Trio of Success: writing, improving and commenting

This activity is designed to improve students’ extended writing, primarily at KS4/5. The key foci here are:

• The process of writing, linking and arguing
• The skill of using advice to improve the quality of work
• The application of a mark-scheme to a piece of written work to make a judgement

Though the outcome of the activity can be for students to receive a mark if you choose, they need to understand that what is more important in this case is the process through which they achieved that mark.
Ideally, the activity is hosted on a wiki – a multi-editable page – on a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). If you don’t have access to this technology, then Google Drive (www.drive.google.com) allows students to set up a multi-editable document and email the link to everyone they wish to access it. Alternatively a Word document emailed from student to student would work, and if none of this takes your fancy then good old fashioned pen and paper would also suffice.

Preparation

1. Split the class into equally sized teams. In the event of having an odd number of students, you could always double up roles, or introduce an element of differentiation by giving more able students more than one role. In History we tend to write a six paragraph essay (introduction, four paragraphs and a conclusion) and so my class of 18 was rather neatly divided into 3 teams which is the model on which the table below is based. However it would easily work with a different number, you simply set up a cyclical pass-on system for each of the 3 stages s modelled below.
2. Assign each student a paragraph responsibility within their team, or even better, let them make the decision themselves. Ultimately each student needs to have overall responsibility for one paragraph of the final piece of work.
3. Then you can either assign each team the same essay question, or alternatively you set each team a different question.

The 3-stage model

Stage 1 – Writing

Each team researches and writes its answer. Generally speaking they will need to write it in order – introduction – paragraphs – conclusion – and so it is a useful exercise in collaborative working as well; there can be no ‘night before it’s due’ writing!

One of the best things I have found about this exercise is that students have to pay careful attention to how the paragraphs link together to further the argument; as the thoughts preceding their own are not actually their own, they have to adapt their argument and make use of language in order to create one cohesive argument.
If you are using a wiki on the VLE, then students can all access it in order to input their paragraph. If you are using Google Drive the same applies. A word document would need to be emailed around, and pens and paper would require a cutting, sticking and photocopying job.

Stage 1.5 – you mark the first attempts

It’s important that each team have a sense of the quality of their collective attempt; individual students can look at the comments on their particular paragraph, whilst also getting a sense of how successful their team effort was in creating an overall argument. Whilst some individuals may feel this mark is not representative of their particular contribution, it doesn’t really matter – this activity is about the process.

By marking the first set of essays (three, not 18!) you can also see what each individual has achieved as well as seeing how effectively they were able to work collaboratively.

I downloaded and printed each team’s attempt, marked them by hand, and then scanned in the documents and uploaded them to the wiki for students to access electronically. You could equally use a photocopier.

Stage 2 – students improve on the first round

Each team then moves on to the ‘improvement’ stage. Keeping the same paragraph responsibility (e.g. introduction writers become introduction improvers) students then access the next team’s script, marked by you, and act on the comments made and advice given. The aim is both to read another team’s argument, and to make changes that collectively improve the quality of the work. If the essay is hosted on a wiki, or Google Drive, improvements can be made directly to the document using a different coloured text.

Stage 3 – students mark the second round

The final stage is for each team to mark the improved collective work of the other two teams (refer to the model above). Depending on your students’ familiarity with the mark-scheme, you may wish to guide them through this stage. They can of course refer to the script with your original comments completed at stage 1.5, and they are looking to mark the work as it stands, having been improved by the second team.

In this final stage, students can abandon their paragraph responsibilities and instead mark the whole piece of work. The benefit here is that they can see two versions of the work, and using the mark-scheme they can see how successfully your initial comments have been improved upon.

Charlotte Grove

Project based learning (or, How I learned to do absolutely nothing)

I have been learning a lesson from History. Not from the annals of yore but from the History department at my school. They have been trialling the use of project based learning across Key Stages 3-5 and suggested some brilliant ideas at a recent training session. Magpie-like as ever, I have swiftly been trying them out in my own classroom with some very interesting results.

The main idea that I have trialled has been the Analysis Continuum. In the original History lesson, the lesson began with an essay-style question(e.g. Was there a cultural revolution in the 1960s?), each pair of students then drew a continuum on a sheet of sugar paper from YES to NO. They were then provided with a pile of evidence (photographs, illustrations, written evidence), which they had to sort and stick onto their continuum. A points-based system was used, with 1 point being awarded for a quotation, fact or statement, 3 points for an explanation and 10 marks for a well-reasoned conclusion.

I have so far tried this with my A level Language and Literature classes. And both times it was amazing! In the Language lesson, as with the History model, it proved to be an excellent way to impart a large amount of information (in this case attitudes to language change), without me having to be at the front of the class.

It forced students to engage with the data and develop much more solid knowledge and understanding than if I had tried to 'teach' it to them. In the Literature class, I used it to do two things. Firstly to cover a significant chunk of the text and secondly to engage with a 'How far do you agree with the statement' exam question. The 'data' in this case consisted of extracts from the text and from critics and the activity really focused my students on the process of selecting evidence and weighing it up before deciding on their line of argument.

So far I have used it with KS5 but I can envisage it working really well with my GCSE students in preparation for their reading controlled assessment essays as well. The one downside of this activity is that it takes a lot of preparation, as you need to search for, select and copy a pack of evidence for each pair of students in the class. However, once the lesson has started, you will be amazed at how little you have to do.

All of my students were enthusiastically engaged and motivated, without me having to do anything at all. In fact, I felt a bit like a spare part! The points system was great because not only did it help them to focus on the features of a well-reasoned argument but it also added a competitive element to the task.

