Inside the scheme: Romeo and Juliet

Transcript

Introduction0:00

This is Between the Lines, and this is the walkthrough of our Romeo and Juliet 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 Romeo and Juliet 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 glance1:06

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. Romeo and Juliet is written for Literature Paper 1, Section A, the Shakespeare question. It's 33 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 Act 1, lessons 1 to 7; The feast and the balcony, lessons 8 to 13; Act 2 Scene 3 to Act 3, lessons 14 to 20; Acts 4 and 5, lessons 21 to 28; Themes and the exam, lessons 29 to 33. There are five assessment points. Four of them are Feedback Loop kits, in lessons 6, 12, 19 and 27, each followed by a feedback lesson, and the fifth is the end-of-unit essay in Lesson 32, 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 handbook2:54

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 or what destroys Romeo and Juliet: the stars, the feud, or the choices made in a hurry by the people around them? Then the intent, and what students can do by the end: things like explain Elizabethan ideas about fate and the stars, fathers and daughters, honour and the sonnet tradition, use at least 15 quotations from memory, with the methods they show, and plan and write a 34-mark essay in about 50 minutes. It sets out the exam, Literature Paper 1, 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 Apply4:46

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 5, O brawling love. The big question is: How does Shakespeare present Romeo as a lover before he meets Juliet? 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 oxymoron, Petrarchan, melancholy and gall. Four words a lesson, taught properly and retrieved in the Do Nows, is how the vocabulary builds across the scheme. Then the reading: Romeo's first conversation with Benvolio in Act 1 Scene 1, after the brawl. It is printed exactly, with word help underneath, and it is in the student pack as well as on the slide. Apply is about fifteen minutes, and it has two parts. First you explode one quotation together. In this lesson it's "O brawling love! O loving hate!". 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 two oxymorons side by side, each an exclamation. The word to zoom in on is "brawling", the noise of a street fight, so Romeo gives love the violent adjective "brawling" and his love feels like a battle. The effect: the audience hears a young man more interested in clever words than in the blood on the street, and his sighs sound rehearsed, even comic. The purpose: Shakespeare makes Romeo a Petrarchan lover, copying the sonnets of the 1590s, and ties love and hate together in the first scene as the Prologue promised. 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. Romeo calls love "Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!" What do these oxymorons show about him? The right answer is B: his feelings about love are so mixed that he can only describe them in contradictions. 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 has linked the opposites to the brawl, so you re-read "Here's much to do with hate, but more with love" and start them on Securing. A student who picks C has read "sick health" literally, so you remind them that Romeo arrives after the fight is over and recap what an oxymoron is. The hinge question is how you decide, in thirty seconds, who starts on which level of

Master: one task, three levels7:38

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 5 it's: How does Shakespeare use oxymoron to present Romeo's feelings about love in Act 1 Scene 1? Securing, aiming for a 4, gives a choice of exact quotations, here "O brawling love! O loving hate!", "cold fire" and "A choking gall, and a preserving sweet", 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 why Shakespeare might make Romeo sound like a poem, given that love poetry in the 1590s copied Petrarch's sighing lovers, with a checklist. Soaring, aiming for grades 7 to 9, gives a debatable statement to argue with: Romeo's love for Rosaline is a performance, and Shakespeare wants the audience to see through it. 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: Shakespeare uses oxymoron to present Romeo's love as a confusing mix of pleasure and pain. And the exit ticket is a sentence to finish: Romeo describes love with oxymorons 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 33 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 reading10:21

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-nine-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 Prologue and Act 1, Scenes 1 to 3, from the Chorus's opening sonnet to Juliet talking with her mother and the Nurse. It tells students what to look for: the Chorus tells you the ending before the play starts, a quarrel between servants turns into a street fight the Prince has to stop, and to notice how Romeo talks about love before he has met Juliet. And it gives five check questions to answer from memory, such as where is the play set, and what does the Chorus say will end the feud. 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 Folger Shakespeare website or Project Gutenberg for the text, LibriVox for a full-cast recording split by act, and the National Theatre Collection through Drama Online, which is free to UK state schools. Then comes the week's reading: one short text about the world Shakespeare wrote in, or an idea that runs through the play, and four questions. The six weeks cover the stars, fate and the Prologue; Petrarch, courtly love and the sonnet; honour, swords and street fighting; fathers, daughters and marriage; Brooke's poem and how Shakespeare changed it; and tragedy and the tragic hero. 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: five of them, lessons 2, 10, 15, 21 and 24, 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 33.

