One of the joys of being an English teacher is the opportunities that it provides me with engaging and encouraging students’ creativity and story-telling.  My year 7 class have currently been writing extended horror fiction, based around ‘Ghostbusters’, haunted houses and the mystery of a missing person.  Whilst it has been enjoyable, watching and working with them as they develop and extend ideas, it has also proved problematic as they often lose their way through long narratives and have to revise and adapt to return to their original ideas.  In reflection, and despite the obvious enjoyment they are showing as they struggle with their ideas, we may as a class have bitten off more than we can chew and the outcome it that it has made me reflect on some of the more successful ‘shorter’ tasks that we have used across the year.

Extended writing is a great process in the English classroom, but can be troublesome in other subjects and I want to push the opportunity for students to respond creatively as often as possible.  To this end, I now find myself writing a micro-blog about micro-writing which I hope will provide different activities to be able to use in other subjects.

The task was to write an action story in 80
words or less.

 With literacy and SPaG forever moving up the ladder of school focus, the different ways that we can incorporate written responses that demand accuracy as well as content into our lessons across the curriculum is essential.  

‘Flash-fiction’ or ‘Micro-fiction’ first came to light for me when reading ‘Sawn-Off Tales’ by Dean Gaffney, and since then I have adapted it to various forms and purposes.

Try using:

Six word film plots: This was made popular on a passing internet fad – this simple compression of an entire narrative into only six words really challenges students to find the core message of a given narrative. My attempt would be the film (or even the historical events of) Titanic: ‘Dreams lost to tragic icy death’.

Tweet and Re-tweet:  Much like ‘Consequences’, students write the original tweet and the moving around the room have to respond in new and developing tweets.  This could be developed to show different responses to an event or even having students respond in character, and for higher level students, theorists or scientists.

Seven word biographies: Another fun genre focused writing activity. You can see the opportunities are endless in terms of historical, political, scientific, artistic figures – or even places! – allowing students to once again condense their knowledge to highlight key details. Here is my own example for Winston Churchill: 'Black dog and war held at bay'.

Seventeen word tales:  Though the number of words can obviously be adapted, the task relies on students’ abilities to select and summarise key events precisely to ensure that they hit the magic prescribed number.  For additional challenge, give students rules and structures, such as asking them to include four types of punctuation, key facts or images, etc.

Haiku poems: These compressed poems get students selecting vocabulary and organizing sentence structures with real precision and focus and the true aim is to bring together two juxtaposing ideas - a great way to encourage higher to contrast conflicting theories, beliefs or points of view.

Mobile phone number narratives: Get students to use their mobile phone numbers to create a structure for sentence lengths e.g. for the number seven they need to include a seven word sentence etc. It really concentrates their mind on crafting sentence structures.

They make great starter activities to focus on prior learning or plenaries to show understanding of the lesson’s key content.  Get your students writing!

Writing essays falls at the core of many of our subjects and for our high achieving students they are often able to write page after page of things that are written fluently, are on topic and relevant to the overall subject at hand but are equally just as often vague and not cohesive at establishing a point of view or an argument.  They struggle to identify the reason for their writing.

Writing an essay is a lot like a jigsaw puzzle: you start with the bigger picture and start to build from nothing towards it.  The other reason that I chose this analogy is because there is truly no right or wrong way to approach it – you may be a ‘corners then edges person’ who likes to pin the idea down and then fill in the middle, or you may be someone who drifts from clump to clump as they find pieces that fit together and then pull them altogether later.  Whichever, the point is that eventually it works.  Yet our students still find it difficult to build confidence into their essays without a clear and precise framework that gives them the ‘right answer’ every time and therein lays the problem.  Writing isn’t a ‘right every time process’, it’s one of fluidity, of mistakes and corrections, of drawing the reader in with ideas and challenges to pre-conceptions.