So - the result of my History lesson? I have learned to stand back and do absolutely nothing in the classroom. Finally my students are doing more than I am!

Naomi Hursthouse

Prose poetry: comparing texts

On the blog this week is a very modern exemplar of that unusual genre of literature, the prose poem. The term originates from the famous French poet, Baudelaire, who described his 1869 publication, ‘Paris Spleen’, as ‘Little Poems in Prose’.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica defines a prose poem as: "a work in prose that has some of the technical or literary qualities of a poem (such as regular rhythm, definitely patterned structure, or emotional or imaginative heightening) but that is set on a page as prose."

‘Chessiderata’ opens with a deliberate parody of Max Ehrmann’s famous prose poem, 'Desiderata'. Both pieces are overtly philosophical but whereas ‘Desiderata’ offers an unashamedly optimistic perspective on the Universe, ‘Chessiderata’ explores the darker side of life through the medium of the ancient war game of chess.

You might wish to read both of these texts with your students and then ask them to:

1. Analyse the ways in which ‘Chessiderata’ conforms to the prose poem genre.
2. Explain how the title, ‘Chessiderata’, and the accompanying picture are effective and how they link to the text.
3. Explain some of the thoughts and feelings that the author of ‘Chessiderata’ expresses about life.
4. Compare ‘Chessiderata’ with ‘Desiderata’ in terms of attitudes, use of language and structure.
5. Write a prose poem of your own in which you reflect upon an aspect of life which is of fundamental importance to you.

Copyright Brian Mitchell

This activity can be used to introduce students at KS3 to different types of literature and extend their abilities as critical readers. It is also suitable as preparation for the comparative and analytical components of GCSE.

Download: Chessiderata

Read: Desiderata

Peter Morrisson

Peter Morrisson is a teacher, author and director of animated films. He currently lectures at the Isle of Man College of Further and Higher Education. 

Secondary English - It's good to talk

"I could put you in the movies,” he leered whilst leaning across towards the attractive young woman who sat opposite. 

“Really?” She sounded unconvinced.

“Really!”

He placed an over-sized palm on her knee and smugly flashed a gold tooth in what he must have imagined to be a debonair fashion.  She flinched, as if about to be devoured whole by a snake.  It may not have been the reaction he was looking for, but it didn’t seem to deter him.

“I could make you a ssstar!” he announced emphatically.

She squirmed again.  It sounded uncomfortably like a hiss.

Imagine that you are sitting on a busy commuter train on your way home after another hectic day in the classroom, and you suddenly hear the above snatch of conversation. What do you do?

Roundly chastise yourself with, “I’m a teacher, and teachers don’t eavesdrop!”, then virtuously change seats and continue with your marking?

Or, if feeling somewhat heroic, do you take off the bifocals and charge in with, “Excuse me, madam, is this rather large, intimidating-looking man bothering you!?”

Or perhaps you take a mid-course, stay where you are, put on a convincing display of conscientious coursework correction and surreptitiously cast sly, sideways glances whenever you can?

If your reaction is the latter, then the above piece of dialogue has succeeded because it has clearly caught your undivided attention. And this is a good rule of thumb for writing effective direct speech – it should be interesting enough to captivate a casual passer-by!

As your students will be writing about 800 words for their GCSE creative writing assignment, they will only need a limited amount of speech.  The majority of the story will be narrative with some description.  However, good dialogue does undoubtedly allow characters to step right out of the page and burst into life.  It also enables the writing to become more multi-sensory and vivid, whilst simultaneously casting the reader in the undeniably tantalizing role of voyeur.  So, with all this in mind, the following tips might be of use to your students.

1. Effective dialogue should enhance the interest level of the story, e.g. by creating conflict, tension, suspense or humour.

2. Effective dialogue should convey new information to the reader and, therefore, it has to be vital and fresh.

3. Effective dialogue should reveal the personalities of your characters and, thus, the more interesting and varied your characters are, the more interesting your dialogue will be.

4. Effective dialogue should be short, sharp and to the point, so avoid wordiness.

5. When using dialogue, it is important to ensure that the reader always knows who is speaking. Beginning a new paragraph for each new speaker is helpful but you will also need to tag certain lines, e.g. he said, she replied.

6. But only tag when absolutely necessary so as to avoid needless repetition.

7. Tags should not be intrusive. Some authors say that you should avoid alternatives such as he retorted, she queried, he growled, and so on. In the hands of a good writer, he said and she said, if used sparingly, can become invisible.

8. However, others authors believe that these tags should be diverse. Instead of Lucy said, you could substitute Lucy remarked ironically.

9. Perhaps the answer is to explore what your favourite novelists actually do and then experiment in your own writing. Occasionally, you might use such variations as exclaimed, declared, whispered, stated, roared, etc. But, as a general rule, you might stick to a mainstay of said, replied and asked, and only use the others when they are most effective. Remember, tags should remain invisible and so should only be used when required.

10. This is what happens when you over-use them:

“Just stick with me," he confidently asserted.
"Are you certain?" she asked.
"Dead certain," he replied reassuringly.
"I'm not," she retorted, nervously laughing.
“I can make you a star!” he repeated.

11. One very effective trick is to intersperse brief flashes of narrative with dialogue in order to reveal what your characters are thinking and feeling, and in order to show what they are doing. This will help you to hide your tags. Or you can use beats. This is when you put in a narrative phrase to describe the character's reaction or movements and so identify the speaker without using a tag.

This also allows you to place the dialogue in a world which has a physical dimension that the reader can perceive, thus making your writing more vivid. Otherwise, the conversation appears to be taking place in thin air, and this is much less interesting.