Feedback Loop kits12:53

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 Act 1, and its question is: How does Shakespeare present Romeo's love for Rosaline in Act 1 Scene 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 thinking Romeo is already in love with Juliet in Act 1 Scene 1, when the lady he sighs over is Rosaline. The tip is to listen to how Romeo talks as well as what he says, because his love for Rosaline is full of sighs, rhymes and opposites borrowed from love poetry, and that style 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 Romeo tells Benvolio about Rosaline; to name a method in one of his oxymorons and say what it shows; and why Shakespeare might give Romeo this borrowed, poetic language before he meets Juliet. 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 Shakespeare presents Romeo's love for Rosaline in Act 1 Scene 1, with words to describe and terms to analyse printed above it, describing words such as lovesick, infatuated and theatrical, and terms such as oxymoron, Petrarchan lover and rhyming couplet, 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 chose short quotations such as "O brawling love! O loving hate!" and named the oxymoron before explaining what it shows. Even better when, and we always say when, never if, for example, link context to purpose: explain that Romeo sounds like the sighing lover of a Petrarchan sonnet, and why Shakespeare wants the audience to notice that his words are borrowed. 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 how Romeo feels about Rosaline, add "Griefs of mine own lie heavy in my breast", then one more sentence explaining what "heavy" tells you about him. Level 2: zoom in on "cold fire" and write two sentences on why the two words are opposites and what they suggest about Romeo's love. Level 5: look at the whole scene, set "O brawling love! O loving hate!" beside the street fight the audience has just watched, and explain how Shakespeare ties love and hate together from the first scene. Nobody rewrites the whole thing.

The feedback lesson and the end-of-unit essay16:36

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 Romeo and Juliet those are lessons 7, 13, 20 and 28. 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 32, after a planning lesson in Lesson 31. The paper looks like the exam. An extract, the question in AQA wording, planning space and lined answer space. 50 minutes, 30 marks, plus 4 for AO4. The question is: how does Shakespeare present conflict in Romeo and Juliet? 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 33 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 booklet18:21

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 Romeo and Juliet, for students aiming at grades 8 and 9. Eight texts in four groups: psychology; society and power; history and context; and literary criticism. 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 a summary of Gardner and Steinberg's 2005 study of peer influence on risk taking, which gives students evidence for a reading in which the tragedy comes from the crowd as much as from the stars. There's also an extract from William Gouge's Of Domesticall Duties, printed in 1622, which sets out the rules Juliet breaks: children need their parents' consent to marry, but may beg a parent not to press a match. Each text opens with a note on why it matters for Romeo and Juliet, then three questions in order. The last one is a debate of the kind students meet at A level, such as whether Romeo and Juliet love each other because their families forbid it. And every text ends with a link task back to the play: the link task sends students back to "My only love sprung from my only hate!" and asks which research finding the line supports. 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 sheets20:09

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 5 for a student who missed Lesson 5. Here's Lesson 1. What you missed, in three bullets, for example: the Prologue is a sonnet spoken by the Chorus, and it tells you the ending first. The four key words with their meanings. The quotation to know, "A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life", 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 Prologue twice, learn the four vocabulary words, dignity, grudge, mutiny and star-cross'd, then write three sentences on what the Prologue tells the audience and how knowing the ending changes the way they watch the love scenes. A check question: why does Shakespeare tell the audience the ending in the Prologue? 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 27, 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 premium22:14

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 finds Shakespeare's verse hard still writes about Juliet's oxymorons or Capulet's insults, with a word bank, a worked example and sentence starters beside them. The support changes and the destination stays the same. Shakespeare's language is the first barrier for many students, so the unit builds it in small steps: a short extract in each lesson, glosses for the hardest words, and an optional reading lesson for each act, where you read aloud and students follow. For students with SEND the guide works through a short list of moves: short extracts with the speakers marked, every one between 80 and 220 words; hear the act before reading it, with a recording before each reading lesson; sort before writing, such as the light and dark images at the feast; say it, then write it; and preparing for difficult scenes. For students learning English as an additional language: a picture for every image, because Shakespeare's images are concrete: torches, a dove among crows, pilgrims at a shrine; old words and false friends, such as wherefore meaning why and civil meaning between citizens; frames that name the word class; gestures and idioms, like biting the thumb, acted out or drawn; and pairing students who share a first language to talk through the extract before writing. For pupil premium students: a copy of the play at home, with copies lent and free recordings pointed out; the knowledge the audience took for granted, built in two-minute talks about arranged marriages, the code of honour, friars and confession and the open-air playhouse; who to ask first, with questions they can answer from the extract on the desk; seeing the play performed, through a short clip of one scene; revision in one place, with the AO4 name list and the four kit paragraphs kept together; and catch-up before every assessment. 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 5 the pre-teach is oxymoron, with everyday examples such as bittersweet and deafening silence, and Petrarchan, a lover who sighs over a lady he cannot have. The SEND note is to give the extract with the oxymorons listed down the side, each split into its two opposite halves, so students choose one to zoom in on while the worked example and starters carry the rest of the paragraph. The EAL note: show the opposites in a two-column table, cold and fire, heavy and lightness, sick and health, with a picture for each word, and add coz and gall to the vocabulary list. And for pupil premium students in Lesson 1, every student needs their own copy of the play to read at home and bring to lessons, so lend copies and point students to free recordings such as LibriVox. 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 editing26:20

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 department27:45

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 27, and the essay in Lesson 32, 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 Romeo and Juliet 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 Romeo and Juliet as much as mine have.