Technique Revision - Focus on Connotation

I started teaching a Preliminary Advanced English class this year and they're an absolutely fantastic bunch of students. As with all new classes, however, there needs to be some diagnostic testing (or pre-testing, if you prefer that term). Not all of this kind of 'testing' needs to be formalised and markable, oft-times it can just be something I've used to gather information that will influence the direction I take my class in over the next few weeks.

At the moment, we're looking at the Area of Study (Belonging) with a Prescribed Text (Immigrant Chronicle by Peter Skrzynecki). To get the ball rolling I decided to go over a big list of techniques and ascertain which ones the students were familiar with. So I put the list up on the board, like so:

Then an idea hit me. I told each student to rank each term out of 3 to show how well they knew them, with a score of '1' indicating that it was a term they didn't know at all. Then I ran around the class collecting all the 1s onto my own copy of the sheet, resulting in this:

The hand-scribbled term on the bottom right is 'enjambment', which I added after we had covered it in the poem St. Patrick's College.

Now I know which techniques we should be revising. I've been working through these over the last few days; just with a few asides where I put up some quotes on the board with the title of the technique and then asked the students to try and work out what the technique was. Here's an example that went quite well, where we discussed 'Connotation' and what it meant:

I forgot to take a photo before I started drawing all over it and editing bits of it. Sorry.

I started with two sentences:

• "Corporal Jones squeezed the trigger and removed the enemy"
• "Corporal Jones squeezed the trigger and murdered the enemy"

Then asked the question, what does connotation mean in relation to these sentences? The students started offering answers, most of them quite pertinent. We talked about the associations we made with the two different words:

• Removed = Good guy, tactical, in war.
• Murdered = Harsher, modal (emotional reaction)

And then, as a class, we came up with our own definition for Connotation: "The associations a reader makes with certain words".

After this, it was time to link it to our Prescribed Text, so I trotted out the poem Feliks Skrzynecki and eagled in on the word 'father'. What are the connotations of this term? What if it were a different term that essentially meant the same thing?

I put up these words:

• Father:
• Dad:
• Patriarch:
• Daddy:
• Guardian:

And asked students to fill in their own word associations, with some interesting results:

As these are senior students, I decided not to censor their association of the word 'Daddy' with 'sexual' and 'fetish'. Their minds went there and this is meant to be about word-association. It is what it is; that's the whole point of connotation. Plus there's far 'worse' in some of the HSC Prescribed Texts.

After we had finished brainstorming each of the terms, we established that 'Father' had a more formal connotation that set up a distance between the poet and Feliks.

Buoyed by how successful this quick exercise was, I decided to plough on a little further with the quote "They dug cancer out of his foot".

This went well too, with connections made between 'dug' with visceral language and gardening. Meanwhile, 'took' implied something far less painful than, say, 'scraped'.

Here's the technique sheet below if you'd like an electronic copy:
Techniques List

That Pesky Russian Vocabulary!

One thing I've found with teaching Russian History is that some students have trouble accessing the content because the terms are so unfamiliar with them. About a year and a half ago, one of my Year 12s disparagingly exclaimed, "I can't get my head around all these bolsheviks and nosheviks and yesheviks!" 

I was a little sad about it, but in hindsight it shouldn't have surprised me. A lot of the words that come into play during the Russia and the Soviet Union HSC National Study aren't even in English, and then there's also the tricky English terms too, all the -isms; nationalism, communism, marxism, stalinism, totalitarianism... these are new terms for the vast majority of students. 

Like most teachers of Modern History, I try to enforce and reinforce all these terms by teaming up the National Study with a Russian Personality Study (Trotsky), and setting it up in Preliminary with 'The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty'. I therefore hope that most students can at least remember a smattering of the tricky new words by the time they get to the end of all their Russification. 

But, just in case they haven't, I decided to create a quick vocabulary activity that will help my current class as they grapple with their 'isms and 'sheviks. The premise is fairly straightforward: 

• Students are given a wordbank of Russian terms and concepts.
• Underneath the wordbank is a table with a list of some key terms.
• Students have to match up the wordbank terms with the key terms in the table. All of the wordbank terms are synonyms or near-synonyms for the key terms in the table.

Activity found here. 