(Re-read the dialogue at the beginning of this article in order to see how the author has used narrative in both of these ways.)

12. However, do be careful. Just as you shouldn’t stifle a good free-flowing conversation by over-tagging it, neither should you kill it by putting too much narrative in between each spoken response!

LINKS:

1.  Scheme of Work

2.  Animation - 'Thunder'

Peter Morrisson

Peter Morrisson is a teacher, author and director of animated films. He currently lectures at the Isle of Man College of Further and Higher Education. 

'Daredevil vs the Hulk? It's just comma-sense!'

“You think using full stops is hard!?” I asked one group of GCSE re-sit students the other day as they grappled with just two simple tips on what to look for when locating the end of a sentence – those being, whenever you can hear a substantial one second pause and / or wherever two main clauses come together – “Wait till you get a load of the rules for using the comma!” Obviously, if we are still struggling with full stops by next term, then the comma is unlikely to get a look in.  However, should the long-awaited full stop revolution ever occur, I will boldly venture forth into a whole new set of starter activities featuring this agile little punctuation mark.

So, in a spirit of reckless optimism, I’ve prepared a slimmed down list of essential comma rules (do you know that there are over twenty in total?) and thirty sentences taken from the epic super hero clash referred to above which occurred in Daredevil, issue163. I’ve selected, and sometimes modified, sentences which not only cover all of the comma rules that I wish to focus upon, but which also tell the full story of this rollicking rumble.

If Daredevil isn’t your thing, then you could always adapt a classic text of your own choosing.  But for me, Daredevil has many of the elements of great literature: powerful characterisation (no, I don’t just mean the big muscles!), as much conflict as you could possibly wish for in a single sitting, and all served up with a generous helping of the most vivid imagery - much of which, thankfully, has been graphically illustrated for me, thus saving me the bother of having to visualise it for myself.  Of course, if you are already a Marvel fan, then your concerns might run in a different direction: “Daredevil versus the Hulk!? What happens after the opening panel???”  Well, to put your mind at rest, DD does survive, albeit after a spell of intensive care in City Hospital!

Should you decide to take the Marvel route, but feel the need to justify all of your literary choices by searching for deeper meaning, then you could encourage your students to imagine the much heavier, more bulky full stop as the Hulk of punctuation – massive and imposing … nothing breaks through it – and the nimble, much more versatile comma as the athletic Daredevil himself.  However, this might be stretching allegory a bit too far!

Ultimately, I hope to project three of these sentences onto my white board at the start of each lesson and ask my students to identify the relevant comma rules from the slimmed down list which, in this heavily idealised world of super heroes, super villains and near-perfect full stop usage, will have been glued into every exercise book for homework!

This abridged version of the comma rules is as follows:

Rule 1: Only use a comma when absolutely necessary; if in doubt, leave it out.  If you think of the sentence as a highway, then unnecessary commas are like bricks in the road.  They severely hinder the smooth flow of traffic.

Rule 2: Use a comma to separate two adjectives when the word ‘and’ can be inserted between them.

Rule 3: Use commas before or surrounding the name or title of a person directly addressed.  You should also use a comma when the inclusion of a name is additional information as opposed to being in the main flow of meaning.

Rule 4: Use commas to embed individual words that interrupt the sentence flow.

Rule 5: Use commas to embed clauses or phrases that interrupt the sentence flow.

Rule 6: Be very careful when using embedding commas in conjunction with words like WHO, WHICH and THAT (relative pronouns).  If the information is essential to the reader’s understanding of the subject of the sentence (i.e. the person or thing being referred to), then the information is not additional and thus does not interrupt the sentence flow. In such cases, the information should not be embedded and so the commas are unnecessary.

Rule 7: When starting a sentence with a subordinate (weak) clause, use a comma after it. Conversely, do not use a comma when the sentence starts with a main (strong) clause followed by a subordinate (weak) clause.

Rule 8: Use a comma when beginning sentences with such single word sentence-starters (introductory words) as: ‘However’, ‘Alas’ and ‘Conversely’.

Rule 9: Use a comma when beginning sentences with short phrase sentence-starters (introductory phrases) such as ‘On occasions’, ‘From time to time’, ‘On the other hand’.

Rule 10: Use a comma to demarcate (to separate) clauses if it will help avoid confusion or make the meaning clearer and easier to understand.

Rule 11: Use commas to separate direct speech from narrative.

Rule 12: Use commas to separate items in a list.

Basically, most of the above could be summarised as follows.  Use commas:

• when beginning a sentence with anything other than a main clause
• in order to demarcate (separate out) extra / additional information which is not in the main flow of meaning
• in order to separate words, phrases and clauses when it is necessary to make the overall meaning of the sentence clearer for the reader

FINAL NOTE:

• A comma splice is an error caused when two sentences are separated with a comma instead of with a full stop.
• A run-on sentence is an error caused by placing two sentences together without any form of punctuation at all.

Thus, as is often the case with tales of mystery and suspense, this final reflection brings me full circle to the point at which I began:

“You think using full stops is hard!?  Wait till you get a load of the rules for using the comma!”

