Marking Metalanguage

Working towards a better understanding of things can be hard...

As someone very interested in assessment, and the contexts that go with different kinds of assessment, I often find myself working towards a kind of multilateral understanding that can be shared between teacher and student. In more general terms, this means two things:

• Using analytical criteria grids wherever I can, so students can see how they perform in relation to particular skills.
• Using language that can be understood by students whilst maintaining the integrity of the rubric as a teacher's assessment tool.

The second of these dot points is perhaps the trickier of the two as there is a pre-existing metalanguage used by markers that should be retained as much as possible for the sake of clarity. One of the issues with metalanguage is that it can be inherently jargonistic; that is to say, different groups favour different shared lexicons when it comes to discussing and assessing the abilities of students, and there's no overall rule book that everyone everywhere is willing to adhere to.

Hey, that's life. 

One example of this is the use of 'sophisticated' to refer to an understanding achieved by a top-marked student, which  contrasts with other rubrics that favour the word 'skilful' as the top descriptor. How can we say one is wrong and the other is correct? Is an attempt to nail down our metalanguage to only one set of terms in fact a contradiction of the ethos of English as a subject that rewards independent thinking and multiple interpretations? And how do we reconcile this with the need of our students to have a clear guide to the terms used in our marking criteria?

I don't have the definitive answer to that, hence my earlier use of the words "working towards a kind of multilateral understanding". What I would like to offer here is a short guide to the English assessment metalanguage that I tend to use; a guide that has been designed for Advanced English student use in conjunction with peer assessment. The hope here is twofold:

1. Students become more confident in using a wider variety of terms when providing constructive critiques of their own work and the work of their peers.
2. Students gain an increased understanding of the sort of language they're likely to see in marking rubrics.

The following terms have been gleaned from school-based assessment tasks, HSC marking rubrics, and the metalanguage used by NAPLAN SMART data and the Literacy Continuum to describe writing standards. I have deliberately tried to keep it from being too long so as not to overwhelm students who are already trying to decipher a marking rubric, but I'm happy regardless to hear any feedback that can assist in the refinement of these terms (or the addition of new ones).

Cracking Open the Marking Terminology used by Teachers

Appropriate to Audience, Purpose, Context and Form: This terminology is taken straight from the English syllabus outcomes. It is asking if the response a student has written reflects the right text type for the question. Additionally, do the sentences reflect the level of care suited to the context (EG. An exam, or a performance), and has the student understood the requirements of the task?

Attempt: Anything on the page that demonstrates a student has tried, even without evidence of understanding, to engage with the question.

Basic: Student shows some understanding, or can use a skill to some extent (most likely not well or successfully). This can indicate a D-grade; slightly below-average.

Cohesive: The student's response 'hangs' together and assists the reader in understanding the composed text. It includes: using synonyms that fit, ellipsis of unnecessary repetitive words, using groups of words that fit together well, and using the right group of words to refer to a specific idea. 

Control of Language: Maintaining one kind of tense (EG. Past tense), keeping the same perspective throughout (EG. Third person), not breaking the subject-verb agreement (EG. Singular noun matches with a singular verb), and making the right word choices.

Effective: Student can do something with some degree of skill or higher understanding. Usually indicates a B-grade; above-average.

Evaluates: Makes a judgment, shows an opinion. Matches up with questions that use the phrase 'To what extent'.

Implied: Something that cannot be obviously seen in the response. The teacher may judge that certain elements in the response indicate the student understands something, or can do something.

Judicious: The student has put thought into what details or examples they choose to use. Could also refer to the deliberate ellipsis of unnecessary details, or purposefully not doubling up on the same kind of technique or example, or matching supporting evidence well to the thesis statement/topic sentences.

Limited: The lowest tier of understanding, or evidence suggests that a student is unable to use the skill being assessed. Indicates an E-grade; well below-average. Interchangeable with Elementary.

Satisfactory: Student has shown that they understand what needs to be understood, or can use the skill that needs to be used, but has done so in a 'workmanlike', 'un-showy' or inelegant fashion. Usually indicates a C-grade; average. Interchangeable with Adequate.

