English - Daniel Bottom

It’s all very well having great expectations of our students, but we must give them means to understand great works of literature. 

The first lesson I taught as an NQT was in a rather challenging school. It was Year 8 ‘bottom’ set. I was told to teach them Louis Sachar’s ‘Holes’ and was assured that it was okay to set lesson objectives that were entirely focussed on behaviour. To get most of the students to stay in their seat for most of the lesson with little profanity and few arguments was to be considered a success. 

A little apprehensive, feeling like an amateur, I arrived to find the classroom door open but the room empty. I sat down and waited. Then I heard a snigger from one of the lockers that lined the wall. A little cough came from another one. Not entirely sure how to proceed when your students, in your first ever lesson, decide to hide from view – and not having addressed this during my teacher training – I decided to do what I was intending to do anyway: read the novel. So, I did. 

I just read the book aloud. One by one the students emerged from the lockers. They looked a little bemused. Most of them decided to sit on the floor. The others sat on desks. And I kept reading. At the end of Chapter 2, I tried to hand out a worksheet with some simple comprehension questions for them to complete. The look in their eyes suggested this wasn’t going to end well so I asked if they wanted to do some work or to just keep on reading. All of them opted for the latter. 

Over the next few weeks, that’s all we did. Read a novel, talk about what had just happened and what might happen next. Slowly we started to pause every now and then to draw the characters or act out what had gone on. We never got around to lesson objectives about sitting in chairs because, most of the time, we didn’t. I don’t know how much they learnt in terms of assessments and other progress measures. But they did learn something and I learned a lot. 

Now, quite a few years later, I still return to this. Students, in my experience, love to ‘read’, though many of them want to be read to. They can absorb the huge complexity of a literary work – the plot, the settings, the characters – if the story is read in a fluent, coherent manner. Audiobooks have been a revelation as the narrators are professionals. I am not. Audiobooks can be paused leaving space for discussion, can be rewound for emphasis. Alternatively, trying to read around the class means that multiple voices play the part of a single character and the fluency of the reading is, at best, erratic, a little like watching an amateurish film in which a different actor turns up every minute or so to play the same character. 

Watching them tackle their final exams, it’s striking how they approach things, partly because of their focus, but also, because of the way IB format the papers. Before students can write, highlight, or make notes, there is five-minutes of reading the questions and going through the paper. They use this time well, often pausing to think and staring out of a window or flicking back and forth so they know the what’s ahead. 

I suspect all students would do better with this breathing space before the writing begins, but as exam boards don’t change, maybe we could train pupils to pause, to read, to consider what’s involved, before they let loose their ideas?

Maybe those who tackled it in the 'wrong' way were simply better at strategy-planning or maybe they are just confident enough to set aside the exam board's thinking and do their own thing.

Here's something to ponder from Mark Tomlins, Assistant Director of Teaching and Learning: 

“How can we use HPL to build our behaviour policy and practices?

During my time leading my school through World Class School Accreditation, the first full school action we developed was to change our behaviour policy. The school was an inner-city UK state primary school. The catchment was very diverse, and many pupils came to school with challenging backgrounds. Traditional behaviour strategies were not working for a small percentage of pupils but these pupils’ behaviour impacted on whole year groups or phases. We looked at changing our behaviour policy with the HPL VAAs at its heart. Instead of being dictatorial with looked at behaviour as being aspirational. For pupils to develop the behaviours that they needed to be high performers and confident learners. Coupled with this was the essential understanding of our pupils both at a school level and individual level for classes.

Have you used HPL to shape behaviour in your school? How did you do it? What worked well that you can share?”

Hi all,

Quick question: how have you used HPL competencies to develop the skills in our pupils to build their wellbeing? What is happening in your schools to help students cope with the challenges they face?

In today’s world of social media and technical communications with have unprecedented opportunities like never before, to contact, communicate with and inform our various stakeholders. Lockdowns have developed in us a new skill set of electronic teaching and communications. Everywhere we see Podcasts from all sectors. The question this week is how is our HPL community using this technology? Are you making Podcasts for parents? Are you posting video content online to support home learning? How is it best used? Share with us your experiences in our subject communities and possibly gets some great ideas shared by others.

As we look at adaptive teaching within an inclusive classroom, could we use the HPL competencies as varied focuses for differentiation? Not differentiation by activity but by the competencies / skills to be focused on. 

 How have you used HPL to support an adaptive, inclusive classroom?

During HPL Pathway Programmes we look to embed the HPL VAA and ACP vocabulary into our classrooms giving our students, teachers and parents a shared language to talk to and about learning. After accreditation we look to address progression and assessment for the VAAs and ACPs. How do we do this in our schools? How do we do this within subjects? Should this be teacher led assessment of pupil self-evaluation?

There are quite a few videos on YouTube that suggest notes on complex matters should be made once the discussion/lecture/lesson is over. That way, a student can listen to what it being said, pause then process things, before making more considered notes. This would seem to apply to reading too. Students, it is suggested, should simply read along/listen and then, once the passage in question is over, go back, highlight and make notes. That way, they follow the narrative's twists and turns and make notes with a better grasp of the bigger picture. 

Having the opportunity to be on stage and focussing on what they say rather than what they write is important. In the long run, if students can say it, they’re more likely to be able to write it…at least, that’s what we believe.

Recently, a student, when asked to reflect on their summer examination, asked me whether that was a little like asking directions from someone who knew they were lost. That seemed an interesting suggestion. They wanted to be told where they had gone wrong and how to get back on track which all seemed quite reasonable until they paused and then pointed out that relying on a teacher's feedback might not be too helpful in the long run as they would be on their own in the real exam. 

For quite some time, peer-assessment and student-to-student feedback seemed to be in fashion. Are students well-equipped to give advice to their peers? Do they need 'training'? Is peer-assessment a risk if the students are trying to get their minds around something and don't, yet, understand it deeply?

What struck me though, was the emphasis on visitors keeping their mobile phones turned off/out of sight, an approach which, increasingly, seems to be becoming commonplace. However, as in my school, many students were carrying tablets and laptops. This made me wonder whether, though such devices offer less scope for social media distractions, do screens of any sort encourage students to focus elsewhere during lessons?

Also, given than the majority of students still face examinations that require them to convey their thoughts by pen, does typing not serve to de-skill them over the years leading up to their final exams?

Or are we, at present, lost in the transition from paper to screen? We want to prepare students to leave us in their wake so they can move into their futures filled with tech, yet we are asking them to navigate assessments in a medium that seems increasingly archaic.  

If students are working towards a comparative essay, then the same process can be followed for a second text. Once that big-picture has been created, then the two can be placed side-by-side and links, connections and differences identified and explored. 

On Thursday, June 8th, the English team where I work, Ellesmere College in Shropshire is delivering an HPL Short Course focussing on how we are looking to develop agility and confidence through creativity. We’ve tried lots of things, many of which haven’t gone too well, had a lot of fun and found a few things that seem to work.

A lot of the session will be led by some of our students as, so often, they know more than us about what works. There will be time to discuss what we’re doing to help students reflect on their assessments, share ideas about curriculum design and, perhaps most importantly, have a chat.

Hopefully we'll see you there. Here's the link: Getting Creative with English eventbrite.com