Download class activity here

 Peter Morrisson

Squaring the circle

Early in August my wife and I went to the Isles of Scilly.  Now, living in Cornwall, this isn’t exactly an adventurous holiday, but it works for us; the weather was great and it was both peaceful and beautiful.  We’d booked to go over on the helicopter from Penzance but the flights were cancelled on the day of departure and we were transferred to a flight from Lands End.  The aircraft was an eight seat Britten-Norman Islander; when you check in your luggage gets weighed and then so do you.  You’re told where to sit (the weight shouldn’t be in the tail); the aircraft has four double seats and is the width of a car.  We were told to sit at the front (well, behind the pilot); read into this what you will, though I’ll point out that another couple weren’t allowed on (even though there was room) as they would have overloaded it.  However, the approach isn’t completely inflexible.  The other passengers were a young couple with their two small children; each adult sat with one of the children as it wouldn’t be great to have two young children sharing a seat in an aircraft with no gangway.  The flight was amazing, viewed entirely through the windscreen and with all the instruments visible (we flew at 100 mph at a height of 950 feet).  Most of the approach to the runway at St Marys is over the water (and then cliffs).  The whole experience is, as they say, the business.

Two days earlier I’d been in London at a meeting about the revisions to A level science courses.  There’s an expectation now that universities (and especially Russell Group members) will have a key role in developing and approving specifications.  Now, this isn’t in itself a bad idea.  Students studying science at A level will want, in some cases, to be able to follow one or two of their subjects through to degree level and the courses should be designed to provide an effective basis for progression.  Why shouldn’t they?

What I think we should also be mindful of is that whereas A levels should be a basis for undergraduate study, that isn’t the only thing they should be.  We’re headed for a situation in which everyone to the age of 18 is expected to be in education or training.  That’s good, but it means we have to be able to offer a comprehensive curriculum in schools and colleges.  Just as GCSEs function as a precursor for A levels but have to work in lots of other ways too, so we have to be careful that A levels don’t have too narrow a remit.  If they are to provide an academic education for a broad range of students they need to be designed to support a range of outcomes.

By all means involve representatives of Russell Group universities in the development programme but for my money there are others who should be involved as well.  My list of nominees would include employers (both of A level school leavers and of science graduates), teachers and students (both ones for whom the existing courses worked well and those for whom they didn’t).

Like the loading of the aircraft it has to be got right, but that doesn’t mean that a single objective is pursued to the exclusion of all other considerations.

Ed Walsh,

August 2012.

Secondary History - Evidence

Look at the evidence! When examining cartoons, pictures or drawings, students often find it difficult to see beyond the obvious, which is usually staring them right in the face. How do you train them to search for all the evidence in the picture? I always remember as a pupil being shown a photograph of Emily Pankhurst, dressed in furs and a swanky coat, walking smiling towards the camera. Why was she smiling? Why dressed up? Where was she going? Pulling back from the close up showed she was being led away by two burly policemen, after breaking windows at a London department store. Who says the camera never lies? Here are a few ideas.
If you have an Interactive White Board the ‘hide’ or ‘highlight’ features are invaluable. Choose your piece of evidence carefully and move the ‘highlight’ around the evidence bit by bit. You can make the highlighted area as large or as small as you wish. Get your students to carefully examine each and every bit of the evidence, explaining clearly what they can see. A variation of this is to use one of the ‘Jigsaw’ types of software freely available on the web. Choose a suitable image and chop it into as many pieces as you wish, then ask students to reassemble it. They will have to look closely at the evidence to do that!
Equally, you can do the same kind of activity on paper, either A3 or A4. Copy your piece of evidence then cut it up into several pieces. Give each group in your class one piece to explore. Ask them to describe what they can see, then suggest what might be in the rest of the evidence. Finally, project the complete image on your board and feed back.

Finally, of course, is our old favourite ‘Powerpoint.’  Project an image, perhaps like this one:

It is instantly recognisable as a German stamp, with the image of Hitler on it. But we can learn so much more from a close scrutiny. Using the ‘arrow’ function and textbox questions, students can be directed to look at very specific parts of the stamp. Add one arrow per ‘Powerpoint’ slide, until finally your slide will look something like this:
They are exploring all of the image, and are then in a position to deduce information from it. The stamp, of course, was overprinted ‘Ukraine’ after the Nazi invasion of Russia, and thus can be clearly dated. It also opens up a discussion on all the ‘normal’ aspects of life that need to be catered for by an invading power!
By carefully choosing the most appropriate images you can easily train your students to look beyond the obvious, and thereby enhance their skill at evidence work. Have fun!
Alf Wilkinson CPD Manager for the Historical Association and previously National Strategist for Key Stage 3 History. Alf has over 30 years history teaching experience and was lead author for Collins Key Stage 3 History resources.

All Secondary - End of Term: Ideas for the last lesson

As the summer break finally approaches, many teachers will be thinking about what to do with their classes for the last lesson. Often both my students and I can summon up little more than the required energy for sweets and a video, but it is nice to end the year on a more upbeat and positive note.  One of my groups of eighteen year olds wanted a primary school style party for which they all brought in food. I normally say no to these requests out of concerns about getting through the work; the mess I would have to clean up, and being a general party pooper, but I’m glad that I went along with their plans this time; for one thing they made nice cakes. So while eating cake, you might want to try some of the following ideas: 

• Advice for next year’s students – Ask students to create 'Do's and 'Don’t's posters for future students. They could instead make a video or podcast of their highlights of the year to be uploaded onto the school/college’s intranet. It is nice to have the opportunity for reflection on how the year went and of course this ticks some boxes for Student Voice and marketing your subject.
  
• Treasure hunt – You could make this subject specific. Save time by asking a couple of students to help organise it and write the clues. Older students seem to particularly enjoy this (the primary school connection again) as my colleague found when his A Level students requested an Easter egg hunt!
  
• Big fat quiz of the year – Get the students into groups and ask them to give themselves an imaginative name, in the style of a pub quiz. Include core content that the students will also need for the following year. This works best with different rounds including a picture round, word association, and one round about the students including funny incidents that have happened in class throughout the year.
  