I put this together because, whilst programming this unit last term, I found myself swept under the sheer weight of information I had to impart onto the students. Which terms do I include? Do I stick to socialism or communism? What about Marxism? Aren't they all basically the same thing? Maybe, maybe not. Like it or not, I wasn't going to be able to prevent the students being exposed to all of these terms in their study of Russia so it was useless for me to try and moderate or censor the new glossary they would be learning.

A nice little bit of extension is to then prompt some of the higher ability students to determine which two groups of terms represent the 'Left' and 'Right' wings of the political spectrum. 

Hopefully this activity helps them connect a few ideas together. Heck, if it helps one student remember one new word, then it's definitely worth doing. 

Trotsky: Evaluating the Way he Faced Challenges.

One of the more distinct and unique parts of the Modern History HSC course is the paper in which students are required to write about the personality they have studied. This paper is divided into two sections; Part A, a question that requires something in the way of a retell about the personality's life (a response where most students can demonstrate their knowledge of the content they've studied) and Part B, a question where the personality itself must be analysed (a more historiographical question in which students must take a position on the personality in relation to the question). For this blog, I want to focus on Part B.

2015's Part B question was:

It is the way an individual faces challenges that shapes them and their achievements.

To what extent is this statement accurate in relation to the personality you have studied and their role in history?

When looking at a question like this, the student is best off identifying the key terms that will direct them in their response. In this case, it's 'challenges', 'shapes' and 'achievements'. In other words: Look at the challenges that the personality faced, and how did these challenges affect their ability to achieve?
 

The challenge of teaching the personality is that you need to cover all your bases in terms of content, and then also provide a range of interpretations for this personality so that students can make some informed decisions about how they are going to evaluate the historical figure. 

Like all good comrades, the personality that I teach is Leon Trotsky (his colleague Alexandra Kollontai looks interesting but I don't know enough about her yet to feel confident teaching her).

I've put together a little reader of about eight different short evaluations of Trotsky (with thanks to fellow Australian History teachers Jonathan Dallimore, Kath Driver, Anne Gripton and Lianne Fisher), with the idea that students can unpack each one into some dot points and then, once they've done all eight, rank them in order of how much they agree. 

A step further from this is that they could do a practice essay by using one of these evaluations as a thesis. If you have some of those particularly eager students I think it would be really effective to get them to do this twice, with a completely separate quote each time. 

Without further delay, here are the evaluations themselves:

Michael Lynch, author, 1990...

Trotsky was a complex personality. He was one of those figures in history who may be described as having been their own worst enemy. Despite his many gifts and intellectual brilliance, he had serious weaknesses that undermined his chances of success. At times he suffered from diffidence and lack of judgment.

Anne Gripton, teacher, 2016

Trotsky's biggest mistake was to underestimate Stalin in both the Civil War and the leadership struggle. While Trotsky's performance itself in the Civil War was good, and undoubtedly contributed significantly to Bolshevik success, he alienated a lot of people which undermined him later on. Also, Trotsky's absolute and unswerving loyalty to the revolution made his response to many challenges inflexible and, to be honest, really frustrating!

Kath Driver, teacher, 2016

I think Trotsky's biggest mistake was to make assumptions based on his position as a theorist and Civil War leader rather than working to garner support. He faced an obvious challenge in exile and personally I think this is where he gained his biggest victory - by rewriting history, positioning himself as the keeper of true communist tradition, and through his writings posthumously convincing historians like Deutscher that he would have been the better alternative to Stalin.

 Tariq Ali, journalist, 1980

He was the only one of Stalin's opponents who grasped what was happening in Russia and who, as a result of his knowledge, decided to fight. Trotsky's struggle in exile was the only antiobiotic which might have rid the international workers' movement of this disease. Trotsky's legacy is the unfinished struggle: for proletarian democracy, for genuine social revolution in the 'Third World', for internationalism. 

 Lianne Fisher, teacher, 2016

...He was also not particularly popular with his peers and this did him no favours either. He should have worked harder to be a people's person. Although the position of War Commissar made him unpopular and he was seen as being cruel and calculated, setting him apart from virtually everyone.

Richard Pipes, academic, 1994

Trotsky's role in the November Revolution has been exaggerated by his admirers. Trotsky's methods in the Civil War were more brutal than those of the Tsarist regime, and his defeat by Stalin had nothing ennobling about it. He lost because he was outsmarted in a sordid struggle for political power. Trotsky's campaign against Stalin was the result of base motives rather than high ideals, he merely wanted revenge, and was willing to destroy the Party in order to achieve it.

