August Heat

Hello from Amber-land!

Below you'll find some resources that have been developed for a lesson that can be taught with Years 7-10 English. Normally I'd discuss the way the lesson works but today I'm going to take a different approach by reflecting a little on how the lesson went and how it was developed/delivered. I find it useful to blog about this process as putting it into words helps me crystallise how I teach. If you're already an experienced teacher just on the look-out for some resources then, by all means, feel free to skip down to the bit about the PowerPoint and activity sheet and disregard anything you already know :)

Preamble done.

Now, to start with, my friend and colleague Kira Bryant, who is also my Head Teacher, brought to the faculty's attention a great short story called 'August Heat' by William Fryer Harvey. Kira said it worked well with her Year 7 class, so I figured I'd give it to a go with three of my junior classes - two Year 8s and a Year 9 class.

(Incidentally, Kira has a really cool blog called Tales from an Edugeek that has a whole stack of stuff about English teachers who write.)

'August Heat' is suitable for our purposes for a number of reasons:

• It isn't too short and it isn't too long - just the right length for the 'mainstream' in a junior classroom (that zone of proximal development that we all love so much!)
• It was published in 1910, which makes it 110 years old, and therefore public domain. As it's not subject to copyright laws there's therefore no legal problem photocopying or printing it for the classroom.
• The style of writing isn't too inaccessible for today's teenagers. The prose is straightforward but not without a certain poetry, and Fryer Harvey's craft as a storyteller should grab the attention for at least a suitable portion of the class.
  
• The content could be described as 'horror' or, at least, in the realms of the mysterious and supernatural. Kira describes it as having an ending with "just the right amount of ambiguity to challenge our students". In any case, the story isn't too inappropriate for young adolescents, and it has an effective sense of dread and mystery that builds in detail until the wonderfully enigmatic ending.
  

So, as I was saying, I decided to use it with three classes.

The lesson itself was designed to be relatively direct. Getting students back into seats in a shared classroom has been, to put it lightly, a bit of a challenge after the disruptions caused by COVID-19 over the last three months. I initially attempted to do a class novel when each of my junior classes returned but that didn't really work out the way that I'd hoped. Each student was moving from separate, individualised online learning to working in a single room with the same novel, ostensibly learning at the same pace. I tried this with my four junior classes (two Year 9s, two Year 8s) and this approach is only really working with one of them so I had to abandon it for the other three classes.

Side-note: Don't be afraid to abandon a lesson that just isn't working. Adapting to the needs of a classroom is paramount to both their sanity and yours. I learned this very early on in my career. Sure, it can be depressing to see a beautifully-designed lesson just completely clunk in the face of disengaged students, but learning how to deal with this is preferable to taking it personally. When this happens to me, and it still happens even now because I like to keep trying different things, then I tend to take two approaches:

1. Recognise where exactly the lesson went wrong and learn from this.
   
2. Use the remaining time of the 'lost' lesson to work individually with students who are still engaged and/or build rapport by talking to the disengaged about why the lesson isn't working for them. If it's a case that the student is 'acting out' then, more times than not, it could be because the work is too difficult for them. Their behaviour should still be dealt with in an appropriate manner (that's a blog for another day), however, the 'tipping point' where they lost the will to learn is invaluable information if you can pinpoint where, when, and why it happened. That, in itself, is informal assessment of student ability.

Anyway. I abandoned the novel study with my two Year 8 classes and my other Year 9 class. I decided that self-contained lessons with minimal whole-class instruction was the best way to go. I also wanted to have it student-centered so I could spend my time doing one on one instruction or 'crowd control' around the room, so I put all the activities onto a single double-sided sheet.

Here's the lesson:

1. Read through the short story with the class. This is presented in PPT form after I heard my colleague Blake speaking about how much more engaged students can be when reading through a screen. Something about smartphone conditioning I guess! I broke the story up across slides with an image for each part of the story (except for one slide).
2. Students work through the six activities on the sheet. There are six of these to correspond with each of the Super 6 activities. I wanted to do something like this after blogging about the Super 6 a couple of weeks ago, so I split the sheet into two halves - the first half is for the students to do before and during activities (Predicting, Monitoring, Questioning), and the second half is for after (Visualising, Summarising, Connecting). I won't go into too much detail as the activities are deliberately self-explanatory to make it as student-directed as possible.
   

Reflecting: The actual lessons with each individual class all turned out very differently. I did the lesson three times across a Friday. Our school has a 5 period day, and I delivered the lesson for Year 8 Class A in Period 1, Year 8 Class B in Period 4, and Year 9 Class A in Period 5.

• Year 8 Class A: This went really well. The class was engaged for the entire short story and the majority of them finished the sheet. Some students struggled with certain parts of the sheet but I was able to simply flip the sheet over and let them pick an activity from the back - after listening to and watching 'August Heat' some students with additional learning needs were quite happy to express their learning visually or tell me stories of how it connected to other things.