• Pictionary – This requires no preparation by the teacher and all you need is the board. Drawing something to represent a theory or concept is quite a challenge and really gets them thinking.
  
• Who am I? – The classic post-it-notes-stuck-to-heads game. Include scientists, historians, sociologists, writers (or whoever is relevant to your subject).

And for students leaving…

• Pay each other a compliment – This is a lovely idea of one of my colleagues. Students each have a sheet of coloured paper stuck on their backs. They walk around the classroom and write something they will miss about that student on their paper. The students then have the piece of paper as a nice keep sake (this might not work out too well of course with a group of students who really don’t like each other!)
  
• Graffiti wall for the class of 2012 – Let the students leave their mark on the classroom by having a wall of poster paper on which they write their names. This can then be added to every year.  

Emily PainterSociology Teacher, Cadbury Sixth Form College

Secondary History - Women and Children First

Whenever I hear the phrase ‘women and children first’ I always think of the Titanic, the unsinkable luxury liner that sank after hitting an iceberg in the Atlantic 100 years ago, with the loss of over 1500 lives. Outdated regulations meant there didn’t have to be a space in a lifeboat for everyone on board – in fact there were lifeboats for only about half of the complement. One of the enduring stories of the tragedy is that the band played on as the Titanic sank, helping to keep passengers calm. The 1997 feature film ensures the story of the Titanic lives on in popular culture, indeed a new Titanic Museum has just opened in Belfast, Titanic’s home port.

But the phrase ‘women and children first,’ and even the idea of an unsinkable ship, is much older than 1912. In 1845 HMS Birkenhead, one of the first iron steam ships built for the Navy, was ordered. She had 12 watertight compartments, designed to prevent her sinking if she was holed. Unfortunately she was obsolete before she was launched as trials in 1845 showed that screw propellers, rather than paddle steamers which powered her, were much more efficient. In 1848 HMS Birkenhead was transformed into a troop ship and used to carry troops to Africa.

In January 1852 she left for South Africa with about 643 men, women and children on board – no one is sure quite how many. On leaving Cape Town, heading for Algoa Bay, HMS Birkenhead hit a rock and sank within 20 minutes. Despite the captain giving the order to abandon ship, Lieutenant-Colonel Seton, the highest ranking Army officer on  board, insisted on the men assembling on deck and assisting the women and children into the boats. Every woman and child on board was saved. As there were not enough boats for everyone, many of the soldiers – mostly new recruits - knew they were going to die but still complete order prevailed. The band played as the ship sank. Nearly 100 men were saved, some swimming the 3 miles to shore through shark-infested waters, others by clinging to the rigging until help arrived the next day.

At the time the men on board HMS Birkenhead were hailed as heroes. Queen Victoria ordered a memorial to them to be built in Chelsea Hospital. The Kaiser of Prussia had an ‘order of the day’ read out to every one of his soldiers asking them to ‘act like those on the Birkenhead.’ Later, Kipling wrote a poem about the ‘Birkenhead Drill’ – ‘to stand and be still, like the Birkenhead drill, is a damn tough bullet to chew.’ Paintings of the event, copies of which you can easily find online, adorned most Victorian classroom walls.

So why do we not know about these events today? Why do we remember the Titanic, and not HMS Birkenhead? HMS Birkenhead is credited with starting the tradition of ‘women and children first,’ and the parallels between both events are striking. It made me wonder which other events, famous or infamous at the time, no longer appear in our national story. Why do we remember some things and not others? And who decides what we remember, or what we teach? At a time of Curriculum Review perhaps we ought to be asking these kinds of questions about what we teach and why we teach it.

Alf Wilkinson

CPD Manager for the Historical Association and previously National Strategist for Key Stage 3 History. Alf has over 30 years history teaching experience and was lead author for Collins Key Stage 3 History resources.

Secondary English - Imaginative Writing

We all know that the burden of marking and assessment is particularly heavy if you’re an English teacher. And yet one of the things that keeps us going can be those little moments of frisson when we read something that one of our students has written that is just fantastic. When we’re just captivated by the description, or the idea, or the character… when we feel that we’re in the hands of a real burgeoning writer at work.

It might not happen very often. But on those rare occasions when it’s happened to me, I can remember feeling rather humbled and wishing that I could encourage more students to be that creative and imaginative.

When getting ready for some Year 10 creative writing recently, a colleague mentioned in passing a starter activity he had experimented with which had yielded some really enthusiastic responses. The basic idea is that you put a simple grid on the board:

Age	Male	Female
5-7	1	2
15-18	3	4
30-40	5	6
60-70	7	8

You also display the following questions:

• What is on their feet?
• Describe their hands.
• What is in their pocket?
• Where are they going?

Students nominate a box from one to eight. They have to use the questions to fill in the box. If something interesting appears, the teacher’s job is to try to ask some leading questions to draw out more information. The student’s job is to say whatever comes into their head. This is often started as a whole-class activity, but can also be done in small groups equally well – when the class are comfortable with the idea.

My colleague was right. I tried this with one class – as a starter activity – and an hour later we were still going. The students came out with the most incredible ideas: the depth and sensitivity of their imaginations seemed to just take off!

Sarah Darragh
English Teacher and author of A Bridge to GCSE English

Secondary English - Dealing with A02 English Literature

As an examiner for English Literature, it’s fair to say that one of the most prevalent phrases used by students in response to poetry is: ‘the enjambment helps the poem flow’. This is closely followed in over-use by ‘the poet / writer does this to create an effect.’ Full stop.

