Inside the scheme: Power and Conflict poetry

Transcript

Introduction0:00

This is Between the Lines, and this is the walkthrough of our Power and Conflict poetry 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 Power and Conflict poetry 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 on a poem. 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 assessment, 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 glance1:06

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. Power and Conflict poetry is written for Literature Paper 2, Section B, the poetry anthology. It's 39 lessons of sixty minutes, which is about six to ten weeks, with three levels of support throughout. The lessons run in five sequences: The power of rulers, lessons 1 to 10; The power of nature, lessons 11 to 17; Soldiers in battle, lessons 18 to 24; Memory, loss and identity, lessons 25 to 35; The exam, lessons 36 to 39. There are five assessment points. Four are Feedback Loop kits, in lessons 10, 17, 24 and 35, each one a comparison of two poems the class has just studied, and the fifth is the end-of-unit essay in Lesson 38, with its 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 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. Notice the rhythm of the unit map: for every poem there is an optional annotation lesson, where you annotate the whole poem together for AO1, AO2 and AO3, and then the main lesson, which explodes one quotation and writes. If a class needs time with the whole poem, teach the annotation lesson first. If it doesn't, skip it. Fifteen of the thirty-nine lessons are optional for that reason, and that's how the unit stretches from six weeks to ten. If you only pin one page to the department noticeboard, pin the unit at a glance,

The teacher handbook3:08

because it's the map every teacher of this scheme is following. 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: What does power do to people, and how do poets make us feel it? Then the intent, and what students can do by the end: explain what each of the fifteen poems is about, who speaks it and the context it needs; analyse language, form and structure with precise terminology; compare two poems with comparative connectives; group the poems by idea and by method; learn at least four short quotations from every poem; and plan and write a 30-mark comparison in about 45 minutes. It sets out the exam: one question that names a poem and prints it on the paper, compared with one other poem of the student's choice from the cluster, quoted from memory, thirty marks, about forty-five minutes, with AO1, AO2 and AO3 assessed and no AO4. Six of the fifteen poems are out of copyright and printed in full. The other nine are in copyright, so students read them in their own AQA anthology with a short guide from us, and the resources quote only short phrases. Part 2 is the unit map, the 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 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 paragraph, 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 line 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 Apply5:19

Both get the same page, and both get what they need from it. Every lesson 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 3, Ozymandias. The big question is: How does Shelley show that human power does not last? 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 tyrant, visage, pedestal and irony. Then the reading: the whole of Ozymandias, read twice: once to follow the story of the statue, once to count the voices that pass it on. Apply is about fifteen minutes, and it has two parts. First you explode one quotation together. In this lesson it's "The lone and level sands stretch far away". 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 alliteration in the last line of the sonnet, with no pause from start to finish. The word to zoom in on is "lone": it tells us nothing else is left, and "level" means flat, because the desert has worn everything down. The effect: the long, slow line makes the reader see sand going on for ever, with the king's statue a tiny broken thing inside it. The purpose: Shelley, a Romantic who hated tyranny, gives the last word to nature and time. 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. Who tells the reader about the statue in Ozymandias? The right answer is B: the speaker, who repeats what a traveller told him. 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 A, the king himself, has mixed up the inscription with the speaker, so they start on Securing. A student who picks C, the sculptor, has spotted him in the poem but missed the frame, so you draw the chain of voices on the board: speaker, traveller, sculptor, king. The hinge question is how you decide, in thirty seconds, who starts on which level of