• Year 8 Class B: Even though they're both Year 8, this class is really quite different to Class A as it contains a whole range of students with quite diverse learning needs. This class found it significantly more difficult to focus for the entirety of the story so I simply read up until the slide with no picture (this slide is needed to cover the visualisation activity) and told the class that was where it ended. The students who had no issues paying attention were still able to complete the sheet and came up with interesting ideas that demonstrated their comprehension. For the students who had struggled I was able to walk around to them, one by one, and explain whatever had confused them. The variety of activities on the sheet gave every student at least one entry point to show their comprehension. From this point on I just wandered the room, keeping students on task, clarifying information, and answering any questions students had.

• Year 9 Class A: As per the law of diminishing returns, Year 9 were even less engaged than Year 8 Class B. This was last period on a Friday, and the class came in off the back of lunchtime, so I guess they were all ready to go home! Usually this particular period starts with a cascade of groaning requests, like, "It's last period Friday sir, can we do something fun?" (My response of "This is English, it's always fun" is not usually well-received) or "Can we just have a chill lesson?" (Response: "Nah bro"). I made the quick decision to follow the same approach I used with Year 8 Class B, opting to cut the PPT short at the halfway mark. Sheet completion was probably around the 20-30% mark, with another 40% at least doing half of it, and the remaining 20-30% of the class still doing at least one activity after the reading portion. Not ideal, but better than the last Friday Period 5 I'd had with them.   

In hindsight, I've decided that the lesson works fairly well and I'm sure I'll use it again next year. That said, the inability of two of the classes to focus through the entire PPT while the story was read to them isn't what I had hoped for. I knew that some of the students in Year 8 Class B in particular would find it quite challenging so it wasn't a surprise, but these things still need to be tried.

For the next lesson I did an entirely self-contained sheet with no whole class instruction and no PPT/board work. I figured this would be a better work-around for students unable to focus on teacher-talk for any amount of time. This turned out to work even better but more on that in a future blog.

Galway Man: Stage 5 English

Hello and how are you? It feels like only yesterday that the 2019 school year was just starting and now here we are in Term 4. Before you know it, the last assessment tasks will be done and dusted, reports will be written, and students will start thinking about building forts in the woods and riding their BMXs down to the river (kids still spent their summer holidays doing that, right?)

In the last few weeks of Term 4 I usually find myself needing a few stand-alone lessons. It's important that these lessons don't feel like 'throw-away' content... when students cotton on that you don't attach value to what they're doing then they'll tend not to value it either. The antidote to this can be to work on the skills needed for ongoing success in English.

This lesson below is a Stage 5 activity that I usually use for Year 9 as part of a genre unit focused on creative writing. It can also double, however, as something that can be used to help students develop specialised literacy skills at any point in Stage 5 - for example, the ability to identify genre through recognition of common motifs and generic conventions used, the ability to monitor a text for adjectives and adjectival groups, and utilising comprehension skills to predict the direction a text will go in.

Context

Teaching Stage 5 English in a mixed ability classroom often means working with a broad range of students. Differentiated curriculum can take many forms when we teach and, perhaps most often, it tends to come into the classroom in a flexible rapid-response form via the teacher adapting to the fluctuating levels of ability exhibited by individual students. 

One of my favourite forms of differentiation is the the lesson planning process adapted from the Gagne model and used by GERRIC. This involves creating material that targets three separate tiers of ability within the classroom - mainstream material for the core of the class, adapted material for those who may be struggling to meet outcomes, and extension material for those who may be considered gifted. It's important to acknowledge here that 'extension' doesn't mean extra work, it should instead take the place of work undertaken by the main core of the class.

Another thing to acknowledge is that it's near impossible to differentiate every single lesson of work in this way as it essentially means doing three times the work. Instead, it's worth aiming to just do this every now and again so that you can assess what level your students are working at and evaluate how they cope with material that more specifically targets their ability level.

The Lesson: Galway Man

The crux of this lesson is a short horror story called Galway Man. This piece has been designed as something that should be suitable for a Year 9 class exhibiting a range of different abilities and behaviours.

What this means is - it's relatively short to allow for engagement of students who struggle with attention in the classroom, and it's written in a way to allow accessibility for students who may have reading levels as low as those typically encountered in Stage 3. It's important to push student reading levels by exposing them to material that will challenge them but this is something that should be done purposefully and not all the time. If we're looking to build things like vocabulary, sustained understanding via extensive comprehension of cohesion, or an ability to parse sophisticated sentence structures then, of course, we should be challenging students with texts beyond their usual reading scope. However, if we want to work on introducing students to other skills like understanding symbolism and imagery, or the ability to explain genre, then we need simply-constructed texts that can allow for these things to be the focus.