Sentence Variety: Uses simple sentences (one clause sentences), compound sentences (sentences with two clauses joined together that could otherwise be separated into two one-clause sentences) and complex sentences (multiple clauses that are dependent on one another for the sentence to work).

Skilful: Student is able to do something exceptionally well. Can indicate an A-grade; well above-average.

Sophisticated: Occupies the same level as Skilful; can indicate an understanding that goes above the majority of the age group.

Sustained: More than one page of writing.

Thesis Statement: The sentence that states the main idea of an extended response to a question, and helps to control the ideas within the paper. It should reflect an opinion or judgment that the student has made in response to the task's instructions.

Allied Occupation of Japan: The War Crimes Tribunal

MacArthur and Hirohito: unlikely post-war allies

The Allied occupation of Japan at the close of WWII is incredibly fertile ground for historiographical interpretation and debate. This period of 1945 to 1951 is a time that calls into question issues relating to the status of Emperor Hirohito (orchestrator, puppet or something else entirely?) and America's emerging need for a strong ally in Asia at the dawn of the Cold War. It's also a case study that forms the fourth and final set of dot points in the Conflict in the Pacific syllabus for HSC Modern History, and relates to the following past HSC questions:

• Evaluate the view that the aims of the Allied powers were achieved successfully in the occupation of Japan in the period up to 1951.
• Discuss the impact of the Allied occupation on Japan in the period 1945-1951.
• Evaluate the view that maintaining the status of the Emperor was responsible for the success of the Allied occupation of Japan to 1951.
• How successful was the Allied occupation of Japan in achieving its aims to 1951?

The part that I want to focus on today is the War Crimes Tribunal. At the end of the war, General MacArthur (nicknamed the 'Gaijin Shogun' by the Japanese, quite literally the 'foreign general'), announced the formation of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. This tribunal was intended to formally bring to justice the Japanese leaders who had implemented and enforced the Greater East-Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere during WWII, and it was a tribunal that was - unsurprisingly - controversial and not without its complications.

Lesson: Part 1 - Understanding What Happened

There are two sheets here that I've attached at the bottom of this blog post. The first sheet is a 1-page reading that gives an overview of the tribunal, who was put on trial, some associated statistics, the outcome, and the impact and controversies that have been noted by historians. Students read through this sheet and use the second sheet, a graphic organiser, to gather and re-structure information in a way that shows their understanding.

I like graphic organisers because they're helpful in getting students to focus on specific parts of a text, and they allow for the relationship between ideas to become visible through the use of flowcharts, arrows, separation of facts, and so on. They also aren't particularly demanding in terms of thinking, which means that every student should be able to engage with it. Just be ready to direct your students on how to fill in the first couple of boxes and most will be able to do the rest. 

Lesson: Part 2 - Evaluating What Happened

The important thing is to then have the students compose a paragraph response that puts into action what they've just learned. Ask them; To what extent was the War Crimes Tribunal a fair process? or alternatively, Whose interests did the War Crimes Tribunal primarily serve? The resulting paragraph doesn't have to include all the information that's been gathered in the graphic organiser. Tell your students to pick two or three pieces of evidence to support their idea and to reconstitute this into a response.

What they end up with should be adaptable as a body paragraph for any of the past HSC questions listed at the top of this post.

Resources

War Crimes Tribunal - reading 

War Crimes Tribunal - graphic organiser

Elysium - Allegory, Allusion and Satire

This shot illustrates the contrast between the idyllic, verdant world of Elysium and the drab, dirty colours of the 'invading' refugees.

English is such a challenging subject sometimes because we have this focus on looking at how composers construct their text which, inevitably, leads us to look at the techniques they use to create meaning and connect with their audience. I've found that most students are quite responsive to learning about techniques that are new to them, however, what becomes challenging is the idea of quantifying techniques.