Planning essays is essential and it is often a determining factor for students who continuously sit comfortably on grade boundaries as to which grade they will actually achieve.  The current move to a ‘Drafting and Editing’ process as school policy should support students in the long run but, perhaps, we still need to provide a consistent and coherent structure for students to apply across subjects rather than continuing with departmental variations.

Planning can fall into different stages and I encourage students to begin with a basic, immediate mind-mapping of ideas and initial responses before moving on to planning a ‘deeper thought’ map of quotes, topic sentences and paragraph overviews.

Planning:

What comes first: the chicken or the egg?  Or, in this case, the planning or the use of modelled answers?  One technique that I have used this year is backwards planning through the use of a modelled answer and thereby looking at both at the same time.  This allowed students to consider the impact of assessment objectives on their writing as well as explore the possibilities of order and structuring an argument.

Planning is obviously an essential step and the trap that many students fall into is that when planning the ideas that they will write about they often fail to consider the order in which to present those ideas and how to link them to strengthen their writing and raise the construction of their argument – this is often the result of bad mind-mapping or an incomplete use of a spider diagram.  One way that I have worked with students to combat this is in the editing stages when they can cut their first draft into the component paragraphs and move them around more freely to explore the possibilities of order.

Options for planning are varied and I have always encouraged students to explore a wide variety of methods to allow them to develop their own way forward.  These might include mind-maps, simple tables of comparisons, spider diagrams, planning trees, PEACE grids, Post-Its and string, numbered lists or any number of other activities that encourage them to draw their thoughts together in a logical and cohesive way.

Scaffolding and Modelled Answers

A rigid writing frame can support weaker students consider
language if it acts as a spring board to another piece or writing

Writing frames are more often used to support weaker students, but by having students develop their own writing frames through discussion and group work can not only more fully prepare the weaker students by allowing them to be familiar with the frame prior to writing but can stretch and challenge the more able students as they develop a framework that can be used by all and consolidate their ideas.

Modelled Answers

Many of us will rely on pre-prepared modelled answers in our lessons, whether provided by exam boards or written by ourselves, and they allow students to apply assessment objectives and identify areas of success or weakness in their own writing as well as potentially ‘magpie’ ideas that they can use as springboards for their own writing.

Frames used to develop and plan
for speeches

Additionally, in the last year I have begun to write modelled answers as my students are attempting to write theirs.  This allows them to see the process first hand, to show them that we all make mistakes first time around as well as allowing them to question my ideas and choices made.  Something that I hadn’t expected was the depth of the conversation that this triggered with one class and the interest shown by another in creating more specific word banks generated by my answer.  

Introductions, Topic Sentences and Conclusions

The introduction should offer a form of conclusion from the start to identify to the reader what they are about to read and what the train of the argument will be.  The simplest way for this is for students to use the command and key words within their opening statement to form a conclusion.  One tip I learnt myself at university and often discuss with older students is to write their first sentence and to immediately write the second without stopping and what they will most probably find is that the latter is a clearer distillation of their ideas and argument. 

In English, we often encourage students to avoid a conclusion as they are usually unnecessary but they can also be the ideal point for students to offer a personal opinion, evaluation or reflection.

Final Thoughts

In most schools, essays are obviously and more generally seen as the ‘remit’ of the English department but Didau suggests that the various departments take ownership for specific forms of extended writing that they need their students to respond in:  Science and Technology for example could stand as the ‘Houses of Inquiry’ or mastering concise instructions, Maths for selecting key details from comprehension questions and so on. Could each department become an expert in their form of writing, showing a wider and more unified whole school literacy that would eventually lead to greater resilience, independence and depth of application in our students?  Are we in a situation where we can collaborate to develop whole school writing frames beyond the restrictions of subjects to provide students with?

