vocabulary

Revision before redrafting

Mark Miller English Teaching , , ,

One of the major changes I have made to my practice is the focus on redrafting. I have been clear to insist to students that they must redraft their work. Often, this is following feedback from me or from their peers. I use strategies such as Kelly Gallagher’s STAR Revision.

STARImageI’ve been using it at the end of the first draft but I’m becoming increasingly aware that the best place for revision of writing is during the writing process and there are a couple of reasons why.

First of all, those students who think deeply about their work make some significant revisions but it has to be said that many don’t. They change the odd word here and there but their final drafts are very rarely significantly different from their first.

Also, our younger students are going to be writing in examinations where they do not have the time or opportunity to redraft. They need to be able to revise as they go.

Now, I do acknowledge that I need to be better at teaching the skills needed for redrafting but these are actually the same skills needed for students as they write their first drafts. To get students to the point where this is natural takes a lot of work:

Modelling

Modelling is massively important. This includes looking deeply at mentor texts, sharing high quality examples, but it is crucial that we also share the process. We model the mistakes, the rewording, the adding. Students need to see this process constantly and feel that it is an entirely natural process. I would always share high quality writing but good writers are experts in hiding their mistakes. The video below is made using screencast-o-matic.com and it shows me revising a paragraph on Animal Farm.

I like making these videos because they are under my control. I can prepare exactly what I want to show. I do also model from scratch in the classroom which does show a messier process. It should feel as natural as possible.

Micro-Revision

Students can’t only practise revision during these sessions of extended writing. They need to practise relentlessly and they can do this by focussing on small texts. I have said before that sentences are just small texts and they are a quick and easy way of modelling writing and the revision of writing. I really like Andy Tharby’s sentence escalator as it is such a great way of highlighting the revisions that we can make. By working on such a small level- the sentence level- we can be highly focussed and students don’t need to feel overwhelmed. Then they just build their writing sentence by sentence, revising as they go.

Also, it is perhaps a better use of time to ask students to redraft a small part of their text but do so multiple times than a redraft of a 3 page essay.

Words

Students need to be taught that the best word is the right word, not the longest. Some of the worst writing is created next to a thesaurus. Let me rephrase that:a quantity of the most evil inscription is fashioned subsequently to a lexicon. This leads to comments like ‘The Birlings live in a cumbersome house in Brumley’. Frankly, ‘large’ would have been just fine.

To help, I would teach vocabulary which will help them explore nuances e.g. when writing about characters in a book. This might mean taking a list of synonyms for ‘kind’ and asking ‘Is Lennie caring or compassionate?’, ‘Is George gentle or humane?’

I’m starting to become wary of thesauruses anyway because they teach a kind of learned helplessness. They also add way too much time when the words will probably not be used properly anyway. I can see them as a way to avoid being overly repetitive and students should be exposed to new vocabulary but they don’t pick up the nuances of words from the thesaurus.

When you look at revising words, it isn’t just making them more complex- although there is a place for this- it’s about making the words do more. If you look at verbs as the most ‘powerful’ parts of a sentence, you can use those as a lever for transforming writing.

Give students sentences with words changed. Ask them about the differences. You could start with clear differences:

Joey walked towards the school gates./ Joey trudged towards the school gates.

or make it harder to distinguish:

Joey ambled towards the school gates./ Joey trudged towards the school gates.

When they have practised this way of thinking, they can play around with verbs- and other words- in their own writing. This idea of giving options is explored beautifully in Chris Curtis’ Techniques for Dummies.

Real world examples

original_lyrics_in_my_lifeIt is great to be able to find real drafts of writing. For example, I like placing a copy of different drafts of ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ and focussing on which might be the final draft and why. I wouldn’t normally teach song lyrics but I think Beatles lyrics might be ok. You can look at the original song lyrics and how they changed e.g. the original lyrics for ‘In My Life’ pictured. The purpose of all this is to show that writers change their mind and it isn’t always to ‘add more detail’ or swap words!

