Inside the scheme: An Inspector Calls

Transcript

Introduction0:00

This is Between the Lines, and this is the walkthrough of our An Inspector Calls scheme of learning. I'm Hannah. If you're teaching this scheme this term, the next half hour is for you. If you lead the department, it's for your whole team, and it's the simplest way I know to make sure that every class doing An Inspector Calls gets the same lessons, the same support and the same assessment, whoever is standing at the front. We'll go through the scheme as a whole, then into one lesson, so you can see Know, Apply and Master working in practice. We'll look at the three levels of support, Securing, Strengthening and Soaring, and how you move students between them in a real classroom. We'll go inside a Feedback Loop kit, the independent practice booklets, the end-of-unit essay, the Soaring stretch booklet, the catch-up sheets for missed lessons, and the inclusion guide for students with SEND, students with English as an additional language and pupil premium students. Nothing in this video is a sales pitch. You already have the files. This is the staff meeting you'd have if I could come in and run it, so pause it, open the folders alongside it, and make notes on anything you want to change, because every

The scheme at a glance1:05

file is editable and we'd encourage that. Start with the file called Start here, because that is where I'd start a new member of staff. An Inspector Calls is written for Literature Paper 2, Section A, the modern text. It's 31 lessons of sixty minutes, which is about seven to eight weeks, with three levels of support throughout. The lessons run in five sequences: Context and the opening, lessons 1 to 7; Sheila and Gerald, lessons 8 to 13; Mrs Birling and Eric, lessons 14 to 20; The Inspector's exit and the ending, lessons 21 to 26; Themes and the exam, lessons 27 to 31. There are five assessment points. Four of them are Feedback Loop kits, in lessons 6, 12, 19 and 25, each followed by a feedback lesson, and the fifth is the end-of-unit essay in Lesson 30, with its own feedback lesson after it. The folder list on page two tells you what every file is and who it's for. The teacher handbook, the slides and the Feedback Loop teacher guides are yours. The student packs, the independent practice booklets, the stretch booklet and the catch-up sheets go to students. The inclusion guide is for you, and the key words list beside it is for them. Page two also has getting started in four steps: read Part 1 of the handbook, print the student packs or share the PDFs, open the slides for Lesson 1, and look ahead to the kit lessons so you know when the progress checks fall. The last pages are the unit at a glance, every lesson with its big question and its assessment point. If you only pin one page to the department noticeboard, pin that one, because it's the map every teacher of this scheme is following. And one line to notice at the top of page two: every file is editable. The handbook and the booklets come as Word and PDF, and the slides come as PowerPoint

The teacher handbook2:55

with a PDF copy of each deck. The teacher handbook is the long document, and it's built so that nobody has to read all of it before Lesson 1. Part 1, about this unit, takes ten minutes. It opens with the big question the whole scheme is answering: Who is responsible for Eva Smith, and what does Priestley want his audience to do about it? Then the intent, and what students can do by the end: things like explain the two contexts of the play, 1912 and 1945, and why Priestley set it in the past, use at least 20 short quotations from memory, with the methods they show, and plan and write a 34-mark whole-text essay in about 45 minutes. It sets out the exam, Literature Paper 2, Section A, with the marks, the timing and the assessment objectives, including the four marks for AO4 that only this section carries, which is why spelling and sentence structures are practised in every written task. Part 2 is the unit map, the five sequences and then every lesson in a table. Part 3 is the lesson notes, and this is the part a teacher opens every day. Every analysis lesson has the same layout: the big question and outcomes, a lesson at a glance table with timings and the slide numbers for each phase, the Do Now answers, the vocabulary and the reading, the exploded quotation, the hinge question with a note on what each wrong answer tells you, the Master task at three levels, a model, the exit ticket, and then teacher notes: subject knowledge, common misconceptions, how to adapt the lesson, and the inclusion notes for that lesson. Part 4 is the assessment guide and Part 5 is the knowledge bank, which runs to several pages, because we think the person at the front should know more than the slide says. We wrote these notes with two readers in mind. The experienced English teacher who wants to check the reading of a quotation before they teach it, and the teacher who didn't train in English and has been given a Year 11 class in September.