Resource: Galway Man - short story.

The Lesson: Pre-Reading

Before reading the text it might be worth doing a quick check of student understanding regarding the phenomenon of bog bodies as this is the main idea behind the 'horror' of the text. These bodies are human remains that have been accidentally preserved for thousands of years after being submerged in swampy peat-heavy marshland. Bog bodies tend to occur in Western Europe and date from the Bronze Age.

Resource: Pre-Reading - PowerPoint Presentation.

The Lesson: Post-Reading

Students can undertake one of the activity sheets after reading the short story. There are two ways to approach determining who does which sheet:

1. Hand out the three different levels of sheets according to which students you think fit into the 'core', 'adjusted', and 'extension' groupings of ability. If any students question why they can't have a different sheet then, by all means, let them have a go at the sheet they prefer. If they find it too easy then you've both learned something, if they find it too hard then at least they challenged themselves.
2. Let students pick the sheet they want to do - I usually place the sheets on a table underneath the whiteboard with arrows pointing down to the three piles labelling them as 'Regular', 'Hard', and 'Hardest'. It can very educational for the teacher to see which students pick which one. 

The sheets roughly correspond to the same pattern of learning broken into 4-5 sections.

• Prediction: After students have been taken through the pre-reading PPT, ask them to think about what a short story called Galway Man might be about. Students then compare their prediction to how the story turned out.
• Adjectives: Monitor the text to locate and isolate adjectives/adjectival groups.
• Character or Flashback: Students actively consider the process of characterisation. This looks different on each sheet - ranging from a visualisation activity to an opportunity for students to draw explicit connections between a character and his purpose in the text. Some sheets may add or replace this with an examination of the story's use of a flashback as a structural narrative device.
• Genre: Students identify the ways in which the story fits into a specific genre, developing increased awareness of the significance of code and convention.

Resource: Adjusted Activity sheet
Resource: Core Activity sheet
Resource: Extension Activity sheet

Categorising Heroes: Literacy, the Soviet Union, and Differentiation in the Modern Classroom

The Khirgiz, once part of the Soviet Union, are still renowned for practising the ancient art of Eagle-hunting

A key part of early literacy for children is the development of a schema or model for understanding the world around them. We construct meaning by ordering new experiences and words into our own self-constructed epistemologies, and we can decode the unfamiliar with increasing confidence as a result. In simpler terms, a child's extending of vocabulary is made possible through their ability to classify words into self-determined categories based on what they already know. 

This now-commonly accepted theoretical underpinning of literacy was supported by the groundbreaking work of the Soviet neuropsychologist Alexander Luria in the 1930s.

(What follows is an explanation of the way that thinking is tied to literacy. Skip to the end if you just want the 'Heroes'-based Stage 4 resource, but read on for some interesting stuff on how literacy works!)

Luria hypothesised that some cultures understood the world differently if they were non-literate, and thus used the Soviet-controlled Central Asian states of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan to support his work. The research that the Soviet socio-scientist conducted in these places revealed very strong links between literacy and the ability to think abstractly. 

Luria, circa the 1940s.

Context

As Luria's fieldwork was conducted in the 1930s, when Stalin's hold over the Soviet Union was at it's most stifling, this meant that several factors contributed to him being in the right place at the right time. The country was undergoing a process known as Collectivisation, in which farms and other peasant holdings were grouped together to allow for easier control by the state. Joseph Stalin was undeniably one of the most brutal and totalitarian dictators to ever walk the Earth but one upswing of his regime was a historically-unparalleled rise in literacy. Luria's studies in remote Uzbek and Khirgiz societies were therefore quite serendipitous as they came at a point in Russian history that allowed for observation of completely non-literate communities prior to rapidly-increased literacy. 

It would probably be most accurate to identify Luria's work as something firmly grounded in a Marxist context reliant on class distinctions rather than cultural ones. This is most clear in the way that the neuropsychologist delineates between the literate and the non-literate on the basis of the 'old' non-literate peasantry vs. the newly-educated and unified Stalinist proletariat (working class). 

(I should note here that Luria's writing on this matter is very much a product of its time in terms of the attitudes portrayed therein - he often uses the word 'we' to refer to mainstream Russian society and marginalises minority groups such as the Uzbek and Khirgiz in the process. He also, problematically and Eurocentrically, uses the word 'primitive' to describe non-literate societies). 

The Research

Luria examined five different groups in his field study, roughly half of whom were completely non-literate. I use the term 'non-literate' here rather than illiterate as 'illiterate' implies the option of literacy; these societies were non-literate in the sense that they had not even been exposed to writing (as opposed to illiterate members of Western societies). 