Jonathon Dallimore, teacher, 2016

His strategy at Brest-Litovsk was an utter failure and, ultimately, incredibly costly both to the Socialist Republic and to his own position. Perhaps how an individual responds to challenges is sometimes not as important as the challenges themselves. The support base Stalin had in his formal positions far outweighed anything Trotsky could muster at the political centre. Something similar could be said for Alexandra Kollontai; she dealt with some challenges in the best possible manner but the obstacles were simply too great and once she slipped from a position of strength it was almost impossible for her to return to any position of great influence.

Isaac Deutscher, journalist, 1953

Trotsky was a revolutionary hero - a man of principle who represented the interests of the working class, and Lenin's true heir. Trotsky refrained from attacking Stalin because he felt secure... It seemed to Trotsky almost a bad joke that Stalin, the wilful and sly but shabby and inarticulate man in the background, should be his rival.

The presence of a few History teachers in this mix demonstrates the democratic nature of history itself - anyone who has done their reading and thinking should be able to engage with these debates about historical personalities. In the case of Trotsky, there is a lot to consider when talking about notions of success and failure, and hopefully some of these quotes go some way in assisting our HSC students to construct a position of their own in relation to his role in history.

Click and save Evaluating Trotsky for the student version of this resource.

The 180-Degree Rule (Teaching Film Through Mini-Lessons)

(To have a better idea of what I'm on about here, check out my previous post about teaching film through mini-lessons.)

The 180-Degree Rule in film-making is something that is taken for granted so much now that modern audiences are aware of it in only a subconscious sort of way. Basically, it refers to the fact that when two actors are conversing on the screen, the camera angles and editing used reflect the idea that they are facing one another. Even when the actors don't physically share the screen together, the shots of them should imply that they are still facing one another for their conversation. Therefore, the camera should never film them facing the same way as the person they're speaking to.

The best way to explain it is to see it, so here is a clip from Mark Cousins' The Story of Film that comes in handy as a teaching resource with my classes. It does a wonderful job of demonstrating how this rule came about and why it's used:

I have also included a diagram of the rule (seen at the top of the blog but also included as a resource below) so that students can better visualise the spatial relationship between the cameras and their subjects.

After spending a short amount of time demonstrating it to a class, I then do the best possible thing that can be done when you want to teach film - get the students to employ the technique themselves by filming a short narrative with iPads (or some other device).

I did this in conjunction with the previous mini-lesson I taught on close-ups (see link at top of article) and told the students to incorporate this rule into a part of their video. The result was a short but effective narrative that incorporated film literacy in an authentic fashion, demonstrating student knowledge of film techniques. 

Plus my class had a lot of fun with it, which is something we should never underestimate when it comes to English!

Resource: The 180-Degree Rule (PDF) 

Resource: The 180-Degree Rule (Video)

Source Analysis: The Grammatical Approach

Art by the blogger, modeled on a photo of soldiers in the trenches.

At the time of writing (though this may change with some of the proposed changes to the incoming new syllabus), Modern History's HSC Core Study is WWI, with a focus on source analysis. 

Studying the 'Great War' is a gift of sorts as it's such an intensely source-rich area of history due to continuing interest from the public. It is, however, a rather large and unwieldy beast that can threaten to swallow historians whole. Thankfully, the current syllabus is focused enough to reign things in, and the decision to make this topic a source analysis one seems almost a relief to the teacher.

That is, until you take the sources into a mixed ability classroom. 

Over the years I have found the concept of teaching source analysis to History students a bit of a double-edged sword. Whilst it can be incredibly useful to students who have the requisite ability to skim, scan, deconstruct and evaluate texts, it can also be a very daunting task for students with lower literacy. Acronym approaches such as OCMAP (Origin Context Motivation Audience Perspective) and COMBAT (Content Origin Motivation Bias Audience Tone) can be overwhelming for these students, and only serve to push them further into disengagement.

I have found instead that taking a grammar-styled approach can be a more useful way in for these students. By attacking the paragraph at word- or sentence-level, students can build up a whole-text understanding of the source piece by piece, and then evaluate it afterwards. 

Step 1

Give the students the Resource below; an English translation of a German soldier's letter about the trenches. The source is relatively short but has been spaced out so that students can annotate the sheet. Read through the text as a class first, explaining any tricky words the students may be stuck on.

Step 2

The first question on the sheet asks the students to create some text chains. This means that they need to find and underline a word and then join it with an arrow to a later word that refers to the same thing. Some examples from the source:

• Somme > here > front line.
• One shell crater > next > one continuous trench.
• Terrible > dreadful > chilled through, dead tired and mentally crushed
• We > company of people

Step 3

With a highlighter, students identify any adjectives that describe verbs or nouns. The three main examples are "dead", "mentally", and "continuous".

Step 4

Students then look at three adjectives (most likely the ones above) and describe what they mean.

Step 5

The last three questions are more traditional content-related questions. These questions should, however, hopefully be a bit easier for the students to engage with now that they've unpacked the source. 

This approach can be replicated for any written source, and can be extended in other ways - noun identification, verb identification, how many simple or complex sentences have been used and why, etc. Once a student grapples with these 'mechanics' of the language they will then feel like they have a more in-depth understanding of the text and can begin to look at the wider meanings behind the combinations of words. 

I've found it to be a really empowering way of making history accessible to students of all abilities.

Resource: Trench Source Analysis

The Close Up (Teaching Film through Mini-Lessons)

Recently at my school we began working with Professor Wayne Sawyer, the Director of Research in the School of Education at Western Sydney University. The goal of this collaboration has been to improve student writing by incorporating the 'mini-lesson' approach that was pioneered and refined by prize-winning American educator Nancie Atwell. 

Something Wayne Sawyer said to our faculty in our last meeting with him was that it's sometimes helpful to get students to think about creative writing in terms of how films are cut together, and it sparked an idea in me that was only, at best, tangentially related to our mini-lessons project. 

Teachers reading this might be familiar with that gap towards the end of Term 4 where all the junior assessments have been finished, and reports are written, and students are ready to move on to their next grade. At my school, we're often left with about 5 weeks. For some classes, we just continue with their current topic and explore a few areas that might be of interest to the students, or could help set them up for the following year. For Year 10 in particular, we have a space where it's teacher's choice to do a whole topic just for fun. 

As I've mentioned previously on this blog, I had a great Year 10 class last year who were fairly focused, so in their case I decided to do some stuff on the History of Cinema. This is a personal interest area for me as I used to write quite extensively about film before I was a teacher, so I took my students all the way back to the early days of silent cinema. This provided me with an opportunity to take a grass roots approach to teaching the actual mechanics of filmmaking. 

Here's where the mini-lesson stuff comes in. I've never used iPads in the classroom before and I discussed with the class how they felt about giving them a go (with the caveat that the technology might need to be troubleshooted a bit as we went [and it did]). I applied the mini-lesson approach to teach some film techniques, making use of the absolutely brilliant and excellent documentary series The Story of Film, by Irish film critic Mark Cousins. 

(SIDE BAR: I can't recommend Mark Cousins' The Story of Film enough. If you want to know anything about film, this should be your non-negotiable first stop.)

So the first thing thing I did was show the students a short clip from the documentary (included below, though I'm happy to take it down if anyone considers it a flagrant infringement of copyright). 

This clip concerns the point in film history where the concept of a 'Close Up' was first invented. We take the visual language of cinema for granted now, so it can be eye-opening and quite illustrative to get inside the process of how these techniques first came about, and what they really meant. The clip shows one of the very first known close-ups, a sequence where the camera cuts from a mid-shot of a little girl feeding a cat to a close-up of the cat itself and then back again to the little girl. This very short instructive lesson has one simple goal: teach the students about the function of the close-up and show them what a close-up looks like.

After showing this to the students, we then got the school's set of iPads and started filming. I gave them a sheet of instructions that outlined some options for creating some shots. The goal was to create a short mini-narrative with a sequence of shots that incorporated a close-up that would build story. The results were fantastic, and I hope to show some here on the blog after securing permission.

It was a very rewarding experience for both myself and the students. Here are the resources:

Clip: The Invention of Close Ups
Sheet: Close-Up Instructions

Teaching History Concepts: Cause and Effect

A cartoon depicting the European nations discussing the future of Africa at the Berlin Conference of 1884

I guess the first thing I should point out before I get stuck into this is that, at present, there is no History Continuum of Concepts and Skills for Stage 6.