How a lesson works: Know and Apply4:47

Both get the same page, and both get what they need from it. Every lesson that studies the text closely runs the same way: Know, Apply, Master. Students learn the shape in the first week, and after that their effort goes into the thinking, because they already know what's coming next. Let me show you with Lesson 4, A hard-headed man of business. The big question is: How does Priestley make the audience distrust Mr Birling? Know takes about fifteen to twenty minutes. The Do Now is five quick questions from memory, on earlier lessons and the reading, and students self-mark from the answer slide. Then vocabulary. We teach four words explicitly, not twelve. Here it's dramatic irony, capitalist, magistrate and knighthood. Four words a lesson, taught properly and retrieved in the Do Nows, is how the vocabulary builds across the scheme. Then the reading: Mr Birling's speeches in Act 1, from his toast to Sheila and Gerald to the sharp ring of the doorbell, read in the students' own copies with our guide. The students read it in their own copies, because the play is in copyright, and our slide gives them the guide to the passage. Apply is about fifteen minutes, and it has two parts. First you explode one quotation together. In this lesson it's "unsinkable, absolutely unsinkable". 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 dramatic irony and repetition, because Birling says the word twice to sound certain. The word to zoom in on is "absolutely", it removes any doubt, so Birling leaves himself no way out if he is wrong. The effect: the audience knows the Titanic sank on its first voyage in April 1912, so his certainty makes him look foolish. The purpose: Priestley wants his 1945 audience to stop trusting Birling early, because if he is wrong about a ship he may be wrong about how society should work. 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. Mr Birling says "there isn't a chance of war". Why does Priestley give him this line? The right answer is A: to make an audience who lived through two world wars doubt everything Birling says. 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 has missed the dramatic irony, so you ask what happened in August 1914 and start them on Securing. A student who picks C has taken the context as the plot, so you remind them that the whole play takes place on one evening in 1912. The hinge question is how you decide, in thirty seconds, who starts on which level of

Master: one task, three levels7:35

support. That's what it's for. 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 4 it's: How does Priestley make the audience distrust Mr Birling in Act 1? Securing, aiming for a 4, gives a choice of exact quotations, here "unsinkable, absolutely unsinkable", "silly little war scares" and "community and all that nonsense", 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 the 1945 audience knew about 1912, 1914 and 1939 that Birling did not, linked to what Priestley wants them to think about his selfish views, with a checklist. Soaring, aiming for grades 7 to 9, gives a debatable statement to argue with: Priestley makes Mr Birling a figure of fun, so the audience laughs at him instead of fearing what he stands for. How far do you agree? Two paragraphs, the second beginning with an alternative reading. Same extract, same question, same standard. Only the scaffolding changes. Then the model paragraph is shared in the last five minutes. The What line in this one is: Priestley makes the audience distrust Mr Birling by giving him confident predictions that the audience knows are wrong. And the exit ticket is a sentence to finish: The audience stops trusting Mr Birling when... Collect those and sort them into three piles, and you've planned the start of the next lesson. Now, how the levels work in practice, because this is the part that matters most for consistency across a department. The levels describe the support and the target grade. They don't describe the student. We never say lower ability or top set in these resources, and I'd ask you not to either. Students start where the hinge question and the last exit ticket put them, and they move up the moment they can work without the support. That can be within a lesson. The adapting notes say it plainly: anyone who completes the Securing frame in ten minutes moves to the Strengthening prompts for a second paragraph. A student who starts the scheme on Securing should not be on Securing in Lesson 31 because nobody moved them. In many lessons the task is a What–How–Why paragraph: a point that answers the question, a short embedded quotation with the method named and one word explained, and what the writer wanted readers to think, feel or do. In others it's a letter, a diary, a speech, a description or a story opening, because those are Language skills, and the Literature scheme is where there is time to

Independent practice and the reading10:19

practise them. Here is a problem most schemes of work never mention. Students don't read the set text on their own, and a seven-to-eight-week unit cannot spare the hours to read all of it in class. So the independent practice booklets do two jobs. They are six weeks of homework, about twenty minutes a week, and each week opens with a page called Before this week's lessons. It names the part of the play to read, listen to or watch before the first lesson of the week. For week one that's the whole of Act 1, from the dinner to Sheila realising who the Inspector is going to question next. It tells students what to look for: the long stage direction at the start, where Priestley tells you what the house, the lighting and each person are like, and to count how many of Birling's confident predictions you know turned out wrong. And it gives five check questions to answer from memory, such as what is the family celebrating at the start of the play. The answers are in the back of the booklet, so students mark their own, and you can use the five questions as the Do Now. The page also says where to find the text: the student's own copy of the play, because it is in copyright, so there is no free text or recording online; reading it aloud in parts at home, since it was written to be heard; and a filmed production the teacher chooses, such as the 2015 BBC film. Then comes the week's reading: one short text about the world Priestley wrote in, or an idea that runs through the play, and four questions. The six weeks cover Edwardian England in 1912 and life without a welfare state; Priestley's life, the First World War and the Postscripts broadcasts; the 1945 audience, the election and the welfare state; women and work in 1912; the well-made play, the detective story and the morality play; and socialism and capitalism in Birling's speeches and the Inspector's. Every level covers the same topic and the same facts each week. Securing has word help and sentence starters; Soaring asks for more connection to the text. A student can move up a level whenever they're ready, just as in lessons. This is how context gets into essays as part of the argument and no longer a paragraph bolted onto the end, which is the habit that costs marks every summer. If your students will not do the reading at home, or you'd rather hear the text read well in class, there are optional reading lessons: three of them, lessons 2, 10 and 16, each covering a whole act. You read aloud, modelling confident, fluent reading, while students follow every line with a reading ruler. There's a short prediction, two or three pause points, and a summary at three levels of support. Without the reading lessons the unit is 28 lessons. With them it's 31.