Luria conducted extensive interviews in the native languages of these groups, concentrating on three central questions:

• How do people linguistically code basic categories of experience as colour and shape?
• How do they manage classification and abstraction?
• And then, what about verbal problem-solving and self-analysis?

Results

The Soviet researcher found that the non-literate groups were able to classify drawn shapes only by referring to them as objects from their everyday life (EG. A circle was a 'plate', a triangle was a 'tent'). They did not have abstract terms for these shapes that could be used to classify all circular or all triangular objects. If pressed to arrange two shapes together, they did not classify them through shared shapes but by shared use (EG. Two objects might appear to be tools and classified as similar in this way despite being different shapes). 

This appears to reveal that a lack of written language means that the non-literate groups lacked the language skills/tools for abstraction. The written alphabet is, after all, a series of symbols and therefore an abstract concept. By learning how to work with the abstract concept of written language, literate societies are able to develop a greater level of abstraction in their thought, and can therefore categorise ideas in more complex ways. 

For the Khirgiz and Uzbek groups, colour was even more problematic than shapes. Instead of assigning a name to things that literate groups might classify as 'green', they would instead describe certain things as 'the colour of grass in the spring'. When challenged, they lacked the ability to group colours in any way whatsoever.

When forced to group objects together, the subjects always needed to theorise a shared situation that had a practical use. For example, a log and some tools would go together because they could be used together to build a house. It seemed impossible for the subject to separate one of these things from the other because they could only think in practical terms.

Developing Taxonomies in the Classroom

In Stage 4 English the teacher will often still come across students who struggle with abstraction and this is almost always tied to the students' lower literacy levels. In order to deal with this in English the teacher can combine symbolism with categorisation so students can begin to experiment with building their own taxonomies for better understanding.

The activity here is in connection to a visual literacy unit on Heroes and Villains. Before starting, get students to brainstorm as many different fictional and real life heroes as possible. This should be done independently.

Click here for the Categorising Heroes activity.

In the activity, students use the symbols attached to categorise the list they've created and then assign themselves a 'diversity' score using the criteria. This can then be used to prompt discussion about things such as:

• Representation of heroes in the media.
• Who can be a hero?
• What makes a hero?
• How aware are we of the kinds of heroes in our world?

A while back I wrote about using an Assessment for Learning task in connection to this same Heroes and Villains topic. This diagnostic assessment can be used to differentiate students into streams of ability. The activity above can be targeted towards the 'mainstream' portion of the class, whereas students identified as more gifted can be targeted with an 'extension' version of the activity.

Click here for the Extension version.

In this version it's left up to students to create their own symbols/categories, and their own criteria to judge them against. This requires more independence, imagination, and willingness to take risks in one's learning.

Alternatively, here is the Adjusted version for the students with typically lower levels of achievement.

In this version the students are given a higher level of scaffolding; an array of heroes are provided in case these students have been unable to put a diverse-enough list together. This works well for students with low literacy as they can then monitor and interact with the lesson without having to write.

For more on Luria's research on literacy, see the chapter 'Cultural Differences in Thinking' from his book The Making of Mind.

Differentiation: Using Assessment for Learning

Batman: definitely a fan of education

I often find myself coming back to the concept of Day One.

Day One can be the point where you first meet a class, or the point where you decide to start again with a class you already know. Day One is a beautiful thing because it allows you to essentially reboot; you can reboot your expectations, reboot your teaching methods, reboot the resources you use, and even reboot your opinion of the students. Day One can be therapeutic, for both the teacher and the students. Don't we all deserve a new Day One sometimes?

Day One is a time for trying new things. It doesn't matter if it all goes horribly exercise-book-ripped-in-half wrong because when you get to the end of Day One you get to make a decision: is tomorrow Day Two or will you forget and try again with another Day One?

Day Twos are good when they build on something that's worked, and it's important to remember that even the lessons we perceive as 'failures' are still useful lessons in what does and doesn't work, but if a Day One doesn't completely pan out then it's inevitably best to give everyone (yourself included) a second chance. An potentially essential part of an effective Day One is collecting data on your students to assist with their instruction in the days to come and I guess this post, in essence, is about allowing ourselves as teachers to evaluate students from scratch at multiple points throughout the year.

If, like me, you're teaching in a context where the majority of the classes are mixed ability, you'll find yourself tasked with a need to differentiate your curriculum. The idea of targeting your resources to match the strengths and needs of your students isn't a new one. It should be noted, however, that if you're starting out in teaching or just looking to stretch yourself, it won't always be clear how exactly one should identify the differing needs of a class of 20-30 students. You can lean on your Learning and Support Teacher if you have one, and they should be able to give you some helpful pointers, but at the end of the day it's up to each individual teacher to evaluate and judge the abilities of their students accordingly.

