge into answers but refine the way that this knowledge is used.  One way is just to deal with the straightforward Napoleon = Stalin as before but then explore why Orwell would have chosen this way of representing the character/event. So instead of just x=y we move to x illuminates y. Napoleon isn’t Stalin. Rather, Orwell presents the character of Napoleon in such a way as to highlight, exaggerate and caricature aspects of Stalin that he is criticising or condemning. And instead of saying that Boxer simply represents the Russian proletariat, we can comment on why the image of a strong workhorse was chosen by Orwell: ‘By equating the Russian proletariat with a powerful beast such as Boxer, Orwell highlights just how…’ The question of ‘Why is this an appropriate representation of the figure/event?’ is worth asking and a useful way of developing responses.

The destruction of the Soviet myth

Dealing with each individual character in this way might still lead to a limited response, and we still have  context  tagged on to the end of a paragraph as an afterthought. I think that the next step is to be very clear about the way that the context of Russian history directly influences Orwell’s choices. It’s the very reason for the book’s existence. That can be seen in the characters, but it’s also the choices he makes around language, structure and form. In this way context becomes much more integral to the understanding of the text as a whole and will be integrated more fully into responses.

In his preface to the Ukranian edition of Animal Farm, Orwell states, “And so for the past ten years I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the Socialist movement.” And it is through this lens that I think we can sharpen our focus on this aspect of context. Now when students start to explain just how Squealer ‘represents’ propaganda, they can also explore the idea that Orwell’s representation of the Russian regime as actively misleading the public is also a way of demonstrating that the British public is falling for these lies too. In drawing our attention to this in the book, he helps to destroy the so-called Soviet myth. A question we can add to our repertoire is ‘How does this help Orwell to ‘destroy the Soviet myth’?’

‘Notions and ideas’

If we only comment on the Russian parallels, we can miss out on a richer discussion of other aspects of context, historical or otherwise. In the two prefaces contained in my edition (the Ukranian edition mentioned above; the original proposed preface entitled ‘The Freedom of the Press’) Orwell acknowledges that his criticisms apply to more than just Russia. He shows that we are not dealing with a unique situation – the way that we deal with Russia is the way we have dealt with other regimes and we have not learnt our lessons. Here are selected quotations from those prefaces:

The servility with which the greater part of the English intelligentsia have swallowed and repeated Russian propaganda from 1941 onwards would be quite astounding if it were not that they have behaved similarly on several earlier occasions.

 

Very similar things happened during the Spanish civil war.

 

It is important to realise that the current Russomania is only a symptom of the general weakening of the western liberal tradition.

 

The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.

 

Up to 1939, and even later, the majority of English people were incapable of assessing the true nature of the Nazi régime in Germany, and now, with the Soviet régime, they arc still to a large extent under the same sort of illusion.

 

In Spain as well as in Russia…

Because of this, students need to be able to move beyond Russia towards universal ideas. In the In Our Time episode on Animal Farm, Professor Mary Vincent states that Napoleon is “emblematic of dictatorial power” and “emblematic of totalitarianism and of greed and of ambition.” It’s helpful therefore to think of it like this: character x represents y but is also emblematic of concept z. Linking characters to the concepts they are emblematic of is helpful to address context, and will help to address exam questions as they are often based around themes and wider concepts: How does Orwell use character x to present ideas about concept z?

Universal ideas are a perfectly valid way of considering context. In AQA’s Further Insights report into teaching context, some examples they use for context in a Macbeth question are ‘the idea of paternal lineage’; ‘the idea of the afterlife’; ‘notions of chivalry and honour’. We should ask of all our texts which ‘ideas and notions’ students should be aware of in order to have a fuller understanding. Off the top of my head for Animal Farm:

Totalitarianism; Propaganda; Satire; Marxism; Communism; Socialism; Class;

When writing essays, perhaps students can start from the ideas and notions, then zoom into how this was seen in Russia, then how this is exemplified in the text and the methods used by Orwell to explore the idea. This will offer a sharper insight than the original problem, integrating the context, and they can even skip the reference to Russia on occasion.

The AQA Further Insights publication has four questions that I think are a good starting point for considering context:

  • What is it helpful to know in order to understand about the text or the writer’s view when reading this text?
  • What might different readers / audiences take from this text, or from this moment in the text?
  • What might it be helpful to know in order to get a fuller, richer understanding of the themes, or the language, or the characters?
  • To what extent does the context broaden / deepen my understanding of this text?