Apocalpyse now | Geoff Barton
 In the scrubby Midlands landscape of my childhood, I used to enjoy watching apocalyptic television programmes about life after a nuclear war. Survivors was the most famous (recently revived as a post flu epidemic on BBC1), but the seventies was full of them, with half-radiated people forming tribes, colonising derelict factories and fighting – literally – for survival.
Well here we are. We suddenly find ourselves in the blinkingly bright and unimagined world of the post SATs era. Even the most hardened veterans of educational change hadn’t seen this one coming and I suspect all of us had a heart-stopping moment of thinking ‘So what do we do now?’Well, now, of course, it’s over to us. We’re now absolutely accountable for the progress of our pupils and there’s nowhere to hide. After all, this isn’t the end of assessment at key stage 3 – just the end of bad assessment.
So what should the bright new landscape of the key stage look like?
First, there’s an all-new National Curriculum to get to grips with, one which is designed to build our pupils’ skills and knowledge by breaking down the old bunkers of subject compartmentalisation. Whether we’re intending a two- or three- year Key Stage 3 experience for our pupils, there’s an opportunity to provide something rich, exciting and creative.
If I was Head of English again, I’d be looking at the range and variety of texts we plan, getting digital and media texts into the department’s bloodstream, making sure pupils encounter a lively mix of new non-fiction genres (e.g. travel writing, sport, the writing of science). I’d want English lessons to be the hottest ticket on the curriculum, underpinned by a very clear rationale for which aspects of reading, writing and speaking and listening are the key levers in pupil progress.
|
Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.
Oscar Wilde
|
Because progress is what it’s all about. John West-Burnham once said that you could walk into any school and see lots of good teaching and lots of good learning; but only occasionally would you see them happening in the same classroom. Quite so. Learning means focusing on more than provision (i.e. what we teach) and looking instead at what and – crucially – how our pupils learn.
So the brave new world of English needs a very clear methodology for ensuring pupils learn the bits that will help them to make individual progress. There’s lots to guide us – a revised and more interactive Framework for English; the excellent Assessing Pupils’ Progress (APP) materials; as well as commercial materials from lots of sources. It’s also a chance to demonstrate that real assessment – assessment for learning – is what will help our pupils to make real sustained progress and keep their parents appropriately informed.
So what’s now blindingly clear is that – just like in those seventies sci-fi romps that caught my adolescent imagination – there’s nowhere to hide. We can’t blame badly designed tests for narrowing the curriculum or stunting our pupils’ interest and motivation. The ball is firmly in our court, with an exciting but unnerving responsibility to put together a curriculum which not only enthuses our youngsters, but also delivers the kind of progress that the moribund old curriculum and its leaden testing regime didn’t.
It’s over to us.
Long live the tangent! | Ian McNeilly
“Isn’t it annoying when teachers try to teach you things that aren’t on the test?”
So, this is what it has come to. The above words were said during a recent pupil council meeting at my school.
|
Every man of genius sees the world at a different angle from his fellows, and that is his tragedy.
Havelock Ellis
|
The pupil in question was one we’d all like to have in our English class – sparky, funny, intelligent, critical, mature – and this is what education has done to her.
The meeting was just for pupils and held in the school library. It’s not something she would have said to a teacher. She’s too polite for that. I just happened to be there and overheard her. But it came from the heart and my unintentional eavesdropping made me feel so sad.
There is no one better placed to redress the balance than the teacher of English. Firstly, because there is no one more skilled at going off on worthy tangents than the passionate English teacher. Some of the best lessons I (and you, no doubt) have ever had are where even the sketchiest of plans go out of the uninspected window.
I was supposed to be teaching ‘Half-Caste’ to my Year 10s this week until one of them piped up that a class mate had been selected to audition for the X Factor. So we all tried to write a 200-word news story about it to send to the local paper. Every single one of them will remember that lesson, especially the girl who was interviewed like a star for an hour – and there were some tangible English outcomes to boot.
That’s what’s great about our subject. You can start off on a relaxing stroll to one destination and end up running wild towards (or to escape) another.
Long live the tangent!
After the ogre | Richard Durant
When I heard that the SATs ogre had finally gone away, my first reaction was to frolic with all the other delighted fairy tale characters with whom I cohabit this Brothers Grimm education landscape. Well, I lie. That was my second and third reaction too. But then I began to wonder: how much of our habitual thinking about what we do is based on the existence of the SATs? Will we use our new freedom well?
|
How can I know what I think till I see what I say?
E.M. Forster
|
In all the rejoicing over the ending of the SATs we shouldn’t forget this: just because the SATs were bad it doesn’t mean that there was nothing good about them, and it doesn’t mean we will automatically replace them with something better. Here I am thinking of teacher assessment. In its present form, APP is a rich suite of support materials and recommended approaches that could empower teachers in promoting assessment for learning. The assessment guidelines could provide a framework by which teaching, learning and assessing become a virtuous circle of improvement. As one contributor to Teachit’s Staffroom discussions comments: ‘The APPs seem to have worked to give us confidence and strategies in teaching the skills.’ The problem is signalled by that phrase, the APPs, which makes APP sound less like a philosophy and more like something more to do – a new course of hurdles to clear.