This brings us to the three modes of assessment in our current syllabuses: assessment as, of, and for learning. The qualification of assessment into this particular taxonomy is designed to make explicit the need for a teaching-and-learning cycle; that process where we teach, and then we learn, and then we use that learning to teach again (only better). Assessment for Learning is perhaps the most important factor in a healthy and innovative teaching-and-learning cycle. By assessing students at the beginning of a unit of work we can figure out the general level of the class's knowledge about the subject and, more pertinently, ascertain the full spectrum of ability amongst the students. 

In the course of programming a Year 8-aimed Heroes and Villains unit built around visual literacy I wanted to have a diagnostic activity that would allow me to create ability streams in the mixed classroom.

The idea is that students would start out by designing their own superhero. They would be given a period or so to write details about an original character and drawing said character. The 'test' can be found just below.

Activity: Design Your Own Superhero

After this the teacher takes the product the student has created and marks it in four different ways, using the analytical criteria below:

Through the use of this criteria, the student is being evaluated four separate times before starting the unit of work. These criteria are:

• Visual Representation: The teacher assesses the student's ability to use visual literacy to represent ideas. This will be seen in the image created by the student to represent their hero, and the use of symbolism and other visual techniques to show ideas related to their character.
• Textual Representation: How closely do the image and student-written content link together? Has the student taken their written ideas into account when designing the visual part? This is also where skills in creative writing can be assessed.
• Literacy: Starting out with a class always gives the teacher a chance to check on each student's ability to form sentences, write at a whole-sentence and whole-text level, use correct spelling and punctuation, and draw upon a wide vocabulary.
• Topic Knowledge: You're about to teach a unit on heroes and villains so finding the students who already have a strong background knowledge on comic book characters and the generic conventions associated with them will be invaluable in the days ahead. This means that it's incredibly useful to check this work to see which students know their stuff.

After you've used the analytical criteria to mark the students you can then began to see where their strengths are, and what areas need working on most. Students can subsequently be sorted into separate 'streams' of ability so that activities throughout the unit can be targeted towards different ability levels (IE. Differentiation). 

A thing to remember with differentiation is that you won't need to do it all the time - the separation of marks into five separate streams (see below) doesn't mean that you have your class split into five groups with five different kinds of work every lesson. That would be impossible to organise. The idea is that, sometimes, you can do some group work (with three different streams - core, adjusted, and extension) and other times you can individually target students who may be extremely talented in one particular area (visual literacy) with some homework.

The analytical criteria and the stream guide is included in the activity sheet linked further up. Obviously not everyone teaches heroes and villains to their Stage 4 students but feel feel to backward map anything and adapt it accordingly to suit other units of work.

Paperman and Assessment FOR Learning

One of my favourite things about the new Australian curriculum is the clarification of assessment into the categories 'as', 'of', and 'for'. It takes the summative/formative dichotomy that extra step further and puts the emphasis back onto the process of learning rather than just the end point.

I know, right, I'm an exciting guy. 

For each of my classes I try to build in some informal diagnostic assessment (assessment for learning) that lets me know where each of my students are at. There are a few reasons for doing this:

1. Know Your Students. It helps me get to know my students - if I can't see how they respond to certain kinds of activities then I won't be of much help to them as the topic progresses.    
2. Structured Teaching. As an individual, I respond well to structure, so having a process that puts students through a standardised task appeals to me.
3. Teaching and Learning Cycle. Pre-test, diagnostic task, or assessment for learning - whatever you want to call it - this stage of the Teaching and Learning Cycle allows me to collect data that can be used as a starting point for each term. It also informs my reporting; writing reports is always easier when I have a bunch of figures in front of me that I can line up against my personal impression of each student. The more figures I have, the closer I'll get to accurately representing their true ability.
4. Differentiation. The push at most schools right now is for differentiated curriculum, something that has grown as a response to the mixed ability classroom and as a way to support teachers in catering for the widest possible array of learners. A great way to establish loose streams of 'Adjusted', 'Core' and 'Extension' students within the classroom is to use a diagnostic test at the start of a unit. 
5. Student Response. Presenting work as an informal assessment seems to make the kids sit up a little straighter in class. What I mean is, students take this work a little more seriously than most student-centered work I put down in front of them. In addition, I always try to make it clear why they're doing each informal assessment by linking it to skills that they will need for upcoming formal assessment tasks.

An effective assessment for learning should connect to what I'm looking to assess towards the end of the same unit. What I plan to assess should inform every part of the unit (backwards mapping yo!), so this is always my starting point. In this case the plan is to have students write an exposition piece in which they persuade their audience. The argument they have to make is: why Tim Winton's Blueback should win the 'Novel of the Year' award.

I actually jumped into this blog post with a specific activity and resource in mind, so now that I've gotten all the context out of the way I can do what I came here to do: talk about Paperman.