Tone/ focus

One of the skills to focused writing is knowing exactly what you want to say and the way you wish to say it. If there is a clear tone, then each part can be sculpted to fit that. If there isn’t a tone, then writing can be flabby and unfocused. Similarly, essays with a clear thrust can be revised so everything feeds into the thesis. The best way to teach this idea of tone is to read examples of writing with clear tonality. When reading anything, build habits of looking for tone and writer’s ‘voice’. You can compare extracts like the two below and examine the differences in tone and purpose:

Rather a stately house of its kind, but dolefully in want of painting, and with dirty windows. He took out his key and opened the door, and we all went into a stone hall, bare, gloomy, and little used. So up a dark brown staircase into a series of three dark brown rooms…The furniture was all very solid and good, like his watch-chain. It had an official look, however, and there was nothing merely ornamental to be seen. Great Expectations

They could compare this with:

The property has over the past four years been the subject of a meticulous project to create an exemplary private residence to an exacting specification complemented by luxurious fixtures and fittings throughout. At the heart of the property is the stunning bespoke family dining kitchen designed by Park Royal Interiors Ltd who were also responsible for overseeing the design of the bathroom suites. The property also boasts under floor zoned central heating together with an integrated Sonos audio system, Rako lighting and Cat 5 installation. The external appearance is complemented by Accoya folding door sets with eclipse advantage double glazing. Rightmove.co.uk

Rereading

It may seem ridiculously obvious, but many students do not read their work back to themselves. They may do a quick check but they don’t reread with purpose- or at least they won’t if we don’t teach them to. When they reread, they should be looking for clarity, for style, for syntax and rereading for errors. When I’m sending an email, I will often read the email out loud to check the tone- it can be awkward if an unintended tone comes through in your writing. I also have to proofread a million times- I only just spotted a ‘form’ instead of a ‘from’ in this blog.

The plan

It can be tempting to draw up a rudimentary plan, but the idea of a plan is to ensure that the whole piece has that sense of focus mentioned above. It is in the plan that much of the structural work on a text has to be done. With a solid plan in place, it could be argued that your first draft is a kind of second draft. I would love to suggest a particularly innovative planning format but I would just use a mind map or a variation on it.

Other aspects to consider:

Cohesion– how does the overall text hold together?

Detail– we can model the ‘add more detail’ part by elaborating on ideas, clarifying ideas, looking into alternative viewpoints.

Introductions– provide many models of introductions and encourage students to revise their introduction after the piece is completed.

Everything that I have written could be in a post on redrafting so by teaching the skills of revision, we have also taught the skills for redrafting. Now, if students go on to redraft the work, they are in a strong position already and better prepared for the next draft.

Working with Mentor Texts

Mark Miller English Teaching , , , ,

“A mentor text is any text that can teach a writer about any aspect of a writer’s craft, from sentence structure to quotation marks to show don’t tell.” Jeff Anderson.

In my post on Routines for Excellent Writing, I discussed the usefulness of mentor texts. You can read more about the what and why of mentor texts there. As a follow up to that, and in response to my #tmeng presentation, I am looking in detail at a specific mentor text in this post.

I have chosen this review of Rock of Ages. (original review online here) I chose it for the things I could pick out and look at with students. I’m looking at the unabridged text but I’d recommend cutting bits out, replacing, isolating paragraphs or whatever you need. Using a real text has its benefits but I would also suggest creating one from scratch if you wanted to demonstrate a specific idea rather than searching and searching.

Vocabulary

I’m a bit obsessed with vocabulary. If I wanted a vocabulary focus I might look at the following in the text:

  • Naïve/ lugubrious/ narcissistic – complex words which will probably need explanation.
  • Satirizing/ screenplay/ production values – media terminology
  • Intensity/ frantically/ meander – words which I want to transfer into students’ working vocabulary. A word like ‘meander’ is so nuanced and precise that I’d love to see it in my students’ work.

Sometimes you need not spend too much time on vocabulary. Those last three words will probably inch closer to being used by students just because of the further exposure to them. On the other hand, texts could be chosen or created precisely to build vocabulary. For example, if you knew students were writing about fate, say, in Of Mice and Men, you could read this article: Is a US attack on Syria now inevitable? and the word ‘inevitable’ would (inevitably) find itself in students’ vocabulary. Furthermore, the paragraph below from the same text would help ‘caution’ and ‘reluctance’ shift ever closer to usage too, words which would come in handy writing about the text.