Possible teaching activities:

• Paired planning and essay writing
• Upgrading a weak essay to a higher answer
• Timed focuses – e.g. 4mins to write a killer introduction, marking for academic language, etc.
• Drafting, re-drafting and not accepting until A*
• Planning via ‘Consequences’
• Backwards planning – here is a finished essay, write me the plan
• Taking all topic sentences out and putting them together to create a précis – does this work?
• Write the essay on the white board as the students do

Bibliography:

Ashman, S. & Crème P. (2002) How to Write Essays – A Guide for Students, University of North London Press

Cottrel, S. (2011) Critical Thinking Skills, Palgrave Macmillan

Diadau, D. (2014) The Secret of Literacy: Making the implicit, explicit, Crown House Publishing

Greetham, B.(2013) How to Write Better Essays, Palgrave Macmillan

Using Speech to Structure and Develop Learning

Speeches and debates, presentations, conversations, Q & A sessions, hot-seating, interviews or just plain talk, dialogue has always played a central, and maybe crucial, part of my lessons.  For me, classroom dialogue not only provides students with opportunities to learn but allows me to model the thought processes whilst deconstructing texts, and finally lets me explore their interpretations as much as my own.

Mercer suggests that speech is crucial and that the ‘prime aim of education ought to be to help children learn to use language effectively as a tool for thinking collectively’, and later   suggests that the development and acquisition of spoken language can be linked to intellectual development.  If we accept this, then the nature of classroom dialogue must be structured and scaffolded as tightly as any written work, but I believe that it must also be done in such a way as to maintain the natural fluidity and, perhaps, the ‘randomness’ of speech to recognise those very elements that we draw on in everyday conversation.

Mercer summarises the key concerns of talk as:

·         Talk - of the right quality and depth – develops logic and reasoning, assists in conceptual understanding and in reading comprehension.

·         Many children do not access a wide enough experience of spoken forms outside of the school environment for this development to be assured.

·         From experiencing different forms and types of talk, students need to connect it to the correct functional skills and situational examples of how to construct arguments, jointly reflect on and solve problems and comprehend a range of texts, most importantly non-fiction.

Our experience as teachers tells us that students learn best when they are able to develop their ability to link talk and work together and when we are able to both model and scaffold forms of good practise and the wider expectations outside of the classroom.  While the participation of the teacher, as being the point of authority and knowledge, can have a negative impact, and allow students to feel that their input is ultimately irrelevant, if I allow their train of thought to derail occasionally and follow the direction that they wish to take it in I have often found that this gives them confidence.  It can also open up a wide range of references and connections that otherwise would have been lost.  With a practised class it is easy enough to draw them back to the original point once they have exhausted their ideas – alternatively, it may lead onto an entirely different way of reading something and can allow students to test ideas before committing to them.

Talk is not necessarily just talk, both social and educational talk takes place in our classrooms, equally as valid as each other, and Mercer and Hodgekinson, handily,  identify the different forms of speech that take place and the ones that we should be encouraging students to recognise and consider.  By exploring the necessary forms and mannerisms of each then students are able to more readily recognise what is required from them, adapting and shifting styles, vocabularies and structures where needed.

·         Social Talk: used to develop relationships amongst students, encouraging of group identities and of exploring emotional reactions to both discussion topics and to each other.  In this type of talk, students can learn the meaning behind words through emotional tone and diction.

·         Exploratory Talk: used to more formally test and explore new ideas and practise the application of theories and ideas.  This relies on the first stage of social talk being in place to provide students with the emotional strength and supportive network to challenge others’ ideas, to revise their thinking and share ‘half-baked’ ideas.

·         Presentation Talk: used to present ideas to groups but, in contrast to the informal nature of social talk, with a specific - and perhaps formal - purpose and audience in mind.

·         Meta-talk: used to explore and discuss the thinking processes and to consider talk as a thing that can in turn be analysed and explored.

·         Critical Talk: used to critique pupils own views and of the views around them and allows students to raise academic thought processes.

Recently, I have begun providing classes with slides naming the type of talk they would be using and for what purpose to highlight and emphasise the skills that they would be developing beyond the task itself.  This has been effective for some forms of talk – exploratory, presentation and critical – but for others has not seen the same success, as students seem to have been placing their own judgement on the relevance of the different forms that they use, suggesting that their own reflection and evaluation of their abilities takes place at a deeper level than they might even realise.