Paperman is a fantastic and dialogue-free award-winning animated film by Disney. I use it as a diagnostic text that can help me quickly check on the students' analytical and persuasive writing skills before we do Blueback for the rest of the term.

First, we watch the film. As there's no dialogue and it only goes for five minutes, I think you'll be hard-pressed to find many kids who can't get into it. While watching, the students can start collecting some ideas about their impressions of the film by filling in this sheet: Thinking About Paperman. Have them watch the film at least twice and model at least one idea on the board so they can see the sort of things they can write. You can even got a step further and have the whole class contribute opinions and make a big class example on the board so students can fill their sheets up nice and full.

The next step is, in the next lesson, have your students sit the diagnostic test. This should roughly take half a lesson. Give your students as long as they want though, if a Year 7 student has it in them to spend the whole lesson writing their responses up, then give them that time. This is their chance to show what they're capable of. I even let some students take the sheet home and complete it there if they're that way inclined - I know I can't always focus in a noisy room of about 30 people, so if a student wants to do well by completing the task in a quieter environment then who am I to stand in their way?

Here's the diagnostic test: "Here I am!" It breaks down as follows.

Section 1 is a series of True or False questions that test general comprehension. It's important to allow a section that doesn't require much in the way of writing because if we want to assess comprehension then we shouldn't let a student's inability to write get in the way of that. Writing and comprehending are two completely separate skills. Sometimes we have to make sure that we're assessing one thing at a time. Plus it never hurts to let students succeed in English without having to be great writers, especially at a Year 7 level when we want to encourage engagement with English as much as possible and set them up for a long-term journey.

Section 2 tests vocabulary through the use of a 'best fit' cloze passage. The word bank includes more than one correct answer for each missing word, however, students are asked to pick the best word to complete each statement. This lets the teacher see how far the students' vocabulary extends.

Section 3 is where the actual mechanics of writing are looked at. This means articulating ideas, showing an ability to elaborate on ideas, structuring writing into paragraphs, writing for an audience, and showing an ability to evaluate. Very few students will be able to achieve full marks in this section, and the criteria has been intentionally 'amped' up so that we can avoid the students 'topping out'*. It needs to be difficult because if we're not looking for that tiny percentage of students who can do these really sophisticated and unexpected things, then we're never going to find those students in the first place.

Here's the marking criteria/answers: "Hello there!"

One more thing before I finish up; if you do decide to use this diagnostic assessment and collect some data it's worth keeping in mind that this information is just for you, the teacher, rather than for the students and their parents. I don't hand the papers back with the results because I don't think it's particularly useful for the students. It's not the sort of assessment that students have a chance to study for so it wouldn't be fair to give marks back to them. Plus it could be potentially demoralising to give students access to marks accrued in a test that has been deliberately 'stretched out' to accommodate the largest possible range of student ability. If any students ask for their marks (and very few do, because I don't use the word 'assessment' when I talk to them about this task) then I would simply tell them that the information was just for me and that the marks don't count towards their reports.

*By 'topping out' I mean that I don't want every student meeting the criteria too easily and getting full marks. If this happened then it would mean that I'm not extending my measurements far enough to see where their abilities end. This is another good reason why the students shouldn't be given their marks back: only the most gifted will achieve 'A-range' results.

The Rise of China: Lesson 3

Hello there! Now that the students have been introduced to a few historical terms and gathered some background information about 20th century China it's time for them to start learning about the colossal keystone of modern Chinese history: Mao Tse-Tung. Lesson 3 of this Rise of China unit asks the question 'Who is Chairman Mao?'

I think, predominantly, it's helpful to remember that today's student knows little to nothing about Chairman Mao. You might think that this should go without saying but, heck, I said it because when I was a student (in the 1990s) the spectre of Chairman Mao still hung over pop culture in a big way. I remember the Tiananmen Square Massacre being all over the TV, and I grew up knowing that Mao was one of the 'big guys' in terms of recent history and current world events.

One of the biggest challenges for teachers today is increasing the contextual knowledge held by students. With so many cat videos and songified news stories demanding our attention on Youtube, today's kid isn't as au fait with the 'canon' of world events that were common knowledge to previous Australian generations. Newspapers aren't a thing anymore, and the aspects of history that once permeated our curriculum have become decentered due to the continuing influence of postmodernism. This isn't necessarily a bad thing.

So - whereas we once considered certain Western historical narratives (EG. Britain's colonisation of Australia, the sinking of the Titanic, the assassination of JFK) to be of the highest significance (the aforementioned 'canon' of world events) - our view of history is now a lot more cosmopolitan and egalitarian. This is great in terms of addressing Anglo-Saxon bias, but it's also a challenge because the sheer dearth of information makes it next to impossible for today's generation to know which historical facts are worth remembering.