Of course, poets  do, indeed, use enjambment to ‘help the poem flow’. And they do a lot of other things to ‘create an effect’. This is unarguable. However, bald statements such as these, which are a very, very common feature of exam responses at notional grade D and below, are such a shame if the student doesn’t then go a little bit further… stressed and harried examiners have been known to actually talk to the script itself, asking the student ‘What? What is the effect? Why is it there?’ In one now-famous exam response, the student had actually said ‘He does this to create an effect’ thirty one times in their essay. Without once explaining what the effect was, or what the writer’s themes or ideas were. This was ‘technique-spotting’ at its extreme, of course, but quite a good example of what can happen when students are industriously attempting to do what they think they have to do in order to achieve marks in English Literature exams.

The Literature Assessment Objective to which these type of statements refers is, of course:
AO2: Explain how language, structure and form contribute to writers’ presentation of ideas, themes and settings

In Stevie Smith’s The River God, for example, of course the enjambment ‘makes the poem flow’. That’s one of the key structural techniques, and most students can see that this is a very effective use of enjambment. They can see that she is using structure to deepen the creation of her persona. However, once students have identified the technique, what are they then going on to do with it? Might they, for example, talk about where the enjambment stops – where the end stops are and why Smith might be deviating from the use of enjambment in order to foreground some particularly strong ideas? Might they look at the use of enjambment to really intensify the effects of the two monosyllabic statements: ‘Go’ and ‘Now’, and the ways that the positioning of these two within the enjambment suggest a subconscious command? Because if they do this, then they are starting to analyse the use of structure and how it contributes to meaning, which will enable them to access much higher notional bands than D.

Teaching glossaries of literary techniques can have a place in the Literature classroom. It is arguably a fundamental part of opening students’ eyes to the language of poetry. However, unless students link the technique they want to talk about to some investigation of what the actual effect might be, and how it impacts on meaning, they will produce the kind of frustratingly limiting statements like the ones above.

Sarah Darragh
English Teacher and author of A Bridge to GCSE English 

Secondary Geography - Going underground!

Transport for London has just released a new poster map to coincide with the London Olympics. The familiar stations across the network have been replaced by what are called ‘Olympic Heroes’. These include athletes and other people connected with the games, which have been arranged in lines which make up groups of people with a particular connection. The Olympics is providing a context that is being used in many geography departments this year. The Geographical Association is among the organisations that have produced activities based around the games:
http://geography.org.uk/projects/planetsport/london2012

(c) Shutterstock images

The original tube map was designed by Harry Beck in the early 1930s, and was based on diagrams of electrical circuits. Beck realised that if people were underground they didn’t necessarily need to know exactly ‘where’ they were, but how many stops and on which line they needed to travel to get to where they wanted to go. It’s an interesting opportunity to discuss how maps can distort the real world - something that geographers should be aware of. In March 2012 the BBC series ‘The Tube’ showed some of the secrets behind the organisation of this network which carries millions of people every year - a visualisation here http://spatialanalysis.co.uk/2011/11/tube-you/ shows how far the journeys made on each tube line would reach on a typical day.

Beck’s original map design has been much copied, and most underground networks around the world have a similar schematic map to help users navigate and find the correct line.

Apart from the obvious connections with transport, the tube map has also been ‘appropriated’ for various uses over the years, notably by Simon Patterson who produced a version called ‘The Great Bear’.

Other versions of the map have replaced stations with the name of musicians and bands, pubs in a city, rude words and food.  A version has also been produced to show how the network might be affected by climate change and rising sea levels.

I have used the TfL website http://www.tfl.gov.uk/ to explore journey planning across the city in lessons, setting up scenarios for journeys that have to be made. Although geography is not about ‘teaching how to read timetables’ there is an element of this in the way that geography should prepare people for living in the UK.

The increasing use of Oyster cards has also generated a large amount of data on people’s movements across London and this could be used as a case study for the value of data, and the extent to which our movements are monitored by data capture and CCTV the minute we step foot in a large town or city.

The re-labelling of the tube would lend itself to an exercise in classification. Provide students with a list of terms which refer to three different processes e.g. those connected with rivers, glaciers and the sea. Some of them share similar names, or are similar processes. These would be placed where tube lines intersect.
Lines could be drawn using the freeform tool in Powerpoint and coloured keys produced to summarise the learning.

You might also ask students to ‘organise’ the tube line so that the first stops on the line were the earlier parts of a sequence which terminates at ‘the end of the line’.

A blank tube map which could be used for this activity, or adapted, can be obtained from the site of Geoff Marshall using this link:
http://ni.chol.as/media/geoff-files/sillymaps/blankedout_map.jpg

Students could also be asked to design a tube line with stops that relate to revision for forthcoming exams, or design a platform motif which summarises a particular term.

Another useful area for exploration in GCSE Urban Geography could be research into the development of ‘Metroland’ and the importance of the railways in the development of the suburbs as we know them.
The imagery of the Tube advertising, particularly in the vintage posters such as can be seen in this Flickr set:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/goldenlad/sets/72157603448879462/with/2108840531/ is also worth exploring. How is the city represented in these images ? Do they reflect the reality of living in London ?

Younger pupils could be introduced to the Animals that are hidden in the underground at: http://www.animalsontheunderground.com/ or challenged to find other animals and shapes within the pattern of lines.

A final stopping point could be this site which includes an animation which ‘morphs’ to show the comparison between the ‘actual’ geography of London and that of the tube map: http://fourthway.co.uk/realunderground/real_underground_small_750x525.html

Safe travels through these geography ideas, and mind the gap!

Copyright notice: The Tube map is the copyright of Transport for London.

