Jane Branson Learning

The Butterfly - a reading-writing diary

Mon, 21 May 2018 22:38:05 -0700

First, I have to update on a truly traumatic reading experience, in Gabriel Tallent’s My Absolute Darling. I knew (as mentioned last time) that it was going to be a sweaty-palmed ride. I didn't know it would mean a sleepless night and a race to the end in order to avoid a marital dispute. My husband can't sleep while my light is on. I can’t sleep when my heart is thumping with impending menace. What a terrific and terrifying book.

In the meantime, the audio experience of Neil Gaiman reading me his own Stardust offered beauty and brilliance and some of the best words in the world. A new catchphrase has entered my house, adopted from this fabulous scene in which three dark Lilim women divine the falling of a star from the sacrifice of a stoat:

Gaiman’s reading of the scene is vivid, and I listened numerous times to savour those similes. The child’s pyjamas – so unexpected, yet perfect; the ‘wet jewels’ of the offal – dazzlingly gruesome. ‘Entrails?’ I’ll now enquire of my children, putting on Gaiman’s best witchy voice. But don't worry - my offering is merely porridge, or baked beans.

Wouldn’t that be a great extract to use in the classroom? Engaging and flamboyant, graphic and simply narrated. The interview with Gaiman at the end of the audiobook version (a lovely bonus) offered some thought-provoking reflections on choosing which words to include, and to reflect on the words chosen here, you might pare it back, stripping out the noun phrases to leave the nouns to try their best on their own. That will leave you, for example, with just a board and a knife, a hand and a voice, which you can then re-build with different adjectival choices in order to evaluate those made by the author. It’s a great activity for working out which words really carry the scene into our heads and let us visualise all the gory details. And I know some young writers who'd love...Read More

The Butterfly - a reading-writing diary

Fri, 04 May 2018 08:55:03 -0700

Here is the butterfly diary. Having not blogged for over a year, I’m going to try a new approach, a vague record of recent reading (with recommendations) and writing, as well as occasional helpful (I hope) thoughts about teaching reading and writing. I’m hoping it will flutter prettily about a bit and land momentarily in a few places of interest on the way.

The title is inspired by Phillip Pullman, and Muhammed Ali. ‘You remember what Muhammed Ali said,’ says Pullman, in his Daemon Voices. ‘His method was to float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. My variation is that I read like a butterfly, and write like a bee.’ And since it’s difficult to imagine a more inspirational reading and writing role-model than Mr Pullman, I’m going to borrow the metaphor. It seems to sum up perfectly what the reading-writing bits of the brain do, hovering and darting from idea to idea, making connections both predictable and random, occasionally pausing to make a beautiful display or gather up some good stuff to turn into something sweet and new. Daemon Voices, a collection of essays and speeches about storytelling, is a fantastic read for anyone interested in the power and importance of narrative, as well as Pullman’s work. He’s brilliant at describing the business of being an author (‘making it up and writing it down’) and has great advice for those of us who aspire in that general direction: ‘…think of some interesting events, put them in the right order to make clear the connections between them, and recount them as clearly as you can.’ There. Simple eh?

Stephen King has been my other inspiration lately. In his half-memoir-half-how-to-guide On Writing he says that, to be a writer, the most important thing is to read, read and read. I do that, I thought, feeling happy, and a little smug. Then Mr King went on to say he reads at least 70 books a year, which is a good 20-30 more than my average. So I followed another piece of his advice and...Read More

The Sad But True Tale of An Ordinary School

Fri, 28 Apr 2017 09:00:00 -0700

Ordinary Primary School, like schools all over the country, is facing a huge budget deficit because school funding is going backwards. Unlike many, it’s okay for now: a fair hand of luck and some careful past budget management means it won’t be hit by the school funding disaster until next year. But that hit, when it comes, will be massive: a £100,000 deficit. There is no slack in the system: for years, the school has received gold stars for adhering to strict financial standards, has consistently met budget targets and evidenced commitment to providing good value for money. None of this matters now. Governors and school leaders decide, with huge reluctance, to talk about where to make the cuts.

