The ‘diminished diet’ in English
Last month I was lucky enough to receive an invitation to speak at the TM English Icons conference. Whenever I’m asked to speak to other teachers, I always think long and hard about topics that could be the focus for a presentation. Ultimately, I try and go for something that I’m passionate about and truly believe in. It seemed quite pertinent then, that I should settle for ideas and strategies to help avoid teaching a ‘diminished diet.’ This is a phrase I first heard used by Mary Myatt when I saw her present at ResearchEd Birmingham last year. At the time, I knew this presentation would be invaluable to the way I approach my teaching. Over the past year, it has come to influence and drive everything I believe about classroom practice and pedagogy.
The idea of a ‘diet’ revolves around what we offer students. I’ve been thinking a lot about how this term could be applied to English and what we can do to avoid a ‘diminished diet’, an offer that isn’t good enough or right for those we teach. Of course, as teachers we have to ask ourselves the tough questions in order to improve both ourselves and our students’ experiences. Is what we offer our students good enough? By ‘good enough’ I mean is it challenging enough? Is it exciting? Is it ambitious?
I think ‘diet’ can be considered on both a macro and micro level. On a macro level, we have to think about our English curriculum, the sequencing of that curriculum, the ‘Big Questions’ we’re asking and the text choices we make. On a micro level, we’re looking at lesson plans and how they fit into the ‘bigger picture’, the resources we use and our views on differentiation versus scaffolding. Are we teaching the right texts or could they be more rigorous? Are we differentiating and changing the destination for some or are we championing high challenge, scaffolding and helping everyone to reach the same goal? Are resources planned and used ambitiously or picked out from the back of a filing cabinet with minimal changes since they were first made five years ago?
I also think there’s a danger of serving students a ‘diminished diet’ without knowing it and with it, more tough questions that have to be asked. Are we moving on to the next PowerPoint slide just because it’s there or because students have truly ‘got it’? We may be teaching high challenge lessons but if we’re hurtling through content and haven’t picked up on the fact that students haven’t understood what’s come before, future lessons are pointless. Do we confuse the idea of ‘doing’ with ‘learning’? Or do we elaborate answers offered by students to questions we have posed so that it aligns itself with what we wanted to hear in the first place?
There’s lots here to consider and doing so can sometimes be uncomfortable. Reflecting on my own practice, I’ve certainly been guilty of moving on too quickly or spinning student answers into something more intricate to make it sound better than it was. Of course, this isn’t the right approach.
I think it’s particularly easy for us as English teachers to fall into the trap of serving students a ‘diminished diet’. After all, abridged texts exist in abundance, graphic novels of Shakespeare texts are ready and waiting and film versions can be used to plug the gaps of parts we may have skipped over in the actual book. Yet by providing students with these resources, we’re denying them the right to engage with a text before they’ve even had the opportunity. By thinking they need the graphic novel instead of the real text, we’re expecting them to fail before they have had a chance to prove themselves. Students can and will meet high expectations. We must, however, give them the opportunities to do so.
With this in mind, I’d like to talk about ‘Read, re-read and read again’. This is something I spoke about during the conference and have had some questions about it since. My presentation included some other strategies and ideas that can be found here.
‘Read, re-read and read again’
A lesson spent reading is not a lesson wasted.
‘Read, re-read and read again’ isn’t necessarily a new idea but I thought I’d explain how I’ve used it, just as an example of how it can be done. For me, it is an amalgamation of thinking from lots of various people and their work including Lyndsey Dyer’s (@RealGingerella) ‘Register and Read’ sessions, Alex Quigley’s (@HuntingEnglish) ‘Closing the Vocabulary Gap’ and ‘Closing the Reading Gap’, Chloe Woodhouse (@Aviewaskew) and her presentations on reciprocal reading and Alice Visser-Furay’s (@AVisserFuray) ideas on pre-reading strategies.
The need for strategies like the ones advocated by the people above was demonstrated perfectly by something that happened in my class around two years back. I had been teaching the part in Stave Three of ‘A Christmas Carol’ when the Cratchits are having their Christmas dinner. We’d discussed the extract in great depth, talking and debating, planning ideas and preparing for an essay. This, I thought, was going to go well. Imagine my dismay, then, when I came across one student who used the quotation, ‘They were not a handsome family’, explaining that this meant the reader’s sympathy would increase for the Cratchits because not only were they poor but extremely ugly as well. While somewhat of a humorous misunderstanding, it highlights a bigger issue. If students can’t access texts, what do they do? This is an urgent question, particularly when one considers that vocabulary can be one of the biggest barriers to accessing a text.
