johntomsett

I have been a teacher for 29 years, a Headteacher for 14 years and, at the age of (nearly) 53, this much I know about how curriculum, assessment and teaching & learning are so inextricably linked.

If one of the purposes of education is to introduce our children to the best that has been thought and said, then I believe that all students should know and understand the dynamics of the sonnet as a poetic form and how the form has evolved over the centuries.

If I were to design a scheme for teaching the sonnet…

• I would want students to know and understand the main sonnet forms – Petrarchan, Spenserian and Shakespearean – and how the sonnet has been developed beyond those definitive forms.
• I would want the students to know the historical contexts within which the sonnet form developed.
• I would want students to know and understand the following in order to appreciate the dynamics of the sonnet’s poetic form:

• • key vocabulary central to the sonnet form: octave, sestet, quatrain, rhyming couplet;
  • iambic pentameter;
  • the role of the volta;
  • the different rhyme schemes and how to notate rhyme;
  • why poets use rhyme and the impact of rhyme and its relationship to a poem’s meaning.

• I would want students to be able to write a critical analysis of a sonnet, using a good range of literary criticism terms.
• I would want the students to learn a sonnet by heart.
• I would want students to write their own sonnets.

I would introduce a number of sonnets to the students:

• Visions (Being at my window all alone) – Petrarch
• Whoso list to hunt – Wyatt
• On his blindness – Milton
• What guile is this – Spenser
• Sonnet 18 and Sonnet 130 – Shakespeare
• Ozymandias – Shelley
• How do I love thee – Browning
• Anthem for Doomed Youth – Owen
• Clearances III – Heaney
• Tony Harrison – Long Distance II
• Anne Hathaway – Duffy
• Simon Armitage – I am very bothered

So, how are curriculum, assessment and teaching & learning so inextricably linked? Well, students need to be taught some core knowledge before they can understand the concept of a sonnet (curriculum content). I could, for instance, give students a deliberately chosen range of sonnets which exemplify the different forms within the form, and let students work in pairs to identify similarities and differences. They could classify the different sonnets and find there are three main forms with some oddities. I could then tell them directly what the three main forms are called, illustrate the forms with new examples and label for the students the elements of each form that make them distinctive. Or I could teach all that directly from the front (two different approaches to teaching). I could then check to see if the students had learnt how to identify the different forms by a whiteboard quiz – I show a sonnet on the board and they write down Petrarchan, Shakespearean or Spenserian or other –  an exercise which also reinforces corrrect spellings (checking learning through formative assessment). The mode of formative assessment depends upon the taught curriculum content I want to check has been learnt. What I teach next depends upon the outcome of my formative assessment; if the students have not learnt what I have taught them, I will have to go back and teach the content in a different way. In order to embed the learning, I could begin each lesson with a new sonnet, read the sonnet and challenge the students to identify to which of the main sonnet forms it belongs. And I will revisit this content anyway because, as Nuttall claims, 80% of students will have moved new knowledge and understanding from their short to long term memories if they have encountered that knowledge at least three times (my A level students know the Nuttall 3 times claim better than they know the economics theory I am supposed to have taught them…).

Weeks later, after I had taught and formatively assessed all the knowledge and understanding I have detailed above (as well as teaching the students the rigours of how to write a literary criticism essay), the summative assessment – the destination towards which we were always heading – would be something challenging like this:

“Read the following sonnets: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130; Spenser’s What guile is this…; Petrarch’s Visions; Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth and Heaney’s Clearances III. Choose two of the sonnets and compare and contrast how the poets use the sonnet form to communicate their ideas and feelings.”

This essay would summatively assess the extent to which the students know and understand the dynamics of the sonnet as a poetic form and how the form has evolved over the centuries. Over time, as different cohorts of students have been assessed, I would be able to modify the assessment according to its validity and reliability.

Without knowledge you cannot develop students’ analytical skills. How can they analyse sonnets, and write their own, without knowing about Petrarch, Spenser, Shakespeare, et al? Once you have all chosen the content of the curriculum, chunked that content up into learnable chunks so that students can cope with manageable cognitive loads, taught that content, assessed whether they have learnt that content, then they can analyse and evaluate, for instance, Tony Harrison’s Long Distance II, and debate whether it is a sonnet. Can it possibly be a sonnet with 16 lines?

Long Distance II

Though my mother was already two years dead
Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas,
put hot water bottles her side of the bed
and still went to renew her transport pass.

You couldn’t just drop in. You had to phone.
He’d put you off an hour to give him time
to clear away her things and look alone
as though his still raw love were such a crime.

He couldn’t risk my blight of disbelief
though sure that very soon he’d hear her key
scrape in the rusted lock and end his grief.
He knew she’d just popped out to get the tea.

I believe life ends with death, and that is all.
You haven’t both gone shopping; just the same,
in my new black leather phone book there’s your name
and the disconnected number I still call.