What I mean is, students like to be given taxonomies of things. They like to know the relationship between ideas, EG. The text reflects this particular context, and this context has produced this text type, and within this particular text type it's this genre, and this genre involves these particular codes and conventions, and in order to do all this the composers uses these techniques. And to do all this, these techniques are defined as thus.

The problem with this is that it emphasises the quantity of parts that build a text, rather than each part's potential to be a multiplicity of things. Students focus on something being a metaphor and then don't consider that it could also be visceral language (provoking a feeling of repulsion), or that it also ties to a story-wide motif (and therefore supporting larger themes).

In short, elements of a text can be defined in multiple ways. Those who express how challenged they feel by English are those who often struggle with its open-endedness. There's no wrong answer if it's supported by valid and substantiated evidence - we say this to kids all the time - but how do we teach them that there is more than one right answer, and that these correct alternatives don't always fit neatly together either?

I don't have a simple answer to this. The students who understand that meanings can be in flux, hyphenated, or pluralistic, are the ones who often do the best - grappling with ambiguity and ambivalence is something that great authors (IE. Great Englishers, yes, that's a word now!) do throughout the course of their entire careers.

The ongoing presence of drones throughout Elysium has proven to be a rather valid prediction about the enforcing of law and order throughout the world. The shot above is a 'drone's-eye view' of a battle between the film's hero and villain. The villain is blurred, indicating that the camera represents the view of his employers and their corrupt interests in protecting his identity from being recorded.

Elysium isn't a complex text, it's a film that feature multiple layers but it's also a film that was designed for Hollywood's mainstream market, so most students will be able to follow it on at least one level. In comparing it to Animal Farm as a dystopian text that's very much a product of context, students need to be able to illuminate the ways in which it makes use of allegory. This in turn leads to discussion of satire and allusion, and these things are all tied together as interconnected techniques and structural conventions. In the PowerPoint below I've divided my analysis of Elysium into allegory and satire but this is largely an arbitrary distinction as they could be looked at either way. 

Walk your students through the presentation and have them discuss the way the images and ideas link to context. There are numerous examples, including the villain Kruger as a representation of South Africa's dark history of hiring shady mercenaries, the role of the fable that the little girl Matilda tells to Max, and the subtle (and not-so-subtle) references to Max's role as a messiah for this bleak, grimy future.

There is also a sheet that students can work through afterwards, in which they are given pre-identified examples of various allusions and asked to explain them. The pre-loading of ready-made examples (IE. Techniques that have already been linked with textual evidence) forces the students to focus on explaining the significance, which is what we really want our Advanced English students to be able to do. 

Resources

Elysium and Our World - PowerPoint Presentation

Allusions - worksheet

Conflict in the Pacific: The Battles

I enjoy teaching Conflict in the Pacific (for Part IV of the Modern History HSC syllabus) because I feel like there's a genuine interest from a lot of Australian kids about this part of history. All the bits of World War II are big, and interesting, but it's arguably the Pacific Theatre that has the most relevance to our corner of the world. When I hear students talking about the impact the Pacific War had on their grandparents, and think about the way it influenced Australia's foreign policy and sense of identity, I feel like I'm in the 'goldilocks zone' of the Modern History subject. It's not too close to home that students are disinterested, and it's not too distant and alien as to make them feel like it's irrelevant to their lives and experience.

I've taught Conflict in the Pacific before and if there's one thing I took away from the experience it was that I could cover the battles better. There's a dot point in the syllabus that specifics coverage of four battles - the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Battle of Midway, the Battle of Guadalcanal, and the New Guinea Campaign.  

I think I struggle with battles in general. They seem like such visual and kinesthetic things that a classroom can never really do them any justice. How do I get the real nature of a battle across to my students when I myself have never experienced such a thing? How do I explain the strategies and the implementation of each side's campaigns? And what of the impact on the course of the overall war itself?

In the past I've created research sheets and turned it into an jigsaw-styled activity. I've been guilty of doing this with the syllabus-dictated WWI battles too, but I wanted to move away from this because my current cohort aren't the biggest fans of these kinds of lesson. So this time around I was determined to find a better way to teach the battles in a relatively efficient amount of time. 