The next day, a new pupil arrives. She’s been excluded from another setting. A pupil with an enhanced level of needs comes on roll every few weeks. Every time it happens, there is an immediate £15,000 impact on the budget. The child will be well-looked after and kept safe – that’s the bare minimum the school must do. Hopefully, her social, emotional and behavioural needs will be addressed through some focused and expert support. But the person who will be held responsible for the quality of that child’s education will be the class teacher.

The class teacher already has 32 children in his class. Three of them have specific learning requirements and a number have low-level behavioural difficulties which mean their days need to be carefully tailored. Thankfully, there is a learning assistant in the class for most of the morning. This probably won’t be the case next year. Last week, the learning assistant worked two mornings as a cover supervisor, because the supply budget has already been cut.

The class teacher welcomes his new pupil. He tries to give her a great first day, but it’s clear she needs help if she’s going to cope with the social...Read More

What’s the point of learning

Sun, 25 Sep 2016 03:25:56 -0700

Last time, I wrote about avoiding testing in the early days with a new class. Since then, a number of conversations with learners and teachers have included remarks such as “It’s Year 6 now so we’re getting ready for SATs”, and anecdotally confirmed that even Year 7 and 8 students are starting GCSE preparation. I even discovered one child keeping herself entertained through the early doldrum days of Year 6 with a home-made bingo game; it involved tallying the number of times her teacher repeated all the stock phrases we associate with test preparation. Good on the child concerned for making fun out of nothing, but… how depressing.

We must resist the urge to lend false value to learning by reference to tests and exams, even when making lessons feel meaningful and relevant feels most challenging. Desperate to plough through such-and-such a text (that students can’t bear), or to focus a distracted class on their grammar preparation, we may well be tempted to cry “test” to justify, explain or excuse. But denigrating learning to test preparation is kowtowing to the national agenda in the worst possible way – letting high-stakes tests dictate our core purpose.

Here’s where it could get messy, for what is the core purpose of education? You and your school mission statement may disagree. Are you dedicated to standards, relentlessly focused on making sure every child achieves the best set of test results? Or perhaps your classroom is all about personal development, creating resilience and fostering a love of learning? Maybe, the whole child is your bag, and you’d sacrifice a grade or two to turn out rounded and compassionate citizens. For others, the extra-curricular may take precedence, and sporting and artistic achievements outweigh the benefit of a clutch of above-average exam...Read More

September Hits and Misses

Sat, 03 Sep 2016 01:04:51 -0700

Mists are coming creeping and mellow fruitfulness is in the air. It’s time to go back to school. Whether you’ve already got a jittery tummy or can’t wait for the starter’s gun, here are a few tips for a successful September.

Let’s begin with testing. Er, maybe not. Some advise – it may even be written into the shared planning – that the best way to find out about a new class(es) is to test them. Indeed, in the light of the mess we currently call assessment, many schools are deciding that their own tests are the best way to cut through the mire and find a relevant baseline. Special sympathy must go to Year 7 teachers, trying to interpret the first year of data under the new primary assessment framework. Nevertheless, early testing is risky. If you go ahead, don’t do it in the first few days when learners may be anxious and overly focused on finding their way – they’ll be likely to underperform, meaning that subsequent planning will lack challenge and pupils will be bored from the get-go. Of course, if decent cross-school or transitional moderation is in place, then you’ll be able to trust the judgement of the teacher who went before, so do so, and get pupils doing something more interesting than a test. Likewise, you’ll need to buck the trend if you find yourself in a school where the autobiographical task or “my summer holiday” remains popular as a fail-safe way to start the new term. But I’ve blogged (ranted?) about that before…

What about the rules? Last September, a student of my close acquaintance spent his first week at secondary school writing out the “rules” of each subject. In maths, he did it twice, because the class were shared and the teachers couldn’t agree on their rules. Needless to say, he soon lost his new-school sparkle, and it wasn’t rekindled with “cover your book” homework activities. My heart sinks at these lost opportunities. First lessons are...Read More

Ten Ways to Celebrate Shakespeare

Sun, 24 Apr 2016 11:43:06 -0700

It’s time to celebrate Shakespeare. Here are ten appoaches to his drama and his poetry - all easy to incorporate into planning and classrooms as one-offs or to make links with longer learning units.