Feedback Loop kits12:57

Decide as a department which you're doing, and tell students the plan in week one. Four times in the scheme, the Master phase is a Feedback Loop kit: a twenty-five minute progress check that fits inside the lesson. Kit 1 is in Lesson 6, after the opening of Act 1, and its question is: How does Priestley present Mr Birling in Act 1? The teacher guide tells you how to run it, step by step. Students read four common mistakes and a tip for three minutes. For this kit one of the mistakes is treating Birling's predictions as simply silly, when the audience knows the Titanic sank and war came, so Priestley uses dramatic irony to make them distrust everything he says, including his view of responsibility. The tip is to use the doorbell, because Birling's speech about a man looking after himself is cut off by the Inspector's arrival, and that interruption is a method you can write about. We put the misconceptions at the start on purpose. After ten years of marking this question I know what students are going to write, so instead of correcting it afterwards, we tell them before they begin. Then nine minutes on three short questions, one each for What, How and Why: two things Mr Birling predicts in Act 1 that the audience knows turned out to be wrong; to name a method in one of his speeches and say what it shows; and why Priestley might make Birling so confident and so wrong. Those are the planning and thinking stage, and the teacher guide has the acceptable answers with marks. Then thirteen minutes on one What–How–Why paragraph, how Priestley presents Mr Birling in Act 1, with words to describe and terms to analyse printed above it, describing words such as complacent, pompous and self-interested, and terms such as dramatic irony, stage direction and didactic, and a checklist to tick before they hand it in. 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. Then the sheet that saves the evening: the whole-class feedback sheet. You read the paragraphs, note the patterns, and fill in one sheet for the class. What went well, for example, most of you used dramatic irony accurately, explaining that the audience knows the Titanic sank and the war came. Even better when, and we always say when, never if, for example, link the predictions to responsibility: if Birling is wrong about the Titanic and the war, Priestley wants the audience to doubt his view that a man has only to look after himself. The four common mistakes are listed with a tally, so you can see that half the class made mistake two. A level spread, so you know where the class sits. Students to praise and students to support, and the student who moved from Level 1 to Level 3 belongs there as much as the one who got Level 6 again. And a box for what to re-teach at the start of next lesson. That one sheet goes in your mark book, and for a head of department it's the quickest honest picture of a class you'll get. Finally the improvement tasks, one for every level, done in green pen. Level 1: write one sentence saying what Mr Birling thinks about other people, add "a hard-headed business man", then one more sentence explaining what "hard-headed" suggests about him. Level 2: zoom in on "unsinkable, absolutely unsinkable" and write two sentences on why the repetition makes Birling sound certain, and why the audience laughs at him instead of trusting him. Level 5: add structure: explain how the doorbell that cuts off Birling's speech works as a reply to it, and why Priestley places the Inspector's entrance at exactly this moment. Nobody rewrites the whole thing.

The feedback lesson and the end-of-unit essay16:39

Everybody improves one paragraph from the level they reached. The lesson after each kit is a feedback lesson, so the time to act on feedback is already in the scheme. You don't have to find it. In An Inspector Calls those are lessons 7, 13, 20 and 26. A feedback lesson has its own layout in the handbook: whole-class feedback from your sheet, the answers to the short questions, a model paragraph, then the improvement task for every AQA level, and a redraft. Across the unit a class goes round that loop four times. Assess, feed back, improve. By the time they reach the essay, they've practised the exact skills it needs, four times, with a next step each time. The end-of-unit essay comes in Lesson 30, after a planning lesson in Lesson 29. The paper looks like the exam. The question in AQA wording with no extract, because Section A of Paper 2 has none, so every quotation comes from memory, then planning space and lined answer space. 45 minutes, 30 marks, plus 4 for AO4. The question is: how does Priestley present the idea that we are responsible for each other in An Inspector Calls? The teacher guide gives you level guidance for this question, and three complete model answers written at Securing, Strengthening and Soaring, each labelled with its AQA level, Level 3, Level 4 and Level 6, with notes on why each one sits where it does and what would move it up. Essays come back with a level and a comment, and no mark, for the same reason as the kits. Then Lesson 31 is the feedback lesson for the essay: students find their level group, read the model answer nearest to theirs, and redraft one paragraph in green pen with the improvement task for their band. For a department, the useful thing here is that every class in the cohort sits the same essay, under the same conditions, placed in levels against the same indicative content.