Alan Parkinson
Secondary Curriculum Development Leader of the Geographical Association

Secondary English - Combating comma-splicitis in the classroom!

Comma-splicitis: (comma-splice-i-tis) A severe punctuation disorder which leads to a total inability to discriminate between the entirely separate functions of the comma and the full stop.

Now that the flu season has finally retreated, English teachers can renew their assault on that other perfidious plague which remorselessly infects classrooms right across the land, comma-splicitis. Its symptoms are well known to all experienced practitioners, whether their students be children or adult returnees alike:

• an overwhelming terror of using the full stop;
• the consequent rationing of full stop usage to one or two, at most, per paragraph;
• a clear preference for desperately attempting to block the blatantly pregnant full stop pause (which, despite the condition, the sufferer still intermittently recognises) with a painfully inadequate comma.

This intractable complaint has certain severely life-diminishing outcomes:

• a chronic difficulty in obtaining a grade C in the all-important English Language GCSE;
• an acute inability to gain a university place as a direct consequence;
• a gut-wrenching incapacity to pursue an alternatively lucrative career path.

So what does this markedly disfiguring ailment look like? To the afflicted themselves, it is utterly invisible. When looking into the mirror of their own writing, the page will appear to be unblemished and, often, the sufferer will perceive an unwarranted healthy glow arising from his or her own creative outpouring. However, to the practised eye, it is an abhorrent disfigurement which blights any piece of prose regardless of its intrinsic literary merit… and which often leaves the hapless comma-splicer feeling crushed when their otherwise creditable effort receives a more than generous share of red ink as well as a disappointingly low grade to boot.

So, how to deal with the problem?

One method of redress is to approach full stop placement as a ‘musical’ rather than purely grammatical phenomenon. Simply to explain that a sentence always ends with a full stop (question mark or exclamation mark) does not appear to do the trick. However, encouraging students to read their own, and their peers’, work aloud and then to listen carefully for the ‘one second full stop pauses’ may help. Of course, this means discouraging them from dramatically loitering around commas. But then, those few star-struck prima donnas with serious acting ambition can always pursue fame and fortune once they have managed to put this seemingly elusive fundamental in place.

A second strategy is to make students aware of what their personal default sentence length looks like by initially focusing only on missing full stops when marking their written work. Three such corrected pieces should be sufficient for the purpose… but, of course, students would continually need to refer back to these diagnostic assessments when setting out on each new writing venture.

Finally, you might choose to project a suitably interesting narrative text consisting of an on-going series of full stop exercises onto your classroom screen at some point in every lesson for the foreseeable future (see downloads below). This will only take five minutes per period (pardon the pun),will involve no additional marking workload on your part, and could well be used for starter activities or to provide a welcome change of pace mid-lesson, thus re-engaging students whose concentration often wanders should any task be so bold as to progress uninterrupted for more than twenty minutes at a time. Needless to say, once started, students should complete the entire course!

Hopefully, if we beleaguered English teachers all pull together, we can severely limit the spread of comma-splicitis and, who knows, with a concerted national effort, we may even be able to bring this severely debilitating disorder to… yes, you guessed it… a complete and total full stop.

Peter Morrisson,
English Teacher and author

* The downloads which follow contain the kind of material which could be projected over a series of lessons and used as outlined above.  The content should prove to be both interesting and educational for teenagers.  It consists of one teenager’s dramatic account of how she was overtaken by the genuinely horrifying psychological illness, anorexia nervosa.  This material has been used with the kind permission of the owner's of the website:  www.escape-from-anorexia.com  The website owners are fully aware of its intended use within the classroom and are pleased that such usage will simultaneously enhance student awareness of the insidious nature of this terrible illness.  They would also like to reassure both teachers and students that Helen, the teenager who wrote the account, made a complete recovery.

The ‘Finding the full stop pauses – Exercises’ download consist of thirty-five sections with missing full stops, question marks or exclamation marks but, so as not to confuse students by including both correct and incorrect comma usage, there are no comma splices – just an absence of appropriate end of sentence punctuation. The ‘Finding the full stop pauses - Answers’ download contains the same thirty-five sections, but with the correct punctuation in place.

Secondary English - Non-fiction Exam Preparation

Acronyms seem to have become a vital part of preparing students for GCSE exams. There are loads of them: PALSS (Purpose, Audience, Language, Style, Structure) is a popular one, but fill in the gaps yourselves, I’m sure you know them all.

There is a place for acronyms, of course. In particular if students are not very confident, having a quick reminder of what they need to look for can help to calm them and give them a sense of purpose when they are on their own with the exam paper. The problem with this approach, however, is two-fold: it can be quite limiting for the students, and, perhaps more significantly, it can actually impede them from answering the question in front of them.

Teaching a holistic approach to texts, especially non-fiction, is really important but also incredibly hard because in an exam, students don’t have a lot of time to access previously-unseen material. However, they are being assessed on their ability to link what the writer is doing to why they are doing it: to comment on how the language, or the structure, or the presentation, links to meaning. And if they don’t have a grasp of overall meaning, this is where they are going to fall down, and this takes us back to the ‘limiting’ nature of some student responses.

One of the best ways of preparing students to tackle non-fiction is not, however odd it may seem, to present them with a series of past papers. Of course they need to see a paper, of course they do – it would be ludicrous to suggest they don’t – but using the deliberately uncontentious material that has to be set as unseen material as preparation does not lend itself well to students grasping ideas and engaging with them.