As a whole class, in a round, read the opening scene of Macbeth, enforcing only two rules: 1. The people on the other side of the circle have to be able to hear you. 2. Each line’s reading must be different from the last. (Depending on the age or class, provide some suggestions for intonation and performance: whisper like the wind; shout like an army general; say it with a cunning smile in your voice…)
Chop up a soliloquy into half-lines. Get students to find the partner whose line completes theirs and learn it off by heart. Then reveal the order of the speech and read as a class, with each student reading their own half-line. Repeat and rehearse, building to a full performance including appropriate gestures, movements, tone of voice and moments of stillness.
Visit the National Theatre’s Shakespeare on demand site and sign up for free. Watch some Shakespeare and marvel. (Later, access the teacher resources for help planning engaging activities around specific speeches and engaging students with Shakespeare’s language.)
Make a list of some of the different things that happen in the opening scenes of Shakespeare’s plays: preparations for a wedding (A Midsummer Night’s Dream); a triumphant army gets home (Much Ado About Nothing); witches chant in a deserted place (Macbeth); a storm (The Tempest); two feuding gangs meet (Romeo and Juliet); riots on the street (Coriolanus); two watchmen guard a castle (Hamlet), and so on. Rank these openings on a scale of 0-10 for excitement and audience appeal.
Don’t forget this familiar but lovely activity using Shakespeare’s insults: give...Read More

PfC - the bigger picture

Mon, 25 Jan 2016 16:00:00 -0800

Look at these Google-question lists. They draw wry attention to the different kinds of questions people ask, and especially the queries posed by those who lack the inclination to type those time-consuming letters “y” and “o”. They are also a powerful demonstration of different sorts of thinking: the type that focuses on the personal, and the type we do when we are thinking about the bigger picture.

I was thinking about these silly lists, when a piece in the TES gave me a further pause for thought about the “bigger picture”. The article (Tom Bennett, Set Civil Tongues Wagging, TES, 01.01.16) described a lovely-sounding A-level lesson in which students had exchanged views on difficult topics with wholesome and thoughtful frankness. Classrooms, said Bennett, can be “virtual laboratories” of discussion, where “we test ideas”. And he went on to say that his students, when they left the room, were “different people from who they were when they walked in.”

When I last checked, changing the nature of the learners in front of you was not one of the criteria for excellent teaching. But it probably should be, and it can be done – through Philosophy for Children (PfC). I trained in PfC with SAPERE about 5 years ago, and it’s been one of my favourite things ever since. Last year, research (by the Educational Endowment Fund) backed the common sense notion that PfC works, showing that it has all kinds of powerful benefits, including improvements in reading, writing and maths as well as increased confidence, patience and self-esteem. This...Read More

The Patterns of Poetry

Sat, 16 Jan 2016 16:00:00 -0800

There is a pleasure in poetic pains
Which only poets know.
(William Cowper)

Mr Cowper got it right. Poetry does appear to involve a lot of pain: for evidence, teachers only have to listen to the collective cry of agony issuing from their classes whenever “poetry” is revealed as the subject for the day. And then, there’s the pain that inspires a lot of it, the pain it often expresses, and last but not least, the pain of having to memorise it. Ouch!

So, what if we wanted to share the pleasure that “only poets know”? One way to help children enjoy that unique tingle is to show them how they can turn the secret keys of the poem, and see how it works. With this knowledge, they need never feel bamboozled by a bard again. Instead, they will feel emboldened and empowered whenever they encounter “some words in a group where the lines don’t reach the other side of the paper”. This, by the way, is my favourite definition of poetry, provided by a Year 7 pupil in my first year of teaching many years ago.

The secret keys of the poem are its patterns. Reading a poem for patterns is only one way to read it, and yes, there will be finer nuances that may not come to light with this reading technique. But, the benefits are great. Patterns are clues to meaning and intention. Patterns highlight the important bits. Patterns give us a way to talk about poetry. And patterns help us learn it too.