The Soaring stretch booklet18:29

That makes moderation a conversation about student work, which is what it should be. We all have the students who love this subject and are already halfway to A level, and the question is what we do for them beyond the lesson. The Soaring stretch booklet is reading beyond An Inspector Calls, for students aiming at grades 8 and 9. Eight texts in four groups: sociology; psychology; history and context; and literary and political writing. Some are extracts, copied exactly from a published edition that is out of copyright. Others are our own summaries of modern research, with a full reference so a student can find the original. The first text is an extract from Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class, from 1899, on conspicuous consumption: the argument that wealthy people spend money in order to be seen spending it. There's also a summary of Darley and Latané's 1968 experiments on bystanders, which showed that people in a group feel less responsible than people alone, because each one waits for someone else to act. Each text opens with a note on why it matters for An Inspector Calls, then three questions in order. The last one is a debate of the kind students meet at A level, such as whether the Birlings' concern with display and status is the real target of the play. And every text ends with a link task back to the play: the link task sends students back to Mrs Birling's "Arthur, you're not supposed to say such things", and asks how that small correction shows Veblen's idea that manners are a form of display. That last part is the point. This isn't context for its own sake. It's wider reading that comes back to a quotation, so the student learns to weave an idea through an essay, with the quotation as the thread. The booklet sits alongside the lessons. There's no separate scheme to run. Give it to the students who want it, and build the debate questions into your Soaring

Missed a lesson: the catch-up sheets20:17

conversations in class. Attendance is the thing none of us can fully control, and it has a bigger effect on outcomes than most things we can. So every lesson in this scheme has a one-page catch-up sheet, in folder nine, Missed a lesson, and the page numbers match the lesson numbers, so you print page 4 for a student who missed Lesson 4. Here's Lesson 1. What you missed, in three bullets, for example: the play is set on a spring evening in 1912, before the welfare state, and Priestley wrote it in 1945, after two world wars. The four key words with their meanings. The quotation to know, "fire and blood and anguish", with a sentence on what it shows. Then catch up in about fifteen minutes: three short steps. For Lesson 1 that's to read the Lesson 1 context guide and underline three things that changed between the two dates, learn the four words, class, welfare state, socialism and complacent, then write three sentences explaining why Priestley set a 1945 play in 1912. A check question: name two things Priestley's 1945 audience knew that the Birlings in 1912 could not know. And at the bottom, the teacher check-in box: caught up, talked it through with me, needs a catch-up session, and your initials. The answers to the check questions are on the last page, for you. The onus is on the student to catch up, and the sheet says so. But our most struggling and most disengaged students will not do it on their own, and they are the students who can least afford the gap. So the sheet is only finished when that box is ticked, and the check-in is the class teacher's job at the start of the next lesson the student attends: look at the check answer, ask one question about the quotation. My suggestion is the one I'd use myself. When the student comes back, they do the catch-up sheet instead of the Do Now, so they pick up the core knowledge before the lesson moves on, and the sheet is stapled into their book. If a student misses a progress check, in lessons 6, 12, 19 and 25, or the essay, they sit it as soon as they're back, at a time you arrange with them, so nobody arrives at a feedback lesson with nothing to redraft. And when someone asks what the department does about students who miss learning, the