Perhaps a more productive way is to regularly have interesting texts on display – perhaps as starter activities – allowing students a short time to skim and scan and then for them to notice what features are being used to good effect in that text. In this way, they take more ownership of the process rather than sticking to looking for the techniques they think they ought to be looking for. Because what happens if that technique isn’t being used in the exam text? Well, the answer, unfortunately, is that some students will still try to comment on it… leading to those very limiting statements referred to above, such as ‘the writer hasn’t really used any imagery in this passage’ or ‘there aren’t any rhetorical questions’.

Sarah DarraghEnglish Teacher and author of A Bridge to GCSE English 

Secondary English - Wish you were... analysing language!

Being able to comment on the effects of language choices is essential to achieving grade C and above in GCSE English. Nonetheless students often struggle with this, getting tangled up in knots listing any literary terms they can remember and forgetting that the foundation of all language is words.

A recent way that I have tried to re-focus students on the importance of word choices was by using postcards. A colleague recommended cutting up a text and sticking a small section of it onto blank postcards so that a larger extract could be unpacked by students in more detail.

I tried this out with a year 10 class last week, in a lesson on ‘Of Mice and Men.’ I had never taught this class before and found out moments before beginning the lesson that they had never read the book. Trying to get the students to answer the question ‘How does the language in the extract influence your view of Crooks?’ suddenly seemed not only foolish but impossible.

However, the postcard method really worked!  I provided students with three different colours of pen to help them annotate the extract, by focussing on three different types of description. Breaking up the text on the postcards, forced the students to really examine the words used by Steinbeck. The different coloured pens allowed them to quickly visualise how Steinbeck’s word choices worked together (or apart). The feedback session was really fruitful as we were able to explore how Steinbeck’s use of words varied and developed across the text and how this related to the historical context.

The best ideas are often the simplest and this is a really simple one. Breaking up a text into smaller chunks is certainly not a new suggestion and using coloured pens to annotate is something I am sure we have all done before. Putting these two together, however, allowed these students to untangle language choices rather than getting tied up in knots with literary terms.

Try it for yourself! Download the resources below:

- Of Mice and Men Language Lesson Plan

- Of Mice and Men Language Lesson PowerPoint

Naomi Hursthouse

Advance Skills Teacher, Steyning Grammar School

Secondary History - Reinforcing chronological understanding

Students often find it difficult to sequence events or people, yet it is crucial to understanding cause and effect, continuity and change, and most other things in history. Here are a couple of well-tried and tested ways to reinforce chronology.

Let’s start with a pillar box:

Why is it green? When was it made? Who installed it? Where was it made? 

Nearly all of these questions can be answered from a close examination of the pillar box. It is green because it is in the Republic of Ireland, and was originally red, installed in the reign of Edward VII. 

Now, how about these pillar boxes?

Can you put these pillar boxes in chronological order?

(Download the images in a Word document here.)

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Each pillar box has the cipher of the monarch on it, so VR dates from Queen Victoria’s reign, and so on. Which monarch is missing from the above collection? In ‘Powerpoint’ in ‘outline’ mode it is easy to manipulate images around a page. Of course it is even easier with an Interactive White Board if you have one. This activity can be endlessly recycled using houses, modes of transport, inventions, battles, political leaders, whatever is appropriate. Used regularly as a starter activity it helps build up a sense of chronology and of linking events together.

Of course you can do this activity on paper too, as a card sort or, if you want to involve the whole class, using the Washing Line Game. Write 20 or so names, events, etc, on to individual sheets of paper, and hand them out to your class, one to each student. One at a time get them to come out to the front of the class and put their event in the right place standing along a timeline, or peg it onto a string stretched across the classroom. Get the rest of the class to ascertain whether or not the event is in the correct place. It gets very noisy, but it is very effective at reinforcing chronological understanding!

Alf Wilkinson

CPD Manager for the Historical Association and previously National Strategist for Key Stage 3 History. Alf has over 30 years history teaching experience and was lead author for Collins Key Stage 3 History resources.

Secondary English - Building Learning Power

Sometimes you need to make sure your class knows a deluge of information; this might be before an exam, before you start a topic or midway through to check understanding. As we are told again and again, simply ‘telling’ your pupils means they retain very little of the information, ‘doing’ increases their ‘Learning Power’ and allows them to remember the information due to the way it was taught.

With this in mind, ‘Building Learning Power’ lessons work really well and create a lively learning atmosphere in your room. These lessons also engage all learners, use group work and work especially well with classes where pupils have issues sitting still!

How it works
Before the pupils enter the room, set up a couple of tables in an area that has a lot of room. Station yourself at these tables with a timer or have the timer running on your interactive white board. On the tables place your ‘fact sheets’ face down, make sure you have enough for one between two for each group. (See my example for the novel ‘Of Mice and Men’)

Put pupils into groups of 4, 2 ‘runners’ and 2 ‘writers’. Each table should have one blank grid sheet. (Download an example grid here)

Your ‘runners’ have one minute to get to the table and memorise as much as they can from their fact sheet. After the minute they put the fact sheet back face down and return to their ‘writers’ who need to record the right information into the right box. This is repeated around 10 times, depending on how your group is progressing. What I love about this activity is that most of the groups will come up with a strategy, some memorise different areas of the sheet and others make up rhymes for key events or mouth the words over and over.

After the activity is over you can give groups a mark out of 5 (1 for each box) for the information they retained. It is also worth doing a plenary that involves the groups having to put their sheets under their chairs and asking them questions from the fact sheets to test how much they can remember. I always back this up with a similar style starter for next lesson to ensure the information is really wedged in there! The resources can be tailor made for any event, I’ve used them for Media lessons when pupils need to learn a lot of terminology as well as A Level lessons where pupils need to memorise poems.

Joanna Fliski
Teacher of English, Media and Drama, Lliswerry High School