Attempt the following ‘learning objective’ – to develop inferential skills on the supplied quotes. Key info, students have not completed the text and so cannot connect forwards, students are a little disengaged from the text so are unlikely to connect backwards, and it is treated by the mandated powerpoint as a ‘word explosion’. All I can tell about the word explosion is that it looks for definitions and associations.
Without her gun she felt vulnerable.
Without the drug he’ll never manage it’ll kill him in the end.
The legend the stone would persist until it was laid to rest by a woman who was its equal.
The water will be flowing through hangman’s wharf soon… We’re both going that way.
What did you note? Maybe, gun is a noun, associated with violence and murder? Drug precedes kill and end so these terms are culturally sequenced as well as grammatically sequenced? A woman cannot be equal to a stone, unless some unit of measure is indicated?
If you could say more than this, you’ve done better than I – and far better that the students could do. For the most part, all we are doing is repeating back what we’ve read, but in different terms. Maybe, less figurative, or in lower order lexical terms. We paraphrase what we’ve read.
When students are asked to analyze texts, we often ask them to focus on the skill of inference. But inference does not constitute a discrete packets of knowledge nor is it itself and example of key disciplinary vocabulary. So what exactly is being taught by the teacher, and what exactly is being learned by the student?
To just clarify what we mean by a skills in Literature, we can analogize this to the skill of juggling. Juggling is itself a motor skill that is developed through continual rehearsal, practice and a high number of repetitions. Juggling is not particularly an example of knowledge that can be taught, though it can be demonstrated. It is something that the student must develop a relationship with and an affinity for through quiet internal reflection and focus.
For Discipline of English, inference is a skill likened to the motor skill of juggling. In the four quotes provided above, a class of students might be asked to infer ideas. But my experiences of delivering this kind of learning objective ends within a very high degree of failure, ultimately because they haven’t done anything they couldn’t do at the beginning of the lesson (they can read and understand the lines), neither have they learnt something from the teacher that could not be discerned from textual scrutiny.
Paraphrase is ultimately a proxy for reading, and not for learning new knowledge. Anything that we might say around each of these quotes is really something that is quite explicit at different levels and. I think students feel this way too; they detect that their annotations are really just writing out what has been read but in different words.
True analysis happens when students are shown something by an expert that they cannot discern for themselves – academic knowledge is something that is gained over a long period of time when subject experts discern patterns across vast sways of material. Students are not equipped to handle the high degree of material and the long periods that academics are dealing with and so cannot possibly observe the patterns. The student can only obtain this discrete disciplinary knowledge via the subject expert, and not through discovery or inferred through quiet focus and reflection.
I’ve been doubling down on ensuring each lesson contains at least three key vocabulary and a paragraph explaining the core principle – and this is not how lessons are normally formatted. The difference has been immediate. Students can see a job to do; to use the key vocabulary in a paragraph of their own work. It should reflect the core knowledge, and come to describe some material in study.
And it’s so much easier to mark. I can browse through their paragraph and feature spot the key vocabulary. I can deep read the paragraph for sense if needs be. But all I really need to do is tick off the key vocab list when I see it being used correctly.
I want to see students building a disciplinary vocabulary through which they can unlock critical meaning. The inference is done via the vocabulary, not in its absence. The vocabulary becomes a proxy for critical engagement and with enough repetitions, it should become second nature to use these terms in situ.
Every lesson throughout DoE is structured around this principle; core knowledge and vocabulary. It is these which need understanding and applying to texts. This is the fundamental nature of learning how to think like a critic.