If you're waiting to hear about some amazing new pedagogical process I'm afraid you're about to be disappointed. All I did was put together a PPT describing each battle in its various stages, and gave students an accompanying set of sheets to fill in while we discussed each one. I guess my sense of achievement here is simply that I processed something that, to me, seemed incredibly complex, and then turned it into something more teachable in my Western Sydney classroom. The bits I'm happiest with are the simple little annotations I've added over the top of each of the maps. 

So if you've got a class who can listen a little while they work, and are looking for a relatively easy way of teaching the battles, then get them to do the following:

1. Work through the PPT below, talking about each battle as you go.
2. Stop at each map and have the students annotate them on the 'Battles' sheet with the arrows and labels shown in the PPT. 
3. Discuss the logistics of each stage of the battle as you move through the PPT, whilst students fill in the accompanying sections of the 'Battles' sheets.

NOTE: I left the New Guinea Campaign out of the PPT because I wanted to focus on it separately.

Resources
Turning Points in the Pacific War (PPT)
Battles (pro forma)

What Could I Be Doing Differently?

Most of my blog tends to focus on the practical and pragmatic. Well, I at least hope that's the case - it's up to those of you who read it to decide if these lessons and resources have been practical. The point is that I like to focus on what it is that we, as teachers, can do in the classroom to make things run more efficiently and effectively. 

It's not a perfect world though, and things can and do occasionally go pear-shaped in the classroom. There's a tendency in teaching for people to externalise these issues and look for blame-factors - heck, it's something that lots of people do in life in general. I'm not saying that external factors don't exist but there's little point in stressing about what you cannot change.

Therefore, if something ever goes askew or wrong then I like to internalise the problem and look for what it is that I, the classroom teacher, could be doing differently to avoid or fix the situation. There are three things that I always come back to in my head, and they work like a mantra:

1. If I don't like something, then I'm the only one who can fix it - and that extends to fixing my perception. I might just be looking at the whole situation the wrong way. What could I be doing differently?
2. If I want something done the way I want it done, then I should do it myself. That's how things get done. No one else is going to do something for you, they have their own things to do.
3. Don't ever ask anyone - parents, other teachers, students - to do something that I myself would not be prepared to do. 

I recently read 101 Answers for New Teachers and Their Mentors by Annette Breaux. It's a fantastically positive book for educators that has given me a whole bunch of great ideas and reaffirmed my teaching philosophy. I think that we all, at some level, want to be appreciated by our clientele - the students, the parents, and even the administrators/executive branch that we work for. It's their taxes that generate our salaries - we owe it to each of these groups to do a good job. 

At the end of 101 Answers is a section from one of Breaux's other books, Seven Simple Secrets, that details what makes for effective and appreciated teachers, and a lot of it just makes sense to me. I read over it and came up with this list on how I reinforce positive teaching practice:

Things that students like:

• Teachers who are nice to them
• Teachers who make learning fun
• Teachers who help students succeed
• Teachers who challenge students
• Teachers who are clear and consistent with expectations 
• Teachers who are willing to start each day afresh
• Teachers who get to know their students as people

Things that parents like:

• When teachers treat their child as fairly as we would treat our own
• Teachers who do their best to keep them informed
• When teachers make an effort to communicate positively
• When teachers listen to what they have to say 
• Teachers who never give up on their child
• Teachers who challenge students while making learning fun 

Things that the executive like:

• Teachers who prepare their lessons well before they teach them
• Teachers who handle their own discipline problems
• Teachers that make decisions based on what's best for students
• Teachers who maintain professionalism when interacting with non-administrators (parents, students, other teachers)
• Teachers who continue to educate themselves
• Teachers who manage their classroom efficiently 
• Teachers who treat every child with respect and dignity
• Teachers who cater for all stakeholders 

I'm not saying that I'm a great teacher, but I think that if I continue to work on doing each of these things to the best of my ability then I'm going to get there eventually. We can always be better at what we do.