I have been stressing President Obama’s caution and reluctance to take action. But now it does seems difficult for him to back down without losing face. Unless something changes.

Punctuation

I find it much easier to study punctuation in context. For example, our mentor text has a number of brackets used in different ways:

  • Stacee Jaxx (Tom Cruise)
  • …a couple of grim bodyguards (Kevin Nash, of all people, and Jeff Chase, a giant 6’7″ bodybuilder).
  • (spoiler!)

The last example is certainly worth drawing attention to. I’d discuss it with students, ask them if it is ‘correct’, ask them if that matters, ask them to write their own. I feel that this approach is much more successful than trying to explain how to use brackets and should complement any explicit teaching of punctuation.

Openings

I’m often greeted with variations of ‘I know what I want to write but I just can’t get started.’ Good mentor texts can show many different ways to get started. When I ask students to write a letter, they can all get started. (I am writing to…) This is obviously not the greatest opening but they have been exposed to letters and letter writing in class so many times over the years that it is encoded. The opening to this review is not ground-breaking…

“Rock of Ages,” a rags-to-riches rock ‘n’ roll musical set mostly in a music club on Sunset Strip, wins no prizes for originality.

…but is still a useful opening to steal: “Gravity,” a stunning adventure story set in open space, wins first prize for visual effects.‘ From there, students can build. We can introduce other review openings and ask students to compare which ones are more effective and why:

  • Combine (1) a mysterious threat that attacks a town, and (2) a group of townspeople who take refuge together, and you have a formula apparently able to generate any number of horror movies, from “Night of the Living Dead” (1968) to “30 Days of Night.”
  • Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi” is a miraculous achievement of storytelling and a landmark of visual mastery.
  • After opening with one of the most terrifying flying scenes I’ve witnessed, in which an airplane is saved by being flown upside down, Robert Zemeckis’ “Flight” segues into a brave and tortured performance by Denzel Washington — one of his very best.

Sentences

A sentence is a mentor text. We can use them on their own to highlight aspects of the writer’s craft or we can identify sentences of note in larger texts. In our mentor text, I noticed the following:

  • If you’re tracking those names, you’re perhaps impressed.
  • If you are of a certain age, you may remember them.
  • If you’re making the kind of movie where everybody in the audience knows for sure what’s going to happen, it’s best not to linger on the recycled bits.

Students can be asked to create their own. They can keep bits of the sentences or lose it all. They might play with the order. We could look at who ‘you’ is and the effect of that. Is ‘you’ the same in all sentences?

I’d also play around with a sentence like, ‘In a movie where all the stars except the leads are essentially satirizing themselves, Tom Cruise is the most merciless on himself.’

  • In a movie where all the__________________, x is the most__________________.
  • In a scene where none of the__________________, x is the least__________________.
  • In a world where__________________, x__________________.

Paragraphs

Of course they also fall in love. Of course they have heartfelt conversations while standing behind the “Hollywood” sign. Of course they break up because of a tragic misunderstanding. Of course their mistake is repaired and (spoiler!) they’re back together at the end. Has ever a romance in a musical been otherwise?

This paragraph is perfect for a review and perfect to steal. It could fit into any review which touches upon typical genre conventions. It could be used in isolation as an introduction to anaphora. It could be used in a Media Studies lesson to explore genre. The idea of constructing a paragraph can be difficult to grasp and examples like this are priceless in helping to show what is possible.

For more on mentor texts, I’d recommend reading anything by Kelly Gallagher.

Getting on top of homework

Mark Miller Vocabulary , ,

Teaching is really hard. One of the problems is that there are so many things to do and not really enough time to do everything in the way that we want. I have struggled to keep on top of all of my work and still retain anything like a fair work-life balance. From my experience, there are certain things which we may let slide – not because we are bad teachers but because we are human beings who can’t spend every waking hour on the job.

