Creative Writing: Reinforcing an Idea

One of the challenges of teaching Year 7 is that we often have to determine the level of understanding that a class is at. We may often find that this varies wildly from year to year. Students in metropolitan secondary schools are often drawn from a range of primary schools, and this variation in context can lead to ever-shifting permutations of Year 7 classes where students sitting alongside each other have come from different primary schools where curriculum has been interpreted and delivered in many different ways. 

In short, we can't really assume too much. 

Instead, we utilise assessment for learning - informal evaluation of student ability gathered through activities that act as a litmus test of classroom efficacy. We watch how students react and work with certain activities to gauge their ability level. We check for understanding. And then, after this, we engage to some extent in a process of universal design - re-adjusting how we pitch the lesson so that all students can access it in some way. 

Sometimes, or oftentimes, the general ability level of a mixed ability Year 7 class requires us to start from scratch so we can better understand what's happening inside the learning of our students. The activity in this blog is borne from such a context. It speaks to the idea that one needs to go back to basics to ensure that an intellectually-diverse collective of students are brought onto the same page. Even high-performing students with gifts for critical thinking will benefit from having things broken down to their components as this allows for new approaches that they may not have considered, or explains things they may have subconsciously wondered about. In the task below we are looking at one aspect of imaginative writing. With Year 7, or any mixed-ability class, I often find that it's much more effective to only focus on one skill or idea at a time.

In this case I'm aiming to teach the use of increased vocabulary to reinforce a theme or idea. This means that I won't get bogged down in spelling, or grammar, or sentence structure, or punctuation, or any number of other things. I want to look at this skill in a vacuum. I want to quarantine it off so I can examine it in on a plate of glass in the cold unyielding light of a microscope. And so students, who are looking at this microscope slide alongside me, can better understand how to "show their working" (to borrow a phrase from Maths). The time for synthesising a range of disparate skills is a whole other lesson - we simply just can't teach everything at once all the time; it's overwhelming for both the teacher and the student. 

Here is a PowerPoint that breaks down this skill through the use of a modelled paragraph - Make Your Idea Stick.

1. The goal is to get students to come up with an idea or theme and to then explore and reinforce this using a variety of words.
2. First, we model this with an excerpt from an age-appropriate novel. In this case, I've used Victor Kelleher's Taronga. The idea is that he wants to show his audience a version of the future where society has broken down and everything we know has been destroyed.
3. Give the students a copy of the paragraph from the PPT.
4. Students highlight any words that show that things have broken down, gone wrong, or been destroyed. Direct students to look for nouns, adjectives, verbs that demonstrate this. This will create a visual guide to a subject-specific set of vocabulary within the paragraph.
5. After students have had a chance to find their words, work together as a class to construct a highlighted version on the board with the 3rd slide of the PPT. The 4th slide of the PPT then has a completed one for the class to compare their collaborative version to.
6. Students then draw arrows from each word to the next, creating a text chain that ties the paragraph together and again visually demonstrates how subject-specific vocabulary has conveyed Kelleher's idea. 
7. The final step is for students to then write their own paragraph. If they're stuck for an idea it will up to the teacher to pick one for them, something different to the Kelleher model. It could be something like: a character is amazed by something they've seen or a character feels a sense of immense dread related to their surroundings or depict a world where modern technology was never invented. The possibilities are endless.

I'm a big fan of teaching students these text chains. The real name of this grammatical element of writing is 'lexical chain', and it exists in texts as a reflection of said text's overall cohesion. Well-developed or expert use of lexical chains improves clarity for the reader and 'builds the field' of a topic that is being explored. Teaching this isn't restricted to just English, I've used it also with History and Aboriginal Culture classes, and have seen it used really well in Science.