Master: one question, three levels7:43

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 question as a What–How–Why paragraph. In Lesson 3 it's: How does Shelley show that human power does not last in Ozymandias? Securing, aiming for a 4, gives a choice of exact quotations, here "Half sunk, a shattered visage lies", "Nothing beside remains" and "boundless and bare", 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, then choose a quotation from after the volta, name the method, irony, alliteration or caesura, and zoom in on one word, and for Why, what Shelley, who hated tyranny, wanted the reader to think about rulers like this one, with a checklist. Soaring, aiming for grades 7 to 9, gives a debatable statement to argue with: In Ozymandias art lasts longer than power. How far do you agree? Two paragraphs, the second beginning with an alternative reading. Same poem, 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: Shelley shows that human power does not last by setting the king's proud words against the empty desert around them. And the exit ticket is a sentence to finish: The desert at the end of Ozymandias matters because... 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 39 because nobody moved them. The What–How–Why paragraph is the same shape every time: a point that answers the question, a short embedded quotation with the method named and one word explained, and what the poet wanted readers to think or feel. In this scheme it's always a paragraph, because the exam asks for analysis and comparison and nothing else, and the quickest way to get good at a paragraph is

Independent practice10:23

to write one every lesson. The independent practice booklets are six weeks of homework, about twenty minutes a week, and each week opens with a page called Before this week's lessons, which names the poems to read before the first lesson of the week, twice each, once for the story and once listening for the voice. For week one that's Ozymandias, My Last Duchess and London. It tells students what to look for: each poem puts a kind of power at its centre, a king remembered by a broken statue, a duke showing off a painting, and the people who run London, so notice who is speaking and who they are speaking to. And it gives five check questions to answer from memory, such as in Ozymandias, who tells the speaker about the statue. 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 poems: the AQA anthology the school gives them, with the six older poems also free online, and the Poetry Archive website for recordings of several of the living poets reading their own work. Then comes the week's reading: one short text about the history, the poets or an idea behind the poems, and four questions. The six weeks cover Romantic poets and revolution; rulers and portraits; the First World War and its poets; the Crimean War, newspapers and the Light Brigade; conflict since 1945; and identity, empire and exile. 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 poems. A student can move up a level whenever they're ready, just as in lessons. This is where AO3 comes from. Context in this paper is worth six marks, and the booklet gives students the context each poem needs and no more, so it ends up inside the argument, with nothing bolted

Feedback Loop kits12:12

onto the end. 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 10, and its question is: Compare how poets present the power of rulers in Ozymandias and in My Last Duchess. 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 writing about Ozymandias and then My Last Duchess as two separate pieces with nothing to join them, when the reader needs the link: both rulers are shown to us through a work of art, a statue and a portrait. The tip is to ask who controls the story, because the Duke talks without a break and decides who may look at the portrait, while Ozymandias speaks only through words carved on a pedestal and the empty desert answers him. 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: one way Ozymandias shows his power and one way the Duke shows his; to name a method in each poem and say what it shows about the ruler; and what each poet wants the reader to think about men with this kind of power. The teacher guide has the acceptable answers with marks. Then thirteen minutes on one What–How–Why paragraph, with words to describe and terms to analyse printed above it, describing words such as arrogant, possessive and temporary, and terms such as dramatic monologue, frame narrative and comparative connective, 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 compared the two rulers inside the same paragraph and used connectives such as both and whereas to hold them together. Even better when, and we always say when, never if, for example, compare methods as well as ideas: when you say both men are proud, go on to compare how each poet shows it. The four common mistakes are listed with a tally. A level spread, so you know where the class sits. Students to praise and students to support. 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 at the start of the next lesson, in place of the Do Now. Level 1: write one sentence about each ruler's power with a quotation from each poem, then join them into one sentence that starts with Both. Level 2: zoom in on "sneer" and on "commands", and write two sentences comparing what each word shows about the way the ruler treats other people, linked with similarly or whereas. Level 5: compare the endings: the "lone and level sands" leave Ozymandias with nothing, while the Duke ends by showing off another work of art, still in control. Nobody rewrites the whole thing.

The end-of-unit assessment15:41

Everybody improves one paragraph from the level they reached. The end-of-unit essay comes in Lesson 38. Lesson 36 groups all fifteen poems so any named poem has two or three partners, and Lesson 37 plans and writes the comparison. The paper looks like the exam: the named poem printed in full, here Exposure, the question in AQA wording, planning space and lined answer space. 45 minutes, 30 marks. The question is: Compare how poets present the effects of conflict in 'Exposure' and in one other poem from Power and conflict. Students choose their second poem themselves, from memory, exactly as they will in the summer, and the planning lesson before it is where they practise choosing well. 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 39 is the feedback lesson: 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 paper, under the same conditions, placed in levels against the same indicative content.