It would be easy, then, to provide students with a ‘diminished diet’ here, giving them an abridged version, a modernised version, a comic version to help them ‘get it’. Therefore, misunderstandings like the one above won’t happen and those students who struggle with reading will still understand what’s going on, right? At the beginning of my teaching career, I’d be inclined to agree. Not anymore. I saw Alex Quigley speak at a PiXL English conference three years ago where he talked about words and how they should be discussed, debated, used in sentences and pulled apart in order for students to truly learn them. Quigley’s keynote inspired me to create a resource (pictured) that linked to the ‘Thinking Hard’ strategies and could be used as part of explicit vocabulary instruction.
I won’t talk about explicit instruction here. Instead ‘read, re-read and read again’ is something that runs alongside that, helping students consider words in their context, allowing them to access passages of text. This is how I use it in the classroom. I find it useful because we can’t always explicitly teach every single piece of vocabulary that students will find difficult, but this is a way of addressing these words without resorting to handing students a glossary devoid of explanation or discussion, another example perhaps of a ‘diminished diet’.
Step One - Pre-reading activities
Firstly, if we are due to read a long section of a text, I will look through what I am going to read before the lesson and think about whether a particular extract from that section contains complex language that could inhibit understanding. I will then pick five or six words in that extract (never more than six to avoid cognitive overload) that I think students will find difficult to understand. If a word is particularly challenging, it may be suitable for explicit vocabulary instruction too. Before we read the extract, I’ll give students the words and their definitions. This is where some people have been critical of this method, citing Quigley and the fact that we shouldn’t just give students lists of words and definitions, but that’s not what’s actually happening here, for these words and definitions will form the basis of pre-reading activities.
Now I’ll read the text to students without any interruptions. I think it is important for students to hear their teachers as expert readers to help with their understanding.
Step Three - Re-read the text, substituting words for their definitions
Next is the most important stage of the process. At this point, I will re-read the text, stopping and starting where appropriate in order to question students and check for understanding. As we come across the words that were discussed in pre-reading, I will stop and ask students what each meant to see what they have retained from pre-reading. I may ask for the meaning of ‘fettered’, for example, and would expect students to tell me that it means ‘restrained with chains’. Once I have elicited a definition from a student, I will re-read the text again, substituting the word with the definition. For example, Dickens’ line:
“You are fettered,” said Scrooge, trembling. “Tell me why?”
will become
“You are restrained with chains,” said Scrooge, trembling. “Tell me why?”
It’s a simple strategy, but one that helps students understand what a writer is saying. After all, the fact a student can recite words and definitions is not indicative of understanding. It is important they see how a word is used. This in itself may present an opportunity for further questions and discussion. It is the longest stage of the process, but one that breaks down complexities.
Finally, I’ll read the original extract again with the definitions now removed. Exposing students to the original text after seeing the definitions in place will help students consolidate their understanding. It may also be appropriate to complete a vocabulary check at the end of a lesson to see what students remember.
This method can be used for any student regardless of age. After seeing the TM English presentation, Ceridwen Eccles (@Teacherglitter) shared ideas as to how this could be adapted to suit a primary context. The examples below have been shared with permission.
What I love about Eccles’ examples is the fact that the questions included here actively open up discussion for students. James Britton says that ‘writing floats on a sea of talk’ and I’m convinced the same can be said for reading too. Notice how students are being asked to consider a writer’s choice of language by experimenting with synonyms of the word in question. Students are actively laying those foundations to help them understand the text they are reading.
And this is really what it’s all about. ‘Read, re-read and read again’ takes time. I’ve spent whole lessons reading and ensuring students understand an extract before, exploring ideas and generating discussion. I’m a firm believer of the fact that a lesson spent reading is not a lesson wasted. Reading and understanding is a slow process, but a vital one.
As I said before, there are limitations to this method. It won’t solve everything. Used appropriately, however, it will help us to avoid giving students an abridged or modern version of a text. Those graphic novels can stay in the stock cupboard and gather dust. If we decrease the threat of our high expectations, students will rise to meet them and we can ensure that we’re not giving students a ‘diminished diet’, but a wholesome one.
Stuart
(@SPryke2)
My presentation slides from TM English Icons can be found here.