Firstly, I started offering two sessions a week based on developing knowledge of texts we were studying. Some colleagues had never taught 'Frankenstein' before we began discussing key scenes to cover with our classes obvious starting examples being: Walton's frame narration and the function of it; Victor's childhood; influences at university and chapter 5. We spent time discussing Prometheus and how this myth is embodied by the text. We looked at a lesson from the scheme and talked about how, with a great TED-Ed video The myth of Prometheus, students might secure their knowledge perhaps rewriting the myth before they made links over to the novel. We also came to the conclusion that to understand the novel and really get to grips with chapter 5 students would need to understand the Gothic tradition. As seen previously, for our students videos can be a real way in and I found this one from The British Library The Gothic as a fantastic starting point and covers briefly: Walpole's 'The Castle of Otranto' , 'Jekyll and Hyde' , 'Dracula' and 'Frankenstein' as well as typical features of the genre. Discussions turned to looking at the opening of chapter 5 together and pulling out some Gothic features we could all talk to students about, increasing teacher confidence in analysing a text they hadn't taught before in front of their class. Whatever we discussed I had on a power point that I then shared with the department. These were not fully fledged lessons but ideas and resources teachers could adapt for their class.
Next, 'Macbeth' appeared to be a hot potato as some teachers either hadn't taught Shakespeare before or weren't sure which topics or scenes were best to focus on. These pop-in sessions featured us looking at Lady Macbeth and how she persuades Macbeth. We considered different interpretations of her such as: loyal wife, villain, strong female (as per other characters in Shakespeare's oeuvre) challenging the idea of subservient womanhood, witch and mad woman. We also honed in on Act 1 scene 7 to see how in a matter of lines Shakespeare has her manipulate her husband to agree to commit regicide. Here we picked out features such as : insulting his masculinity, emotional blackmail, hyperbole, emphasising her own determination by monstrously dashing her baby's 'brains out'.
This led on to me modelling how to model a paragraph about Lady Macbeth. Like the majority of other English teachers, I have moved away from the formulaic and reductive: PEE, PETAL, PEEZE and other variations of letters previously created in good faith to get students to hang an analysis on. I don't even do it with Key Stage 3 classes. We just have a list of prompts by the side depending on the group. There was a great discussion about real concerns of modelling in front of a top set or making mistakes.
I found in my own modelling journey there are many ways around this to alleviate worries.
Make a list of word prompts, as sort of aide memoires if you like, to aid your own thought process whilst demonstrating use of analytical or evaluative vocabulary. For example in the pink box below next to my blue Year 10's first effort:
Another strategy was to pre pick the quotation and type out some sentence starts which could be combined by the class in the lesson. This could then be colour coded or annotated to show how it features the AOs.
The easiest option we discussed was to start as a 'rookie modeller' and to use one from an exam board exemplar, of which there are many on eAQA an other exam board sites.
Naturally, this turned into an essay or analysis opportunity and we discussed how introductions, especially conceptual style ones were highlighted by AQA to be something seen in high quality exam responses. So we looked at some student intros and talked about how to get more students responding more conceptually with thesis statement style introductions. Generally, we concluded these needed to include 'writing from the writer' so in its simplest form, using the author's name. We also decided referring to the key words in the question and creating the thesis statement (argument in a nutshell) around these which might feature: some nod to context or what the writer 'might' have wanted to have a conversation about in writing the text would be a really effective starting point.
In Year 8 this year we taught poetry on the theme of Social Injustice. Students had already read 'Of Mice and Men' and 'Noughts and Crosses' so had some previous knowledge of this in a literary context - although this did have to be explicitly pointed out to them since, as we know, the ideas don't always transfer easily over to a new topic. In these pop-ins we felt so excited by the topic and where it could go and on looking at the scheme reflected that it did not start with the same passion we felt and didn't really activate their previous knowledge or set up a context. I shared some lessons I had done with my class where before beginning the scheme, we looked at music videos of protest songs like: Pink Floyd's 'Another Brick in the Wall' , 'Just a Girl' by No Doubt, Green Day's 'American Idiot' (very easy for students to relate to apparently) and 'Free Nelson Mandela'. These all helped to set up a context to discuss initial big questions like: What kinds of social injustice are there? How do people feel about social injustice? How can it affect people's lives on a daily basis? It was here students began to fully understand the concept and could then apply it to the poems we moved on to study. One of the poems in this collection was 'Nothing's Changed' by Tatamkhulu Afrika. Anyone with a few years of teaching behind them will be able to cast your mind back to the old AQA Poetry from Other Cultures Anthology which featured the aforementioned poem and other gems like Achebe's 'Vultures'. However, many recently qualified teachers had never come across this poem before, so this was a good place to start in sharing ideas. One idea was we watched the trailer to 'District 9' and we talked about the social injustice here and how this could be a way in to the poem for students before giving them a little more context about District 6 in South Africa at the time.
Finally, as we came up to GCSE revision time I shared my 'Three things to teach for...'. These were just snippets of areas in each text you might want to revise or share with your class to revise their knowledge. For example with 'A Christmas Carol' the pop-in featured the opening sentence of the book, the motif of time and Dickens' use of parallelism. Admittedly, the opening sentence one became a bit of a geek out and a key quotation for my students to revise as it fits into so many possible essay questions! Here, we talked about Dickens' use of: hypotaxis, withholding of information, setting up key themes (death, change and loss) , narrative perspective (whose actually is it?) and why Dickens would go to such lengths setting up an air of finality to convince us how dead Marley was, after starting the novel stating that he was only dead 'to begin with'.
Before writing this blog I messaged the department to see what they would say they got out of the pop-ins. Here's some of their opinions summarised (thanks ladies!):
- Staff liked having time to discuss and have resources to take away that they could adapt into the scheme of work and adapt for their students.
- Also, recapping or quickly gaining an overview of key extracts with colleagues' input in advance of teaching them.
- Stealing ideas of tried and tested strategies that had worked for others- finding different ways of teaching something taught before.
- Discussing obstacles we have come across teaching a skill or topic and finding ways to solve them from all experience levels.
- Practical elements such as writing conceptual intros and modelling strategies that could easily be used with any class.
All of the above are great outcomes but the main thing the group felt these sessions contributed to their teaching life was a real sense of collegiality within the department. We created a safe space to discuss ideas, texts, knowledge and misunderstandings. We also had time to throw ideas out the window or time to consider trying a strategy out of our comfort zone with the support of other colleagues. From our group chat we realised it was important for us to celebrate this. Indeed, on a daily basis when we are all so busy rushing around, marking, tweaking lessons, it might not have necessarily been stated out loud the impact these sessions actually had on our lessons and pedagogy. However, as we reflected, this magic was occurring and was inspired by our 'Merry Pop-ins!'