That aside, the Continuum is still highly relevant when it comes to Year 11 and 12 students, so I tend to program for Preliminary and HSC Modern History with the top end of these concepts and skills in mind. In an ideal world, the more capable students in Year 11 Modern History would already have a solid grasp of the Stage 5 Concepts, but, as my fellow History teachers should know, this isn't always the case.

These are the concepts from the Continuum just in case you wanted to see them and didn't feel like googling it:

• Continuity and Change
• Cause and Effect
• Perspectives
• Empathetic Understanding
• Significance
• Contestability 

And the skills:

• Comprehension of chronology, terms and concepts
• Analysis and use of sources
• Perspectives and Interpretations
• Empathetic Understanding
• Research
• Explanation and Communication

As you can see, there's a bit of crossover because some of these are things that need to be understood and applied. I don't want to try and deconstruct or explain the whole continuum, instead, I thought I could use this as an opportunity to talk about just one concept and a way that I try to teach it to Preliminary students.

Cause and Effect in Modern Europe

A perfect example of where Cause and Effect can be taught is the mandatory Preliminary Modern History Core Study: The World at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century. During this topic students look at (among other things) the short and long term causes of World War I. Two such long term causes are Nationalism and Imperialism (I like to capitalise them in the hope that I impress upon my students how important these concepts are in understanding the subject).

These aren't exactly easy concepts to teach to 16 year-olds. One of the hoarier parts of understanding history is getting your head around the ideas that propel the big changes, and 19th Century Europe is absolutely gorged full of such 'big' ideas. Marxism, Nationalism, Imperialism, the Enlightenment, Egalitarianism, Industrialisation, Darwinism, Anarchism... these are the things that make Modern History so interesting and important. A student with a truly solid understanding of where these things come from will, mark my words, become a much more politically rounded and awakened adult. This is why History matters so much!

Ahem. Sorry, I'll get off that soapbox now.

The activity is relatively simple. Students are shown a timeline of European events between 1000 and 1914 (the resource can be found at the bottom of this page). This timeline is fairly broad and aims to draw multiple lines of cause and effect leading up to the outbreak of World War I. The thing with History is that 'cause and effect' is arguably quite subjective. This is why we continue to contest the major causes of World War I. So what I wanted to do with this activity is have students come up with their own causal relationships between events. Anyway, these are the events:

A. 1000-1790: Europe ruled over by monarchies.

B. 1600-1830: Europe uses slave labour to build colonies overseas.

C. 1790: The French Revolution

D. 1800s: French Republic

E. 1830-1850: Slavery outlawed.

F. 1850: Revolutions throughout Europe.

G. 1871: Various smaller European states form into the nation of Germany.

H. 1860-1900: Austro-Hungarian Empire struggles with smaller ethnic groups within Empire.

I. 1870-1914: The major European countries reach various levels of industrialisation.

J. 1884: The Berlin Conference

K 1885-1900: The Scramble for Africa.

L. 1900-1914: European Empires stretch out across the world.

By this point in the core topic, students will already have been taught most of these things. Their goal now is to join them up to each other.

The question that accompanies this timeline is: How do each of these events/eras connect to each other? Write an explanation of how each dot point connects or changes into another.

Theoretically, students could connect any of these dots to any of the others (within reason). One example given on the sheet is the 1790 entry.

EG. 1790: French Revolution - The French become the first European nation to reject their aristocracy, leading to the execution of the French royal family (this links to Event A)

Other examples, not included on the sheet, could be:

• Linking K to J. 
• Linking the revolutions of c. 1850 (oft-called the 'Springtime of the Peoples') to the success of C or D.
• Drawing parallels between the self-determination of ethnic groups in H with the birth of French nationalism in C.
• The rules of the Berlin Conference (J) and their relationship with the outlawing of slavery (E)
• The outlawing of slavery (E) resulting from the charter created by the French people in C.
• Linking L to I.

And so on. There are a lot of other opportunities for connections to be made, and I was surprised at some of the ideas that my students were able to identify in the timeline. The main point was that the students were able to come up with their own 'cause and effect' relationships, which demonstrates the subjective nature of History when it comes to this kind of stuff. It's very historiographical too, which should help set some students up nicely for Extension History in Year 12.

Click to Save/Download - Resource: Cause and Effect