Missed a lesson: the catch-up sheets17:04

That makes moderation a conversation about student work, which is what it should be. 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 3 for a student who missed Lesson 3. Here's Lesson 1. What you missed, in three bullets, for example: the cluster has fifteen poems, written between 1794 and 2013, and every one asks who holds power and what it costs. The four key words with their meanings. The quotation to know, "Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!", 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 context page in the Lesson 1 pages of the student pack, copy the four kinds of power into their book as headings with the poems under each, then write two or three sentences on the Ozymandias quotation: what kind of power it shows, and why the reader judges it. A check question: what does the exam give you for the first poem, and what must you do for the second? 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 at the back, 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. 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, and the sheet is stapled into their book. Check the sheets before every Feedback Loop kit, because each kit compares two poems from the lessons before it, and a missed poem is a missed comparison. If a student misses a kit or the assessment, they sit it as soon as they're back, before the feedback lesson. And when someone asks what the department does about students who miss learning, the

The inclusion guide: SEND, EAL and pupil premium19:11

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 who needs a word bank and a student aiming for grade 9 both write about how Owen makes the weather an enemy in Exposure. The support changes; the destination does not. Power and conflict asks a lot: fifteen poems, nine of them read from an anthology, and a comparison in which the second poem is quoted from memory. The notes in each lesson say what to pre-teach, how to cut the reading into manageable parts and which frame to give, so that the extra load falls on memory and analysis, not on decoding. The poems deal with war, death, grief and displacement, and Lesson 1 sets up a quiet way for students to tell you when a poem is hard to read. For students with SEND the guide works through a short list of moves: cut each poem into parts, with a one-line summary beside each before moving on; reduce copying, with the chosen quotations printed on the frame or grid; say it before writing it; make the patterns visible, such as the repeated every in London, boxed before the lesson; pictures for settings; and quotation cards for memory. For students learning English as an additional language: gloss the old and specialist words, visage, pinnace, strafe, salvo, with pictures; cognates and false friends, since antique means very old in Ozymandias; voices and dialect, because the Creole of Checking Out Me History and the spoken style of Remains are deliberate choices; comparison frames with both, similarly and whereas practised aloud; idioms such as going over the top explained; and pairing readers carefully. For pupil premium students: an anthology at home, checked in the first week, because without it the quotations for the partner poem cannot be learnt; build the cultural knowledge in two minutes and one picture, a Lake District fell, a darkroom, a kamikaze mission; who you ask first; catch-up before kits, since each kit compares two poems from the lessons before it; equipment and time, including a watch for the timed essay; and revision at home, with quotation cards for the bus and a lunchtime slot before the essay. 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 3 the pre-teach is visage, pedestal and trunkless, with a labelled sketch of the broken statue: two legs still standing, the face half sunk in the sand. The SEND note is to give a copy of the poem with the four voices marked in the margin, I, traveller, sculptor, king, and let students say their paragraph aloud to a partner before they write. The EAL note: gloss antique and colossal, which have close cognates in French and Spanish, and show a photograph of desert sand stretching to the horizon. And for pupil premium students, build the picture of ancient Egypt in two minutes, pharaohs, giant stone statues, desert, and check the Lesson 1 catch-up sheet with anyone who was absent. 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: the 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 editing23:24

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 poem we are allowed to print, 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 department24:50

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, 10, 17, 24 and 35, and the assessment in Lesson 38, in the department calendar, so every class reaches each progress check in the same week or near it. Then two things I'd add. Decide which annotation lessons you are teaching and which you are skipping, and say the same thing to every class, because that decision sets the length of the unit. 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 Power and Conflict poetry 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 find the poems as rewarding as mine have.