So, you cannot decide how to teach until you know the curriculum content you are teaching and you cannot know whether your students have learnt the curriculum content you have taught them until you have assessed their learning…simply inextricable!

I have been a teacher for 28 years, a Headteacher for 13 years and, at the age of 52, this much I know about resources for teaching how to write a short story for the writing question on the AQA English Language GCSE Paper 1.

These are very simple presentations; together they provide students with the basics for structuring their own short story if they get a short story only option on the AQA English Language GCSE Paper 1, like this from the AQA guide to the specimen assessments:

The first is about the basic formal features of a short story:

The second uses the original Toy Story film as a model for the basic narrative structure of a short story:

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.

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 1.

Writing is a deliberate, pain-staking act. Many of our students do not, however, have a process for constructing a passage of extended writing which they can employ consciously. What I have devised 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 – is a step-by-step guide to crafting answers to the two 40 mark writing tasks in the AQA English Language GCSE papers.

In this post I will concentrate upon the AQA English GCSE Paper 1.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, what it does is help them demonstrate their writing at its best when under pressure in the examination hall.

The one specimen English Language Paper 1 we have from AQA has the following exemplar question 5:

Now, I have advised my students to avoid the story question. Shaping a narrative is a difficult task. If students do not have a profound understanding of how narrative structures operate they can get themselves into a rambling mess of a response. We have focused solely upon the description question which uses the picture as a stimulus for the students’ writing.

We have designed a number of our own examples:

What follows is an explanation of exactly how I have trained my students to answer such a question…

To begin with the students underline the key word or phrase in the question.

The following three slides demonstrate how we have then trained the students to split the picture into quarters; they then bullet-point three observations from each quarter, ensuring that there is no repetition across the total of twelve bullet-points. Once they have their twelve bullet-points, they choose their best nine or ten and order them logically.

Each observation is then the focus of a short paragraph; collectively, the paragraphs will comprise the final answer. I have outlined a short set of rules for writing a single paragraph:

• One observation from the picture per paragraph;
• Three or four sentences per paragraph;
• A maximum of twenty words per sentence;
• Include the key word in each paragraph.

So, the full step-by-step guide to the AQA English Language GCSE Paper 1, Question 5 is as follows:

And here is Karl’s answer to the remote house question:

One o’clock

The sun shone down onto the bright mountains in the distance. Blue sky sat ontop of the towering mountains.  Birds whistled in the glazing heat as the sun shone warmth into the air.  The mountains looked down upon a remote house set in beautiful Scottish countryside.

The house sat in direct view of the sun as it speared light onto the face of it. The gable end cast a dark shadow down the side of the modern house.  Trees thrived in the sunlight as there bright green leavs glimmered in the midday light.

Trees hung over the boiling hot driveway as the sun melted the tarmack. flowerbeds surounded the house as the glistened in the sunlight.  There leaves let out a ray of beautiful colours.  The driveway led into a darkening woods.

French double doors let a sense of freedom into the house as the sun shone powerful rays of light through the doorway. A car sat on the driveway frieing in the midday heat.

Dark mountains sat in the distance as the clouds came in casting a black shadow covering the whole mountain range. Moorland sizzled with the sound of crickets clicking and birds whistling as sun cast a powerful view from the house.  Ivy intertwine up the side of the house as it cast a dark, menacing shadow through the window.

Velux windows popped open looking down on a river filled with life at the bottom of the garden. The river slowly ran through the scottish country side as the water sparkled in the sunlight.  fish swam in groups as theres fins let out a ray of sparkling lights.

Shards of sunlight speard through the light blue atmosphere as it illuminated the lucious green grass. Flowers sway in the sun as they lit up the front of the house.  Ivy curled up the columns of the porch as they cast a dark shadow into the house.

A BBQ sizzled on the driveway as sausages fried in the midday heat. Smoke rose as it spread a wonderful smell of summer round the garden.  Sunlight glazed down upon the baby trees as they cast a ray of beautiful shadows onto the lawn.

A pathway led to the river as the bottom of the garden as ducks swam with there duckling down the river into the Scottish sumer country-side.

I word processed Karl’s response verbatim so that we could work on improving it as a class; I wanted to focus on some basic spelling and punctuation errors. When I projected it onto the whiteboard and read it out, another student, Jack, said, Well, that’s OK and all that, Sir, but we can never be as good as you. When I denied authorship and told the group that the writer was one of them, they did not believe me for a second. I had to show them the hand-written original before they began to accept that the words belonged to Karl. Once they had overcome their huge sense of incredulity, it inspired them to work harder to become better writers.

They have nick-named Karl, Shakespeare.

The students now have a firmly embedded tool with which they can approach the 40 mark question with confidence. In my next post I will explain our step-by-step guide to answering the AQA English Language Paper 2, Question 5…it’s all about your FAP!