Bringing heart into English Language
I thoroughly enjoy reading Chris Curtis’s blogs on creative writing. They’re packed full of practical ideas, challenge my thinking, and encourage me to step outside of the GCSE spec and get back to the heart of what stories are for. They encourage me to rethink my approach to teaching the English language GCSE.
Too often in the past, my planning for English language GCSE lessons would focus on the paper. I’d follow a set formula: read and discuss the extract, look at one of the questions from the paper, model aspects of the question, and guide students’ practice. In doing so, I lost sight of the purpose of English, beyond just getting students over the GCSE finish line. When teaching the GCSE language course, we should try to get back to the heart of English.
At its heart, English is about writers, who create worlds, challenge society, change minds and connect us across different times and places. It’s about characters, whose struggles, dilemmas and experiences stay with us and help us understand ourselves and others. It’s about storytelling, and encouraging us to create worlds inspired by the words that have come before us. It’s also about the power of persuasion to convince others, and an invitation to us to join the debate, using the power of the written and spoken word to influence.
We are approaching our teaching of English language with fresh eyes, and trying to get back to the heart of English. We’re spending time grappling with the persistent problems our students face, considering some of the deep-rooted causes, and finding solutions together, while holding sight of our subject’s purpose.
Persistent problems and potential solutions
1. Subject enthusiasm
One challenge we’ve explored is students’ passion and enjoyment for the subject, seeing its relevance, and seeing beyond exam questions, specifications and qualifications, into learning to develop a lifelong love of the subject for its own sake.
2. Understanding subject concepts
Another of the problems we’ve explored together, explained eloquently in ‘The Trouble with English and How to Address It’ by Zoe Helman and Sam Gibbs, is students’ difficulty to think conceptually in English. They struggle to step outside the words on the page and think more deeply about the purpose behind the characters, how the characters represent what it means to be human, and how the writers are using the characters to explore struggles and dilemmas that many of us face in our lives.
How can we address these challenges? Potentially by approaching our teaching of English language by thinking about what we most want students to know about stories and narrative, nonfiction and persuasion – not just the knowledge they need for exam papers.
Stories and Narrative
What is it we most love about stories?
What is it that makes stories so powerful?
What do we most want students to remember about the narratives and storytelling we teach?
Writers: their perspectives, intentions and messages
Characters: their motives, choices, struggles and relationships.
Themes that often reflect tensions in society: protest, rebellion and freedom
Craft: imagery and words that stay with us for years to come, striking contrasts, and conversations between characters that reveal desires, passions and conflicts.
Settings: real places, fantasy worlds, or temporal settings that transport us to different time periods or propel us into the future.
Structure: openings that immediately place us on the edge of our seat, twists that keep us reading or unresolved endings that leave us bamboozled or craving the sequel.
Persuasion and Nonfiction
What do we find most compelling about persuasion?
Why is it that certain phrases, letters and speeches have stayed with us?
What knowledge do we want to equip our students with so that they can go out and be the orators and influencers of the future?
Writers: their perspective and chosen topic; what compels a writer to persuade or inform
Heritage: how writers have drawn from the history of rhetoric and its appeals
Craft: emotions, examples, stories, anecdotes, repetition, rhetorical questions, dreams, nightmare and calls to action – the words that reach us, and have the power to change our minds
Structure: the societal problems and potential solutions explored, the art of building a balanced and persuasive argument, the art of acknowledging and refuting objections and counter arguments.
Our English language curricula will be structured around these ideas as a starting point.
3. Writing
Another challenge we’re constantly grappling with in the English classroom is writing.
Our students often struggle because writing clearly and coherently is complex, daunting and overloading. It’s one of the hardest things we ask them to do. And many of our students do not yet have the knowledge of how to write well.
As expert writers ourselves, we struggle to bridge the empathy gap and remember just how difficult it is to write well. Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler take on the challenge in their brilliant book ‘The Writing Revolution’. I’ve blogged before here, here, and here about the importance of never assuming students have the knowledge to write extended pieces, and instead making sure we teach sentence-level writing in the classroom. But much of my thinking to this point has focused on analytical writing. It’s time to revisit the six principles of writing from ‘The Writing Revolution’ and apply these to story writing and persuasion too:
Students need explicit instruction in writing.
Sentences are the building blocks of all writing.
When embedded in curriculum content, writing instruction is a powerful teaching tool.
The content of the curriculum drives the rigour of the writing activities.
Grammar is best taught in the context of student writing.
Two important phases of the writing process are planning and revising.
Like many others, I’ve been inspired recently by Chris Youles’s book ‘Sentence Models for Creative Writing’, which offers hundreds of brilliant examples of sentence models that can be modelled, practised and revisited. We’re selecting some of the most accessible and versatile to try out with our students, and plan to embed the teaching of sentence-level creative writing into our reading lessons, giving lots and lots of opportunities for scaffolded practice.
The top 10 we’ve chosen so far are these:
Write a sentence that orients the reader: who + what + where
Write a sentence that triples the action: three short actions
Write a sentence that gives detail of the setting: The + The + A/an
Write a sentence that shifts focus: Top to bottom
Write a sentence that shows internal feelings: feeling + action
Write a sentence that shows growth of internal feelings: feeling + repetition
Write a sentence that contains sensory details: sight + sound
Write a sentence that creates mystery: sight + sound + touch + reveal
Write a sentence that reveals character motivation: dialogue + verb
Write a sentence that replaces spoken replies with physical actions: reactions
We’re taking a similar approach for persuasive writing. Inspired by some ideas in Emma Lee’s blog, which considers what makes certain writing forms distinctive, we’ve considered which sentence models we need to explicitly teach in order to help our students convey their ideas well – not just in an exam, but in their future lives.
The top 9 sentence models we’ve drafted so far are these:
Write a sentence that introduces a problem or solution.
Write a sentence that introduces an example
Write a sentence that evokes an emotion.
Write a sentence containing repetition, rhetorical questions and a triple.
Write a sentence introducing a story.
Write a sentence showing understanding of an objection or opposing viewpoint.
Write a sentence introducing an anecdote.
Write a sentence introducing a nightmare or dream scenario.
Write a sentence ending with a call to action.
These sentence models are just the starting point; there is, of course, a lot more to crafting a more extended response. But we’ll start with the foundations and work our way up to the roof.
In summary:
Too often when teaching English GCSE, we lose sight of our subject’s heart. Let’s keep trying to reconnect with it, so that we pass on the knowledge that students most need in their future lives – not just for their exams.
Structuring the teaching of GCSE English language around the concepts we most want to teach is a starting point.
Starting with our subjects’ and students’ persistent problems and problem-solving together gives us a much stronger chance of making better decisions and plans.
We need to teach complex writing elements explicitly, selectively and thoughtfully, so that our students can learn what, to us, has become intuitive.
There’s plenty more work to do, testing these out, discussing, debating, revising, reiterating and improving: that’s the joy of curriculum development.
I continue to feel very grateful to the subject thinkers in the English subject community writing blogs and publishing books for us to learn from, and to my colleagues for continually carving out the time to tackle the persistent problems in English head on, together.