A lower key stage 3 English class is studying a poem. The teacher tells the students the name of the poet and the movement, and gives them a fact about it.
This is before the class has read or thought about the poem. The teacher then tells them what the poem is about, in relation to the fact that they’ve been told: “This poem is about this.” “This poet is interested in this.”
The aim is for the students to remember the name of the poet, the name of the movement, the fact about the movement and the way that the poem demonstrates this fact. They will be tested on it later, possibly more than once.
Another teacher, in a different school, is teaching the same poem. She starts by reading it.
She asks the students some open questions to elicit a response. Ideas are shared and the teacher draws out students’ initial thoughts and probes for deeper insights into what is special about this iconic poem, asking questions such as “What’s special about that phrase?”, “Why do you think the poet was doing this, rather than that?” and “What view of the topic seems to emerge?”
At the end, she tells the students the name of the poet, talks about the movement and draws out some key points about what’s special about the poem.
These are two very different ways of approaching the same material.
Teaching English: are we losing our way?
The first can be seen in lots of English classrooms and in examples of practice currently being shared online.
The second was common practice in the past but now is only likely to be visible in schools that are “permissive” towards their teachers, allowing individual departments a degree of autonomy over their pedagogy and practices. It is happening more in grammar schools and independent schools than in the maintained sector.
One can see these different versions in approaches to writing responses to literature, too. In the first version, students rehearse, repeat and write paragraphs closely modelled by their teacher to generate very similar, if not identical, responses to the texts they’re studying, using the same quotations and examples they have been told to use.
In the other, they are encouraged to think for themselves, explore, generate their own ideas and express them in varied ways.
Again, we have two markedly different approaches: one where literary analysis is a fixed academic format to be learned and followed, another where it has flexibility and not only allows for but also expects an individual voice to be heard.
It will probably be clear by now that the second is the version I favour. My reasons for this are many but, above all, they stem from a view that this is what the discipline is about. And this is what English students have always loved about the subject.
But it seems to me, and to colleagues both in schools and higher education, that it has broken down. But why?
Where we’re going wrong
First, the focus on exams has led to a more mechanistic approach. The formulae for exam success have gone way beyond exam preparation to become the default for all learning, even early in KS3. Ironically, even the awarding bodies express consternation about this in their exam reports, urging teachers to encourage independent thought and avoid over-teaching of material and formulaic writing.
Second, the emphasis on generic science of learning in education has led to a flattening of differences between subjects, with a narrowing of English to what can be taught and assessed. There are right and wrong answers and undisputed facts in some subjects, but there are multiple right answers in English and a wide variety of facts that one can choose between. You can remember lots of facts about a text and write very badly about it. You can remember fewer and write a really thoughtful, insightful answer.
Third, for the first time in the 50 years that I have been involved in English teaching, there is a major shortage of English subject specialists, with a large number of teachers not having English degrees.
Non-specialists can, of course, make great teachers. But in a department that has few English graduates, the depth of understanding of the signature practices of the subject, what great writing looks like and even subject knowledge is thinner than it should be. We need teachers who loved the subject enough at school to study it at university and then choose to teach it, to offer that same pleasure to their students.
There is a common refrain from teachers that students aren’t liking the subject as much these days. It’s worth asking why. Maybe it’s because the aspects that made it exciting and enjoyable, that give it a distinctive identity, disciplinary coherence, validity and rigour, have been eroded, sometimes even stripped away, leaving something that is no longer really literary study at all but rather the performance of a new kind of English that is very different and far less enjoyable.
Barbara Bleiman is an education consultant at the English and Media Centre, a former English teacher and writer
