A first (collaborative) attempt at writing a literature essay in Spanish.

 When the new A Level introduced a literary set text, I must admit I was nervous. We have very few pupils who study the traditional combination of French, Spanish, English Lit A Levels that was the norm when I was in the Sixth Form. We have pupils who study Chemistry, Health and Social Care, Psychology and a wide range of A Levels alongside Spanish. I also didn't really know what their GCSE English study of An Inspector Calls etc would equip them to do. So I have approached the set text in Spanish in a very step by step manner.

This week Year 12 were writing their first essay after finishing reading the text. This is the sort of thing that in Year 7, if you said, "One day, you will be reading a work of literature in Spanish and writing essays on it in Spanish," they would have been awestruck by the future that awaited them. I do like to remind them just how brilliant they have become!

We started by planning in teams, by writing on the desks. This is designed to make the process public, shared and accessible. No-one is on their own struggling with an essay plan in silence. They are working in pairs, enjoying writing on the tables, happy to try things out and rub them out, and to comment on or steal ideas from other teams.

Practical tips: Watch out for pupils with light coloured clothing where the pen from the desk might smudge on their sleeves. And don't use black or purple felt tips because they are the hardest to rub off. We are using miniwhiteboard pens, so don't worry about the photos showing black pen.

You can see I have given the pupils a structure to follow. They are looking at the character of Martirio in García Lorca's La Casa de Bernarda Alba. They are listing their evidence about the character from the text that fits into 3 ways of looking at the text:

A simple story or melodrama.

A sociological study of life in rural Spain.

A psychological analysis of desire and repression within the human psyche.

Then they write up their ideas in Spanish. Again, knowing that this is going to be rubbed out at the end of the lesson - they are trying out their expression, exploring what they can and can't say and whether it makes any sense! It is a low stakes, ephemeral and experimental approach to writing.

It is possible to turn this into a production line, with students moving between tables, reading and adding to different answers as they evolve. If you want you can ask them to do this in a prescriptive way: An opening topic sentence, evidence, analysis, conclusion. I asked my class if they wanted to do this and they declined.

Before we rub it out, the students take a photo on their phones so they can refer to it at the next stage.

The next stage is still collaborative, but on a shared live Google doc. Each pair of students has a doc to work on together from their own device. And I also have the doc open to make suggestions. Here you can see the two students working on the doc together and some of my suggestions.

The last paragraph to be added was the introduction, which explains why it's currently the one with most uncorrected errors.

They are using their 3 table paragraphs from the previous lesson:

Martirio seen through the lens of "if you consider it as just a story", "if you consider it to be a sociological study", and "if you think it is something deeper."

To this they add an introduction explaining that they are going to examine these 3 perspectives. And a conclusion explaining that the shift in Martirio's character from realistic to symbolic is part of the trajectory of the whole play from real to surreal.

Next lesson we will plan other essay titles, using the same 3 perspective formula. I had a group once who tried to stress-test this formula and see if it was bullet proof. They tried every conceivable essay title to see if they could use this in every case. It seemed unbreakable.

Having said that, as with A Level teaching generally, Year 12 is about routines and formulae to make sure students are where they need to be. And then Year 13 is about moving on and letting them break away from routines to think independently and creatively.

But I didn't need to be scared of the essay. Students love exploring their ideas and seeing something physically emerge as they create it together.