Let me give an example. Here are the first two stanzas of a poem I often use with children aged around 9 – 11. It’s by Charles Causley:

Timothy Winters comes to school

With eyes as wide as a football-pool,

Ears like bombs and teeth like splinters:

A blitz of a boy is Timothy Winters.

His belly is white, his...Read More

Doing Poetry – not just on special occasions

Sat, 03 Oct 2015 16:00:00 -0700

Why do we need National Poetry Day? Maybe because when it comes to daily, weekly and termly planning, a lot of English teachers just don’t do poetry as much as they do other stuff, and when poetry is the order of the day, pupils rebel. These are surely two sides of the same coin, but perhaps the problem’s in the terminology. “We’re doing poetry” makes it sound as if poetry must be analysed, survived and ticked off – like a lesson observation. “I’m teaching poetry” suggests a full-jug-into-empty-vessels mode of operation, and puts us off because, actually, we don’t know all the answers. And “let’s read a poem” seems to lack both aspiration and rigour.

So, is poetry just a niche hobby for special occasions, and not a viable full-time classroom activity? Of course not. Doing poetry can and should be part of the everyday fun of English, especially if we want it to move out of that little niche, make it part of normal reading culture and even recite it sometimes. So how should we do poetry?

The first answer is: often, to bring it into the mainstream and make it more accessible. Include a poem on the school website or newsletter, and add one to the display screen in the school foyer. If you’re not in charge of such places, post one weekly on your classroom door, and reward anyone who shows an interest in it. Plenty of websites will suggest “poems of the day” or week for you, but the quality of these will vary, and a better option is to buy two or three collections of poetry. Collections like Roger McGough’s ‘Poetry Please’, Jacqueline Wilson’s ‘Glass Green Beads’ and ‘101 Poems for Children’ chosen by Carol Ann Duffy are a good place to start. With every poem pre-selected by such experts, you can relax - every poem is a great choice, and questions of taste and suitability should not arise.

The other way to “do” poetry often is to link it to...Read More

Not my summer holiday...

Tue, 01 Sep 2015 04:12:03 -0700

It’s nearly time. Pencils are sharp, if not brains. The first day’s lunchboxes are not quite packed, but the uniforms might be labelled. Class lists and seating plans may be ready - and everyone’s already resenting the training day they’ve got to sit through while classrooms need decorating and lessons need planning.

Here’s my plea for the first English lesson: no “My Summer Holiday” writing. If you think about it, by the time they reach secondary age, most kids have written about themselves and their holidays at least half-a-dozen times, and probably many more.

Maybe for those really little learners, coming back into Year 1 or 2, there’s a case for writing about the holidays. It’s their recent experience, after all. And with some strong “talk for writing” activities, and a lovely exemplar, and some teacher modelling (selected highlights of your summer only please!), they’ll make a good job of it.

Exemplars of holiday writing are hard to come by, though. When you think about it, that’s not surprising. In real-life, when do people write recounts of their holidays? And how many us want to read them? Some parents (yes, that would be me) keep writing going through the summer by requiring holiday diaries of their little darlings. This is a type of recount, but its daily, on-the-spot, current nature makes it a very different of record. The passing of time, even only a few days, makes a holiday recount a strange beast: what we’re really talking about, in real-text terms, is travel writing. And we don’t very often teach that as a genre.

The recount, it seems to me, was born of the National Literacy Strategy’s “Six Text Types” document, and it’s a real horror. As another mum once said to me in total disgust, “I suppose Gove made “recount” into a noun.” Good recounts are rare, and the genre, if it...Read More

Jane Branson Learning

The Butterfly - a reading-writing diary

The Butterfly - a reading-writing diary

The Sad But True Tale of An Ordinary School

What’s the point of learning

September Hits and Misses

Ten Ways to Celebrate Shakespeare

PfC - the bigger picture

The Patterns of Poetry

There is a pleasure in poetic painsWhich only poets know. (William Cowper)

Doing Poetry – not just on special occasions

Not my summer holiday...

There is a pleasure in poetic pains
Which only poets know.
(William Cowper)