I realise that not every teacher reading this will be willing to focus their frustrations entirely on themselves but I figure that there's more than enough negative stuff out there so a little bit of positive practicality can't go astray.

Fostering Engagement with English Studies

Discovering new worlds through the wonders of travel...

It's Term 3 for Year 12 so I'm at the tail end of teaching English Studies and now at a point where I can reflect on the subject with some hindsight. I would be lying if I said that I had gone into teaching this subject without some degree of trepidation, however, it turned out to be one of the most liberating, vocationally-affirming and positive experiences of my teaching career so far.

The way I see it: English Studies gives space to engage students with the role of language and texts in representing our authentic interaction with the world around us. For my class, this meant learning how to write letters and postcards, plan holidays, construct a resume that promotes their abilities, work collaboratively and effectively, make appropriate use of technology, and communicate in a meaningful manner. 

Something else to consider with English Studies in keeping students engaged is being strategic about the way assessment is used. I have found that the most effective way of using assessment with English Studies is through project-based (or authentic) assessment. In the terminology of the syllabus, this means Assessment as Learning. The last term of a 7 term slog with these students was always going to be a stretch in regards to mustering student-enthusiasm, so I knew I had to come up with a program for the travel-writing unit On the Road that:

• Integrated assessment into every lesson (therefore making the content meaningful and answerable to the audit process).
• Incorporated real life skills (IE. Planning their own holiday - something I'm sure that all of them will have to do at some point in the near future).
• Was fun (meaning that I could incorporate an excursion as a nice way to finish the topic with a class that had been such a pleasure to teach).

I had four weeks allocated for the assessable part of the topic at the beginning of this term, so I created a booklet of three sections. In order to complete the assessment 'task', students also had to work through a couple of lessons in the booklet designed to build their use of travel-related meta-language.

Section 1: Plan Your Overseas Trip

This is the nuts and bolts section and, at first glance, is mainly organisational in outlook. Students must select an international destination and then use the internet to research all the necessary components of a real holiday. This means:

1. Flights - time and price.
2. An itinerary that details where they will be going on each day of a 7 day trip.
3. Accommodation.
4. Distance and means of transport from airport to accommodation.
5. Safety precautions (vaccinations, travel insurance)

Students are also required to compose three 'Facebook' posts (in the assessment booklet) describing three of their hypothetical days on their holiday.

Section 2:The Excursion

What's more authentic than getting your students to co-plan their own excursion? We decided to go on a day trip to Katoomba in the Blue Mountains (about an hour's train ride from where we are). Students had to research the logistics of catching the train there, times of arrival and departure, and figure out an itinerary that would include lunch and a visit of some local sights.

While on the excursion, students were required to take at least five photographs that would represent their travels, categorise them with a class-specific hashtag (and four other hashtags of their own invention), and then analyse their photographs in terms of what they represent.

I can confidently say that this excursion (on which I took 14 students) was the most technically successful excursion I have ever taken students on. By that I mean every student was engaged with the task at hand - taking photographs of Katoomba - and the 14 students who attended accounted for about 70% of the entire class (the highest percentage of attendees I have ever gotten anywhere on excursion). On the train trip home, nearly every student spent the entire hour uploading their photographs to Instagram and hashtagging them. 

Section 3: Travel Writing

Students read an excerpt of travel writing (taken from this here blog) and answer some comprehension questions. I included this section to round off the booklet with a travel writing-focused activity, to illustrate to the students the way their excursion and planning links to reading and writing. 

Anyway, that's enough of that, here's the whole unit if you'd like to have a look - HSC English Studies: On the Road plus two associated resources (here and here). You might have to adapt it if you want to use it and don't want to go to Katoomba. Credit goes to my colleague Kira Bryant for the meta-language activities in the above booklet that act as a prelude to Section 1.

Assessment

The rubric at the end of the unit makes use of analytical criteria, with students assessed in four ways. I'll just write a little on each one...

