The Write Team: Creativity, Confidence and Challenge

 

Yesterday I had the pleasure of giving a talk at the University of Exeter's CREATEseminar with Emma Metcalfe of Bath Festivals' Write Team on the impact of creative writers working in schools.

In particular we drew attention to the difference the project made to pupils' confidence and to changes in practice in participating schools. 

You can read the outline of our talk below.

The_Write_Team_Creativity_Confidence_and_Challenge_March_12_2012_Blog.ppt Download this file

Click on the following links for more details of the Write Team, including free downloadable resources and anthologies of students' work.

Click here to view a video about the work of Bath Festivals' education projects, including the Write Team.

Click here to download the full research report on the Write Team project.

Recent Research on Poetry in Education

Below is a summary of some recent research on progress in pupils' poetry writing and teachers' metaphors of poetry writing instruction.

Recent_Poetry_Research.ppt Download this file

 

In search of the ‘Tyger’: power relationships and poetry in the classroom

 

When I began teaching the Year 5 class of children whose work would form the basis of my doctoral study of teaching poetry writing I did not really know what I was doing. (This was in an ‘ordinary’ community primary school in a not particularly salubrious area, and with no strong tradition of poetry teaching). I had a strong hunch, nothing more, that engaging the children in reading, writing and performing poems would somehow be of benefit to them. I think I had the grand idea that I would somehow find a link between ‘improved literacy’ and writing poems. But I was confident that if I read them poems and asked them to talk about them we might have the basis of a conversation which could be transformational. This was not a research finding, it was a hunch; and I was so serious in my belief in it that I spent the next three years investigating it.

 

I was influenced in my first sessions with the class by something Wendy Cope once told me about her teaching. After reading a poem to a class she would deliberately restrict herself to one question about the poem, and then let discussion about the poem emerge from there. She also tried never to use the same question twice.

 

On my second visit to the class I decided to read them, among other poems, William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’. I imagined that they would not understand all of it, that they might even find it a bit strange or difficult, but I was convinced they would respond to it. What happened that afternoon changed my whole view of teaching, and teaching literature in particular.

 

After reading ‘The Tyger’ to the class I chose to ask what pictures went through their minds as I was reading the poem. After a few slightly predictable answers about forests and tigers one boy put up his hand and said this: ‘I think it is about a big forest and a little forest. The little forest is trapped inside the big forest and is struggling to escape from it. It is a real struggle. Eventually the little forest breaks free and makes its way to edge of the big forest. It looks out.  What it can see on the other side is the First World War.’ There was a silence. Nobody knew what to say next. I thanked the boy for his comment and said that I found it interesting. Then I did something I had not done consciously in my teaching before. Instead of saying what I wanted to say, which was to debate with the boy’s interpretation of the poem, or read another poem perhaps, I asked the class if the boy’s answer had made anyone else think about the poem differently. All of their hands went up. Then I did something else I had not done before: I allowed the children to take control of the discussion. Instead of their comments going through me ‘in the chair’ they began talking and responding to each other, not always in agreement, but with a new energy and purpose.

 

I thought about this story again at the third Poetry Matters Seminar Series in Leicester in September. During a discussion of a paper by Gary Snapper Michael Rosen encouraged us to reflect on the power relationships at work in the English teaching classroom. It was impossible, he said, to ignore them. Drawing on the work of Foucault, he invited us to consider the connection between the questions we ask in classrooms and the imperative of exams and ‘standards’ and thus policy. Placing poetry in this equation is by definition a disruptive act, he reminded us, because poetry is a democratic and subjective art-form. Sue Dymoke added that taking this kind of risk requires confidence, both in terms of subject and pedagogical knowledge.

 

Together we considered the paradox of ‘losing’ power in order to gain new kinds of knowledge and confidence by asking questions about poems we do not know the answers to. As Sue Horner remarked later at the Seminar, it is possible to move too speedily from curriculum specifications to decisions about classroom practices without taking the time to engender the trust and the fun and the risk which we know teaching poetry can bring. We can catch glimpses of the Tyger, but these will not be memorable or long-lasting if we go hunting for it using only pre-planned routes.

Put 'I' in GCSE to give pupils their own voice -by Amy Winston in the TES

Put 'I' in GCSE to give pupils their own voice

Comment | Published in The TES on 1 July, 2011 | By: Amy Winston

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"Are you writing down any of your ideas?" I ask a critically lazy Year 10 boy. He stares at me. "Well, Miss," he replies, "I've got words but I'm not sure where to put them."

I spend my time at school trying to teach meanings, impact, audience, purpose, structure and grammar. "Take scissors to that sentence!" I yell. "Bulldoze that paragraph!"

Some listen and really try to think about where to put their words, but others truly don't know how to choose their vocabulary to create an effect. Often it is too late by the time they are in key stage 4. The damage has been done after 10 years in a conveyor-belt system that rarely asks them to be independent.

They are frightened of failure and look to you for an answer. This neediness makes them good exam fodder, but can be death to effective writing. Our current GCSEs are stripping away pupils' ability to think independently - the very skill needed to succeed in all aspects of life.

It is almost as if we need a measure of achievement that requires pupils to think independently, where choice is paramount and imagination rewarded. Step forward the AQA IGCSEs in English.

If you work at an independent school, the chances are you have been teaching them since they were introduced a few years ago. But colleagues in state schools may not realise that the course is free from the constraints of national curriculum statutory requirements, while adhering to its general ethos.

Because it does not follow the curriculum to the letter, it allows pupils their own voice. They get to choose their own area of assessment and pursue independent research into it. Assessments aren't taught as a whole class, they are individual, leaving pupils the choice to examine a politician's speech or writer's body of work. The stabilisers are off.

Teachers of the standard English literature GCSE will be very familiar with the opening chapter of Great Expectations; Act I, Scene V of Romeo and Juliet; and Act I, Scene II of Macbeth. Why? Because there is so much to cover we have to reduce these great works to the analysis of extracts. Students are aware of the wider plot and themes, but most may only study a select few scenes or chapters, as required.

In contrast, for the AQA IGCSEs you study three or more whole texts. Yes, whole texts. Cover to cover and everything.

But if I went round state schools proposing that they switch to this qualification, most headteachers would laugh me out of the room. The reason for that lies in the dark core of our education system, the part that devours our schools from the inside. To put it plainly, this IGCSE still does not count in the main league table measure, the one for five A*-Cs including English and maths. So, for most schools, it might as well not exist.

If the Government is intent on sticking with such a simplified way of judging schools' worth, they should at least count these qualifications. Maybe then our pupils would learn not only where to put their words, but how to become the independent self-starters our society so desperately needs.

Amy Winston is an English teacher at a comprehensive in the West Midlands.

via tes.co.uk