The inclusion guide: SEND, EAL and pupil premium22:32

answer is in their books, done, with a date and your initials on it. The inclusion guide is the document I'd most like every teacher of this scheme to have read before Lesson 1, and it's also the one that most often sits unopened in the folder, so here it is. It covers students with SEND, students learning English as an additional language, and pupil premium students, and it opens with our approach in one paragraph. A student aiming for a grade 4 and a student aiming for a 9 both write about how Priestley presents responsibility, class or the Inspector, from memory, as the exam demands. What changes is the support: a word bank and a frame on Securing, prompts and a checklist on Strengthening, a debatable statement on Soaring. The play suits this approach. It is short, it happens in one room, and its argument is plain enough for every student to grasp: we are responsible for each other. The challenge lies in explaining how Priestley makes that argument, and every student deserves that challenge. For students with SEND the guide works through a short list of moves: one question, chunked, because every lesson's passage is split into two or three parts in the scene guide; cast and chain cards, with a printed chain of five dated links from Lesson 19 showing who harmed Eva and in what order; quotations on a card, learned one per lesson, because the exam has no extract; spoken rehearsal; frames that are partly done, with the first row filled in; and access arrangements in every assessment. For students learning English as an additional language: the translated word list, with a column for the home language or a picture; idioms explained, because Priestley's characters speak in idioms such as hard-headed, felt rotten and a lot of moonshine; 1912 in pictures, for students who may not know the Titanic or a variety theatre; sentence frames for analysis; and pairing for the reading, with one student following the text while the other listens. For pupil premium students: a copy of the play at home, checked in Lesson 2 and lent for the length of the unit; background knowledge built in, such as servants, charity committees and aldermen; theatre, seen as theatre, through short clips or photos of different productions; who answers first; revision that does not depend on home, with five minutes of retrieval from the fifteen quotations in the workbook; and checking the catch-up sheet before each progress check. Then the part that makes it usable: lesson by lesson notes. For every lesson there are four lines. Pre-teach, the words or idea to cover with a small group before the lesson, in tutor time or at the door. SEND. EAL. Pupil premium. For Lesson 4 the pre-teach is dramatic irony, with an example from a film students know, and a picture of the Titanic with the date it sank. The SEND note is to give a two-column table, What Birling says and What the audience knows, with the Titanic row filled in, so students complete the rows on war and strikes. The EAL note: explain hard-headed as an idiom meaning practical and unfeeling, show how unsinkable splits into un, sink and able, and use the frame, Birling says blank, yet the audience knows blank. And for pupil premium students in Lesson 1, every student needs a copy of the play to revise from, because the exam asks for quotations from memory, so check in Lesson 2 who has one at home and lend copies for the length of the unit. Those same four lines are printed in the handbook at the end of each lesson's notes, after Adapting the lesson, so the teacher planning the lesson sees them without opening a second document. Beside the guide is the key words list for students: about forty words from the unit, each with its word class, its meaning, an example sentence and a My notes column for a translation or a picture. Two things I'd say to a head of department. First, what helps students with SEND helps the whole room, which is why the slides are cream, the fonts are plain and nothing flies in from the side. Second, these notes assume you know your students' needs and access arrangements better than we do. They're a starting point written by a teacher, for a teacher, and they're there to

Fonts, printing, slides and editing26:45

be edited. A few practical things that save arguments. Everything uses Calibri for reading and Cambria for headings, because both come with Microsoft Office on Windows and Mac and with Google Docs and Slides. Nothing to install, and no reformatting when a file moves between platforms. The student pages are white, with colour only on small panels, so the packs are cheap to print in black and white. Students who find a tint easier to read can have their pack printed on cream, pale blue or pale lilac paper, which also covers the access arrangement for coloured paper without an overlay. The slides are cream for the same reason, with no slide numbers, no clutter and nothing animated, and every slide carries teacher notes, so in presenter view you see the knowledge students need to take from that slide. Print the student packs once at the start of the scheme. Every Do Now, every extract, every task and every exit ticket is already in there, so nobody is at the photocopier at twenty-five past eight. If students work on devices, share the PDFs instead. And edit. If your class brings a different misconception from the one we've written into a hinge question, change the hinge question. If you want a different Do Now because you know what they got wrong last week, write it. The Word and PowerPoint files are there so you can. Your licence covers editing, printing for your students and uploading to your school's own secure platform. The only things it asks you not to do are share the files outside the school or put

Getting started as a department28:12

them on a public website. So, how to start as a department. Four steps, the same four that are on page two of Start here, and I'd do them together in one meeting. One, everyone reads Part 1 of the teacher handbook. Ten minutes. Two, decide who prints and who shares PDFs, and agree that every student starts on the level the hinge question puts them on, and moves. Three, open the Lesson 1 slides together and walk through Know, Apply and Master once, so the shape is shared. Four, put the kit lessons, 6, 12, 19 and 25, and the essay in Lesson 30, in the department calendar, so every class reaches each progress check in the same week or near it. Then two things I'd add. Agree whether you're teaching the reading lessons or setting the reading as home learning, and say the same thing to every class. And after each Feedback Loop kit, bring the whole-class feedback sheets to the next department meeting. One sheet per class. The level spread and the re-teach box will tell you more about where the cohort is than any spreadsheet, and the conversation about what to re-teach is the CPD. That's the An Inspector Calls 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 An Inspector Calls as much as mine have.