• Audience and Purpose: This refers to the student's ability to make use of language in a way that is audience-appropriate. In other words, writing with some degree of formality when required and understanding the purpose of language in certain contexts. (Links to Outcome H2.2) 
• Representation: The student's ability to annotate/analyse their own photographs in a way that insightfully represents their travel experience. (Links to Outcome H1.4) 
• Planning: How well (authentically) and in-depth did the student plan their overseas journey, and the excursion to Katoomba? (Links to Outcome H4.1) 
• Commitment: How thoroughly the student completes the assessment booklet and/or gets involved in the class throughout the four weeks. (Links to all three of the above outcomes, really).

Added Authenticity

As an additional piece of fun I organised with Blue Mountains City Council to have the five best photographs  re-posted on the Blue Mountains Visitor Information Centres Instagram feed. I think this was a great way to demonstrate to the students the authentic nature of the task, and the ways in which representation of experience (IE. Thoughtful photographs with a range of hashtags that show authorial intention) is both an English skill and a real world skill.

English Textual Concepts - the Processes

About a month ago I had the opportunity to undertake some professional learning after school. One was an Adobe Connect session (which are a fantastically efficient and user-friendly way to conference - and FREE!), and the other was a Primary Executive Support Group seminar (only $40 and not too far from where I live - money well spent). Both, by serendipitous coincidence, focused on the English Textual Concepts - the rollout and implementation of which continues with much excitement and energy across Australia.

I've spoken about the Concepts on this blog before; in particular the way this framework re-positions the English syllabus through a lens that assists in applying a consistent focus and agreed-upon metalanguage to the way we (English teachers) approach our subject area. All English teachers have an idea of what characterisation and narrative are, however, do they have the same idea of what they are and where students should be in their own understanding of these things? How do we approach a level of consistency and standardisation that lends our KLA increased credence and authority?

We can agree that English is about the study of texts and textuality, and that texts represent power relationships and culture, but the English Textual Concepts allows this to be extended further into a definitive paradigm. 

I think I've attended six separate sessions explaining the Textual Concepts now and I've mostly spent this time thinking about the Concepts part of the framework - the things like Argument, Code and Convention, Figuration, etc. This time though I found myself thinking more about the Processes half of the framework. 

My colleague and friend Kira Bryant pointed out to me that the Processes are the framework's equivalent of the syllabus modes (the way we assess English - Listening, Speaking, Writing, Reading, Viewing, Representing), and it got me thinking about how the Processes could be used in a similar way. 

Processes

• Experimenting - Creative or Imaginative Writing, and Representation
• Engaging Personally - Enjoyment or Value or Personal Response
• Engaging Critically - Analysing Techniques and Structure
• Connecting - Exploring Context, and Intertextuality
• Understanding - Identifying and developing Understanding of Themes and Ideas
• Reflecting  - Metacognition and recognition of Learning Processes

Imagine dividing our assessment of English into these processes. There's a certain authenticity in modelling assessment on the ways we want students to think. We teach this stuff anyway, and the English Textual Concepts framework points us in the direction of teaching this stuff more explicitly. 

And hey, this interpretation has only just come to me while listening to the aforementioned seminar, so I may soon reformulate my ideas of how to use the Processes to assess. Heck, I know I will. But, to paraphrase the entrepreneur Reid Hoffman, if you're not embarrassed by the first version of something - then you've launched too late.

I might not be an ambitious capitalist techno-wunderkind like Hoffman (incidentally, he created LinkedIn, which was recently purchased by Microsoft) but I do believe this philosophy is applicable to teaching, writing, and most other things.

In other words, if you wait until something is perfect before you've revealed it to anyone, then you're probably waiting well past its due date in terms of relevance. In addition, it feels naive to think that anything can be perfected to this extent - we need to test ideas out in the real world to see if they stand up outside of the vacuum of our minds; if they can grow through the magic of dialectical exchange, or if they wither under the scrutiny of our peers.

Besides, history has shown us time and again that ideas are never 'finished'. There's always going to be something new to add. That's the nature of culture.