Presentation Talk is one that we often rely on to encourage students to present and lead but I freely admit that having provided my students with the opportunity to work independently and lead the class I can often forget to provide them with the structure, purpose and with specific focus on the type of language that they should be using to address their audience.  To my own embarrassment I too often leave it to chance.  This can be easily rectified by discussing and establishing presentation criteria and by allowing students to draft, edit and practise the way that they will present.

Meta-talk has been the hardest to engage students’ responses as they seem to struggle with the concept that we talk about talk – in much the same way, I have found, that they find it difficult to think about what they have thought.  In attempts to counter this I have used this as a discursive plenary.  To discuss what challenged them or how they felt about expressing their ideas.

Organising Group Talk:

As well as the Kagen structures and activities we have explored in CPD, there are a number of other activities we can use to organise group discussion, many of which can be established early on in the year and then revisited quickly and easily with little additional work – I tend to have a worksheet or visual slide I can re-use each time.  Ginnis’ ‘The Teachers Toolkit’ is another great source of activities that can be used to structure and scaffold classroom talk.

Activities such as:

·         Listening Triads – Pupils work in groups of three with allocated roles: a Talker, a Questioner and a Recorder who reports back.  The Talker speaks on the topic or activity while the Questioner is expected to listen and question them on what they do and why they think something.  The Recorder, much like a secretary, listens and makes notes that they will feedback to the wider audience.  This allows the teacher to structure the Recorder to listen for key phrases and spoken features.

·         Envoys – after group activities one person from each group visits another to share ideas and then reports back to the original group.

·         Market Seller – Once the activity is finished one person remains behind to share ideas while the others in the group visit other ‘sellers’ who will provide them with ideas to feedback to the original group.

·         Snowball – Pairs brainstorm and discuss ideas, before doubling up to fours to extend ideas and then again to eight and so on and so on. Eventually this can lead to whole class debate.  This allows students to prepare what they will say and how they will say it in a debate.

·         Jigsaw – Before an activity takes place the ‘home’ group divides themselves and allocates a section to each member.  The experts for each section then join other experts to complete the activity before returning to their original groups and ‘jig-sawing’ ideas together.

·         Observer/Listener – This can develop the class’ use of critical talk.  While an activity takes place one student sits aside to watch and listen to each group and the ways in which they interact, the ways in which they speak and their group dynamics.  Feeding back can raise awareness of their ability to work together as their sense f language being used critically and reflectively.

·         Team Puppet – Groups nominate a puppet that they will control in a debate.  The puppet speaks for the team, but they can call a halt to the proceedings and give the puppet further instructions to work on or ways to respond when the activity continues.

Scaffolding group talk:

Didau left some interesting points to take up and use to scaffold talk, such as sentence starters and speaking frames, though the primary aim of them is to develop our students critical language and not necessarily to support the weakest students that struggle to verbalise their ideas, or – the students who are the real bane of talk in class – the shy ones.

By developing our students ability to talk confidently, accurately and with mature sophistication, in both the classroom and in real life situations, we can only give them greater independence and cognitive ability to see them through to greater success beyond the ‘be-all and end-all’ exam.  Holistic and wishy-washy it might be, but it is what I believe.

Bibliography:

Barton, G. (2013) Don’t call it Literacy: What every teacher needs to know, Routledge

Diadau, D. (2014) The Secret of Literacy: Making the implicit, explicit, Crown House Publishing

Ginnis, P. (2002) The Teacher’s Toolkit, Crown House Publishing

Mercer, N. (2002) ‘Developing Dialogues’, in Wells, G. & Claxton, G. (2002) Learning for life in the C21st: Sociocultural perspectives on the future of education, Oxford: Blackwell

Mercer, N & Hodgekinson, S. (2008) Exploring Talk in School, London: Sage