The main reason homework has slid for me in the past is that I didn’t value it. It always felt like a waste of time as it didn’t seem to impact positively on my students’ progress. It is often the first thing to drop off the to-do list when I am busy and tired and working flat out. Whereas I would feel a deep sense of shame from not marking a set of exercise books, I can’t say I have ever been that bothered about forgetting homework. Homework can be time consuming to create, inconvenient to hand out, a nuisance to collect and a pain to mark! Hattie gives homework an effect size of 0.29 which seems to back up the idea that homework is ineffective.

Why does it matter?

Homework matters to a lot of people. It is often a high priority for senior leadership teams and I have had many conversations with parents who cite homework as their number one concern. Ofsted state that ‘setting appropriate homework’ is a feature of outstanding teaching. These are obviously important factors but they are not compelling enough for me and have never led to me setting effective homework because they don’t really tell me why. To be clear, I am not dismissing any of these factors as unimportant, but for me to sustain any changes in the habits of my teaching, I need to see exactly what’s in it for my students.

For me to make any sort of progress with my homework, it needs to be worth it. I have taken some time to read Hattie on homework again and it is interesting to read the nuances of his meta-analysis. Hattie talks about the greater benefits of homework the older students get, which makes the overall effect size somewhat skewed. For older students, the effect size is 0.64, making this above Hattie’s own hinge point of 0.4. Hattie adds that ‘more task-oriented homework had higher effects than did deep learning and problem solving homework.’ and ‘…the effects are highest, whatever the subject, when homework involves rote learning, practice, or rehearsal of the subject matter.’ I also find that this post by @headguruteacher makes a compelling case for homework. (He also has a detailed post on Hattie and homework here)

This goes some way to convince me that homework at Secondary could be effective and that if it involves rehearsal or practice it might be more worthwhile. From this I thought about the type of practice that would be effective for my students. Feedback based homework would be worthwhile, but I’m not sure that this meets my own selective criteria of homework being easy to prepare.

I decided that a vocabulary focus would be a strong driver for improvement. Because I have read around the subject and because I value it highly, vocabulary homework is not something I will do half-heartedly so is more likely to ‘stick’. While the jury may still be out on the overall effectiveness of homework, I am now in a position where I feel that the homework I set is helpful for my students while avoiding the problems I have struggled with in the past.

My approach

This is my current approach to homework. I trialled it with a couple of classes last year, have refined it and am now using it routinely. I am constantly reflecting on the benefits and as you will see below it is far from perfect but I am seeing the highly visible impact in the form of students’ work.

First, I choose words for study. I look at the texts we will be reading and choose words which I envisage having to explain. These could be words with multiple meanings, complex words, words students can’t work out from etymological or context clues. Words are also chosen if they give students precise vocabulary to write on the topic we are studying. For example, this list of vocabulary to help with a Blood Brothers essay. Here is an example of a word chosen from Animal Farm:

 At one end of the big barn, on a sort of raised platform, Major was already ensconced on his bed of straw, under a lantern which hung from a beam.

COBUILD

I use the COBUILD dictionary and British National Corpus to create helpful definitions and example sentences.

The students write their own example sentences as homework.

The idea here is that students will take on these words if they are exposed to them several times. Many of the words chosen are ones they may be slightly familiar with and this additional encounter makes the even more ‘known’. You can see from the example below that the student is almost there but doesn’t quite have the precise meaning of ensconced. Ensconced

 

 

 

 

 

 

HomeworkExcuseI have started using Laura McInerny’s homework excuse notes to help manage the handing in of homework and the minimising of non-doers.

Then, some time after students have completed the homework, we use them in class, usually through reading them in the book/poem/article. The idea is that a further interaction with them will allow these words to transfer into students’ written vocabulary. I spend longer on the words that students struggled with in the homework.

Then, I hope, students will use them unprompted in their writing as in the example below. Although the spelling isn’t correct, it is clear that this student has reached for the right word and found ‘ensconced’. Or, the student deliberately found a way to use their new word. Either way, that student now has that word firmly in their written vocabulary.

EnsconcedStory

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can read more about vocabulary and why it is so important in the posts below: