Five Feet Away From Success With Accuracy In Writing

The Red Arrows will take your breath away no matter how many times you’ve seen them searing through the skies overhead.

The excitement translates to video, too, as we discovered when we showed the Red Arrows in action to a group of Year 11 GCSE English students.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHZWr6oeYC0

Even the Squadron Leader seemed thrilled to be able to watch the display from the unusual vantage point of a rear mounted camera. His commentary was fascinating. At times, he tells us, the aircraft are no more than 5 feet apart. There was an audible gasp from the students when they heard this.

How do they do it?

Planning and practice lead to precision the students reckoned.

Suddenly, a request for their best shot with accuracy in punctuation and spelling didn’t seem much of a stretch after all.

For more about the Red Arrows – http://www.raf.mod.uk/reds/

Accurate Spelling and Punctuation – Mavis Riley To The Rescue.

“I don’t really know.”

Who can forget these immortal words from Coronation Street character, Mavis Riley. Spoken in such a dithering, hesitant manner, they quickly became a comic catchphrase for the entire nation, with the charge led by comedian, Les Dennis.

Here’s Mavis, having afternoon tea with that other Coronation Street dynamo, Emily Bishop. Whatever their failings, these two meek and gentle characters paid careful attention to detail and doing things properly. Just look at the tidy coffee table – not a cup and saucer out of place.

Back to that one-liner again. Succinct and restrained certainly when uttered by Mavis. Yet ask someone to write this apparently simple line down and suddenly there’s scope for an awful lot of errors.

Consider the following version;

i dont realy no

How many times have you witnessed one of your English students write just like that? Even students on a GCSE English course, perhaps?

Yet produce writing like this and the student will fall well short of the “mostly accurate” level descriptor that could propel them into the pass zone.

And suddenly your GCSE English results start to teeter maybe.

Certainly there are students who will struggle with basic spelling and punctuation, but in so many cases it’s all too often attributable to simple carelessness. The challenge for secondary English teachers is first try to understand the root causes of the carelessness and then to find strategies for addressing it with their students.

Startling Moments

So today’s brief was to work with a small group of Year 11 students as they continue to prepare for the WJEC/GCSE English qualification. Specifically, to develop their understanding of what’s required for the ‘Transactional Writing’ section of Paper 2. The students had been shocked by the apparently arbitrary and random nature of the topics they would be expected to write about. Better still, to write convincingly about these topics. Some could barely contain their confusion about the congestion charge debate while others visibly gulped at the prospect of writing what they would say when trying to persuade an assembly full of their peers to support a particular charity.

Year after year, this particular exam board – in common with its peers – was setting a letter writing task – whether to friends, relatives, or “to a newspaper”.  Fair enough you might say. Truthfully  though, I  can’t remember the last time I wrote a letter. Is it any wonder that the students’ eyes glaze over at the prospect of writing in a form that seems a little anachronistic? While the exam boards see fit to offer up internet articles as part of the non-fiction reading diet, they are apparently fighting shy of inviting the students to write even an email.

The English department had been concerned that the students struggled to generate their own ideas. They were right. So today, time was invested in developing the students’ approach to planning. They’re allocated 35 minutes to tackle each of the Section B Transactional Writing  tasks. An efficient approach to planning is vital.

Several approaches were modelled and shared and the students given opportunities to apply these to a given topic. Finally, the students were encouraged to relax and adopt a more intuitive approach to generating ideas. Suddenly, there was one of the students, let’s call him David, producing a very different planning format to anything he’d done before. And  generating significantly more ideas. I asked David whether he’d ever used this approach before and he seemed suddenly startled to have his efforts brought to his attention. His eyes lit up and he beamed a proud smile. For here was a sudden shift in his learning. He recognised it and I’d recognised it.

The picture above was taken as the sun started to set over the Welsh hills a few weeks ago. It was breathtaking. Moments such as the one described above can be equally breathtaking for student and teacher alike, too.

A Matter of Confidence – GCSE English, the Queen’s Jubilee and the 2012 London Olympics

2012 is the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations. A curious word – jubilee – one that has it’s origins in the ancient Hebrew word yobhel – which denoted a ram’s horn that was blown in celebration. Now there’s a turn up for the books, unless you happen to be a Hebrew scholar. The next few months will see the final build-up to the other major event in the UK this year – the London 2012 Olympic Games. I felt more confident about the etymology of this word – olympic  – which derives from Mount Olympus, home of the Gods, in Ancient Greece.

The naming of these two very current and significant events in the British calendar for 2012 has very deep roots in places far from our shores, reflecting the historical pre-eminence of these two languages and ancient civilisations. Our own English language and culture also has deep and impressive roots, drawing as it does on the Latin, Viking, and Anglo-Saxon linguistic traditions, not to mention the original settlers of these isles – the Celts, be they Scots, Welsh, Irish or even Cornish. And it this hybrid language that modern day English teachers are called on to teach.

Ofsted has also chosen 2012 to deliver it’s new report:

Moving English forward -Action to raise standards in English which states;

There can be no more important subject than English in the school curriculum. English is a pre-eminent world language, it is at the heart of our culture and it is the language medium in which most of our pupils think and communicate.

What it suggests is that if English were an Olympic event, it would probably be the equivalent of the 100 metres final. Yet as Ofsted would have it, we’re not exactly in with a chance of a medal if current form is anything to go by. This is what the report has to say;

Although GCSE results have improved, nearly 30% of students who are entered for GCSE English do not achieve grades A* to C. Across all phases, girls continue to outperform boys in English. Those pupils who are known to be eligible for free school meals continue to achieve less highly in English than those pupils who are not eligible. In addition, the government’s White Paper3 makes it clear that floor standards in English need to rise still further and surveys suggest that standards have slipped in comparison with our international competitors.

Year 11 students are currently in the final stages of preparing for this important examination. At WorldClass, we’ve delivered our Strong Language GCSE English Revision and Motivation Programme in many different schools and academies across the country, and what the students tell us they value more than anything is having their confidence bolstered. Ofsted have just set the bar even higher but right now you might well have more pressing matters on your mind as a Head of English/English teacher. There’ll be time enough to respond to this and put your strategic planning in place once the examinations are over. For now, reinforcing your relationship with your students will be key as they look to you for support during this last critical phase. With this as a guiding principle your students’ confidence levels should rise accordingly. We’ll pick this work up in later posts. In the meantime, have a well earned Spring break!

Doors to Creative Writing in the Classroom

Ever watched the faces of your students as you finally fire the starting gun and require that they produce a piece of creative writing?

Frowns of fear and perplexity ripple across many a brow as the tyranny of the blank sheet of paper confronts the young writers.

We can do a certain amount to alleviate this and create the conditions for successful creative writing;  we can present and explore models of good writing;  we can supply topics and titles that lend as much relevance to the teenage writer as possible; and we can allow plenty of time beforehand to discuss the possibilities. Sometimes, though, the creative muse simply appears reluctant to land. What then?

Stimulus can provide the answer, with hooks and triggers to tease the ink.

And the humble door can work very well in this regard. Show your students a small selection of photographs or paintings of doors. Then pose some questions. What does the door look like? Invite them to look closely and describe what they see. Now probe and push a little more and take your students into the realms of creative speculation. Who lives here? What sort of person or people? What sort of lives do they lead? What might occur behind that door – from the mundane to the malevolent?

The door can act as a simple, but powerful narrative start point and an excellent stimulus for the creative imagination. Additionally, it can serve as a strong central metaphor that can drive a narrative. Or perhaps the door might feature as a central and significant feature at some point in the narrative – beginning, middle or end.

The use of actual images in the first instance provides a bridge into their imaginations.

The Liverpool poet, Roger McGough, in collaboration with artist, Mark Cockram, is using doors as the basis for an innovative writing project for the new Museum of Liverpool. Here’s Roger explaining more about this fascinating project.

http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/mol/exhibitions/liverpool-doors/

The Liverpool Doors Project is focused on creating poetry but the principles and techniques apply to narrative writing equally well.

So, what could  you do in your classroom with your students? We like to use large rolls of paper for groups of students to work on together in the first instance. Paper that’s as big as a door. The back of cheap rolls of wallpaper will do. Plus the obligatory marker pens. Now invite your students to record and shape their ideas and impressions and ultimately create their own narrative. Working in class groups you’ll have generated maybe 5 or 6 separate door narratives and a rich resource to develop their ideas further as individual writers. Get in touch with WorldClass and tell us how it worked with your students – we’d be happy to share the results on the blog.