Perhaps some people will even have cause to mourn the SATs. This last thought was prompted by my daughter’s boyfriend. He is in his mid-twenties now and was schooled in an urban comprehensive that shrunk and died. He tells me that he loved the SATs and he has a particular fondness for the English test. His teachers had written him off, lessons were a mess, but the SATs gave him the chance to disprove his teachers’ accustomed view that he was no good at English: he achieved level 6 and this gave him a passport into the top GCSE set where he went on to get a B. He is convinced that the SATs put his destiny into his own hands by allowing him to escape the confinement of low expectations. Just because the SATs were bad does not mean they were bad for everyone.
There are people – well, ok, boys – who actually prefer to have their worth measured through rare, high-stakes tests rather than the misery of drawn-out continuous assessment. Many people need to learn in their own way: quickly at times, slowly at others. Sometimes not at all. They are the sort of student who can write, but not today thank you: they will save themselves for the test. Typically these are the ‘lazy’ students – all right, boys – who don’t hand in their homework but then do infuriatingly well in a test. Why should they not be entitled to a diet of tests?
Now, if we are serious about personalisation, then surely we should accommodate the needs of this sort of student by making SATs-type tests available to them. We should allow them to show their worth through quick-fire tests that appeal to their sense of dash and daring. And all the other fairy tale creatures? They can slog their way through the APP marshes!
It’s good to talk | Julie Blake
 The new National Curriculum orders have at last restored the study of language to a more meaningful place. The English teaching profession’s memory can be long, and there may still be those for whom the mention of Kingman (1988) brings on an apoplectic turn, but the steadily increasing number of students choosing A Level English Language, and the gradual engagement of more teachers in its curriculum content, has perhaps provided a more positive perspective, one that might just ensure that the study of language – not as a functional skill, but as a source of curriculum pleasure and engaged enquiry – is permanently embedded in the subject at all key stages.
A Level English Language teachers routinely talk of the enthusiasm with which many students tackle the study of talk, and in the new English Learning objectives for Key Stage 3, this is one of the priorities. The objectives move from straightforward identification of variations in spoken English in Year 7, to investigation and explanation in Year 8, and wider exploration across different cultural contexts in Year 9. Students have a vibrant ‘on the pulse’ experience of spoken language variation, and are generally keen to explore and understand it, given half a chance. Why do they change how they speak in different situations? How do they talk in ways which include some and exclude others? Why do some people in their community and others in different regions ‘talk funny’?
|
The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.
William Blake
|
The basic toolkit for this kind of study is some audio and/or video clips of people talking in different regions and different situations, some simple transcripts of these clips and some ideas about how spoken language works. Easier said than done? The LINC materials may date from the 1990s but they remain exemplary, and for language variation in different settings it is still hard to beat its day in the life of Bristol Royal Infirmary, with its footage including doctor-patient interactions, surgeons discussing football over an anaesthetised patient, and receptionists switching between cardiac arrest alerts and what to have for lunch. The LINC materials are available from r.peck@nottingham.ac.uk. The Talk Talk unit in Teachit’s Language Library provides a talk sampler, a ‘week in the spoken life of’. Use it as a resource in its own right, or go one better and get students making their own. There is noth ing quite like transcribing your own data for getting up close and personal with how talk works.
Ron Carter, Professor of Modern English Language at the University of Nottingham, developed the LINC project and materials, and more recently worked on QCA’s publication The Grammar of Talk. This brings teachers up to date with newer ideas about spoken language, though his excellent description is shackled to case studies of how this knowledge was rather spuriously bolted on to classroom ‘Speaking and Listening’ activities. Let us be entirely clear here: the study of spoken language variation is curriculum content, in the way that Romeo and Juliet or a unit on persuasive language is; it is not primarily about improving students’ discussion or presentation skills. That is how it has been understood in some quarters, and resisted, but that misses the point. Talk is interesting. It is a major field of enquiry in English Language study. Students enjoy it. Let’s do it … |
RSS - Posts
The concepts of ‘personalising learning’ and ‘system redesign’ are in at the moment. In the field of SEN, there has been a real need to personalise learning because the pupils clearly do not fit in to the ‘one size fits all’ model and hence alternative curriculums, modified curriculums and differentiation have long been the name of the game. But personalising learning extends way beyond the remit of just ensuring pupils with SEN have access to a curriculum that meets their needs. It’s for everyone.
What do Teachit, Mark Boardman’s Language List and Wikipedia have in common?
When I received my atypically open-ended Weblinks brief for this issue – to focus on anything topical or interesting for English teachers at the moment – I thought it would be easy. But it’s actually been one of those times where you think it’s going to be nice to have a bit of freedom, a bit of creativity even, until you get it and end up feeling a bit lost. Which brings me neatly on to the topical 
