A Christmas Carol: the scheme in five minutes

Transcript

Introduction0:00

This is Between the Lines, and this is the walkthrough of our A Christmas Carol scheme of learning. I'm Hannah.

The scheme at a glance0:07

A Christmas Carol is written for Literature Paper 1, Section B, the nineteenth-century novel. It's 34 lessons of sixty minutes, which is about seven to nine weeks, with three levels of support throughout. The lessons run in five sequences: Context and Stave 1, lessons 1 to 7; Stave 2, lessons 8 to 13; Stave 3, lessons 14 to 21; Staves 4 and 5, lessons 22 to 29; Themes and the exam, lessons 30 to 34. There are five assessment points. Four of them are Feedback Loop kits, in lessons 6, 12, 20 and 28, each followed by a feedback lesson, and the fifth is the end-of-unit essay in Lesson 33, with its own feedback lesson after it.

One lesson0:51

Let me show you with Lesson 3, Meet Scrooge. The big question is: How does Dickens make us dislike Scrooge, and why does he want us to? Apply is about fifteen minutes, and it has two parts. First you explode one quotation together. In this lesson it's "solitary as an oyster". Before you reveal anything, students try the four empty boxes on the first explode slide: method, zoom in, effect, purpose. Then you think aloud through the full version. The method is a simile that compares Scrooge to a shellfish. The word to zoom in on is "solitary", alone, so Dickens shows that Scrooge chooses to shut people out. The effect: an oyster is clamped shut and hard to open, so readers see Scrooge as closed off and cold. The purpose: an oyster can hide a pearl, so Dickens hints that something precious is locked inside Scrooge, which prepares us for his change. That is the whole analytical move the exam rewards, done out loud, once a lesson, for the whole scheme. Then the hinge question, on mini-whiteboards. Dickens calls Scrooge "solitary as an oyster". Which reading does the text best support? The right answer is A: Scrooge is closed off, but something good may be hidden inside. And this is the bit I'd ask every teacher to use. The handbook tells you what each wrong answer means. A student who picks B is reading the image but missing "solitary", so you recap the word before they write. A student who picks C, that Scrooge prefers to live by the sea, has read the simile literally, so they start on Securing. The hinge question is how you decide, in thirty seconds, who starts on which level of support. That's what it's for.

Three levels of support2:32

Master is the last twenty-five minutes, and it's where the three levels do their work. Everyone in the room answers the same task. In Lesson 3 it's: How does Dickens present Scrooge as cut off from other people? Securing, aiming for a 4, gives a choice of exact quotations, here "solitary as an oyster", "Hard and sharp as flint" and "The cold within him froze his old features", a worked example on a different quotation, and sentence starters for What, How and Why. Strengthening, aiming for grades 5 to 6, gives prompts instead of starters: a clear point for What, a quotation with a method named and one word zoomed in on for How, and a Why prompt asking what Dickens wanted readers in 1843 to think about people like Scrooge, using the Poor Law from Lesson 1, with a checklist. Soaring, aiming for grades 7 to 9, gives a debatable statement to argue with: Scrooge chose his isolation. How far do you agree? Two paragraphs, the second beginning with an alternative reading. Same extract, same question, same standard. Only the scaffolding changes.

Feedback Loop kits3:37

Four times in the scheme, the Master phase is a Feedback Loop kit: a twenty-five minute progress check that fits inside the lesson. You place the paragraph in one of the six AQA levels, using our indicative content for this task. There is no raw mark, and that's deliberate. A six out of thirty tells a student one thing, that they got six. A level, in AQA's own words, tells them what the paragraph does now and what the next one asks for.

Every scheme, the same shape4:04

That's the A Christmas Carol scheme. The same structure runs through every Between the Lines scheme, so a teacher who has taught one has taught the shape of all of them, and a student who moves classes mid-year lands in a lesson they recognise. Lesson 3 of every scheme is free at btl.education if you want to show a colleague what a lesson looks like before they open the folders. Thank you for watching, and I hope your classes enjoy A Christmas Carol as much as mine have.