This means that it's necessary to get the context stuff in before we expect students to start analysing sources and perspectives.

The purpose of this lesson is for students to gather some biographical information on Chairman Mao before reading an appropriate source and unpacking information from it in order to further build their contextual knowledge. It might take two lessons rather than one.

Step 1

Teacher shows students PowerPoint presentation (Resource 3-1) about Chairman Mao while students collect information onto sheets (Resources 3-2, 3-2A, 3-2E). 

These sheets have been differentiated to cater for varied levels of student ability within the classroom. The core/standard group (the majority of the class) are given a range of comprehension questions to read through (3-2) that will facilitate engagement with the text in the PPT. For the lower ability students, a separate version of the sheet (3-2A) has been adjusted to allow for more direct gathering of information - students fill in cloze passage answers and are not required to decode questions before transferring information from the PPT onto the sheet. Meanwhile, higher ability students are given a sheet (3-2E) that asks more open-ended questions that require students to formulate their own opinions - incorporating higher order skills such as assessing the impact of Mao's leadership and independent summarising of information.

Step 2

The second part of the lesson involves students engaging with a wide reading text set (this idea is lifted from the research contained in the Focus on Reading 2 modules). 

The purpose of a wide reading set is to allow students to pick a text to read. Putting the choice of text into the hands of students encourages independent thought and a higher level of engagement, and the range of texts provided here (3-3, 3-4, 3-5) also works as a form of differentiation. Each text is an extract of a larger text about Chairman Mao, and they range in terms of reading difficulty. 

The Focus on Reading 2 modules support the theory that students should be engaging with texts that are 'just right', these being historical sources that are easy enough for the students to read without stopping too frequently (and hence allowing a suitable level of fluency), but also difficult enough to challenge them occasionally in regards to learning new vocabulary.

Step 3

After the students pick and read one of the texts from the wide reading set (the origins of which are cited within the resources), they then use a table (3-7) to sort words into three categories.

These categories are: words that students can understand and use, words that students are familiar with but are not sure they can use, and words that are unfamiliar. This taxonomising of terms is an important part of increasing vocabulary and understanding of context, and through the use of the table students are scaffolded into using this skill on their own. It's never too late for students to learn this!

Take note, if students have not collected enough unfamiliar words from their text then they have chosen a text that is too easy and they should therefore be pushed towards a more difficult text next time.

Step 4

Teacher collects some of the unfamiliar terms that students have identified and puts them up on the board as a glossary. The teacher can then use the teacher notes (Resource 3-8) to define some of these words.

As probably mentioned previously on this blog, students should not copy new word definitions into their books. Whilst it's important for students to be able to work from or learn a glossary,  this kind of old-school 'rote' learning has been proven by research (Focus on Reading 2) to be relatively ineffective for the majority of learners. What is more effective is for students to observe these new words and their definitions on the board (or, preferably, discuss them as a class) and then place the new terms into sentences. In this case, ask the students to pick 5-10 new terms and use them in sentences about Chairman Mao and/or China. By using the terms in a proper context, students are far more likely to learn their purpose and remember them in the future. The key is taking new words and using them appropriately - a student can copy a new word down but they also need to be able to use it. That's the real bit.

Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that I haven't included Resource 3-6. This was an extra text for use in the wide reading set, an extract from the excellent graphic novel Little White Duck. I haven't included it here for two reasons - the first is that I haven't got an electronic version of it, and the second is that I don't want to infringe on copyright too overtly. The other texts I've included are extracts that are out of print and small enough, or sourced from elsewhere on the internet.

Links to resources:
Resource 3-1: Who is Chairman Mao PPT
Resource 3-2: Who is Chairman Mao sheet
Resource 3-2A: Who is Chairman Mao adjusted sheet
Resource 3-2E: Who is Chairman Mao extension sheet
Resource 3-3: Mao Tse-Tung and I Were Beggars text
Resource 3-4: Mao and the Chinese Revolution text
Resource 3-5: Chairman Mao the Deadly Dictator text
Resource 3-7: Mao Texts Vocabulary
Resource 3-8: Vocabulary Teacher Notes 

The Rise of China: Lesson 2

Lesson 2 of this Rise of China unit is designed to get students to start engaging with source work within the context of the historical period. As with the previous lesson there is still an emphasis on literacy and vocabulary usage, and this therefore means that I've taken a 'bottom-up' approach to teaching the requisite Stage 5 source skills - the idea being that students learn to look at sources from a literacy-based standpoint before we even start thinking about higher order History skills like reliability and usefulness.

Step 1

Project Resource 2-1 onto the board. This document contains three photographs of Shanghai - from 1900, 1950, and 2014. The majority of students in the class (your core or standard group in terms of ability) are to approach these images by writing a paragraph that describes the differences between the three time periods.

Meanwhile, lower ability students (the adjusted group) are given Resource 2-1A, a scaffold that helps them differentiate and table-ise their thoughts before assembling a few sentences in a more formal paragraph. Higher ability students (the extension group) can be given Resource 2-1E, a slip of paper with a higher order question that prompts them to argue from a firm and explicit position.

Step 2

Following on from the previous lesson (especially if they didn't get up to the last step of said lesson), the students are to conduct their own lexical density test on the paragraph that they've just written. The teacher should collect student lexical density percentages as a diagnostic score to assist with further identifying (or confirming) streams of ability within the class, and also as a tool for measuring writing ability for purposes of later comparison. 

If you feel, however, like your students are not conducive to the lexical density testing (or you've already had the chance to collect this information) then you can just skip forward to Step 3. It won't be a big deal.

Step 3

Building a bit further on the idea of analysing visual sources, the students are now given Resource 2-2, a written text about early 20th century cultural relations between China and the West that has two accompanying cartoons (one from a Chinese perspective and one from a Western perspective). Students are to read this text whilst collecting information in a 'Making Sense of Visual Representations' table (Resource 2-3, adapted from the Focus on Reading 2 modules).

Students can either pick one cartoon to examine or do a separate sheet for each one. The main goal here is to build an understanding of the relationship between text and image, specifically the way in which both work together to enhance meaning. This is typically a literacy/English-based skill but in History it becomes really useful because it helps to build context - allowing students to decode unfamiliar visual texts and start accessing meaning in a more fluent way that will allow for higher order analysis. 

As much as students find historical cartoons and propaganda quite visually striking, I've found that they still often lack the context to really appreciate what's being said. A lot of Year 11 Modern History students are quite unwilling to draw connections between their own experiences and the commentary contained in early 20th century satirical cartoons, so I think it's important that they learn at this Year 10 level to independently create contextual knowledge in the way demonstrated by Resource 2-3. It'll build confidence and make these sorts of texts a bit less intimidating for them.

Some teacher notes on Step 3 are also included in Resource 2-4.

Links to each of the resources can be found here: 
Resource 2-1: Comparison of Time Periods
Resource 2-1A: Comparison of Time Periods
Resource 2-1E: Comparison of Time Periods
Resource 2-2: Comparing Perspectives
Resource 2-3: Making Sense of Visual Representations
Resource 2-4: Teacher Notes for Visual Representations

Disclaimer: The photography used here is strictly for educational use. If these pictures are yours and you would like credit (or for me to take them down) please just let me know. 

The Rise of China: Lesson Planning

The next step in designing this unit is, of course, the planning of the lessons! Back in university, and in my prac student days, I was taught to plan my lessons out individually and to justify links to outcomes within each individual lesson plan. I can't say that this approach has ever really appealed to me, and I didn't stick with it long once I became a full time teacher because I never found it particularly practical. I'm sure it works for many but, much like learning and students, I find that teaching and teachers isn't a one-size-fits-all situation. 

I have always preferred to plan out my lessons for a unit within a single document. It might sound like such a simple and silly or obvious thing, but it didn't occur to me when I first started teaching that I could consolidate all my lessons into one table. I've found that, with teaching, it's not always possible to box each lesson into a single period because students are a live and unpredictable audience. I don't find flexibility feasible if I'm looking at a lesson plan that's screaming at me, "Finish me off before the bell goes!" So I like to have everything placed into a single sequence, and then I can progress through it at the pace that best suits the class... I can move things around and keep track of the general sequence that things should be happening in. I tend to keep a whole unit together in a single hard copy folder and leave it in my classroom, then whenever I have a lesson I just wander over to my room and everything's there waiting for me, ready to be picked up from wherever I left off when I last taught same said class.

Nearly 2 years ago I undertook GERRIC training with UNSW, which taught programming methods for teachers looking to accommodate gifted and talented students. The best thing that I probably took away from this unit is their model for differentiated programming - a five column table into which lesson plans can be sequenced and adapted for multiple streams of ability within a classroom. I've tweaked it a little over time to incorporate syllabus continuum information and my own preferred way of coding resources, but the premise has remained unchanged - it's an  uncomplicated way to approach differentiation, which is admittedly a fairly complex way of delivering lessons.

Over the next few weeks I'll be sharing some of the resources and lessons I've created for my Year 10 20th Century China History unit (now titled The Rise of China). Before I do so though, I thought I'd explain the way I program (hence the lengthy preamble) and share the proforma that I use:

 

You can download a blank one here if you're interested in giving it a burl for your own programming. I just think it's a great standardised way to approach differentiated programming, and it's worked quite well for both myself and a few of my colleagues (thanks GERRIC!)

For more information about GERRIC go here: https://education.arts.unsw.edu.au/about-us/gerric/for-educators