I have spent a week re-writing our KS3 booklets. This was as a result of our day working as a department to pull apart our curriculum. We started with our Year 7 French Art Exhibition Unit and examined our resources, commenting on coherent long term learning as well as on how individual resources worked in the classroom. Our reflections centred on 4 main issues:
- The balance between meaningful and mechanical exercises.
- The balance between expression and accuracy.
- The balance between engagement and distraction.
- The balance between immediately useful language and long term learning.
It seemed that exercises which were purely to practise a language point were "doable". And that such mechanical exercises had a role in cementing conceptual understanding. But that once done, they were quickly forgotten and had little impact when it came to pupils using the language to express themselves. At the same time, we were aware of the danger of using "communication" as an excuse for glossing over important and potentially confusing details. This came to a head when pupils ended up worrying about the details or mistakes and became inhibited and learning stalled.
One of the raison d'êtres of the Art Exhibition Unit is to work on definite and indefinite articles. So that pupils are confident with words like un / une / le / la / les. Some of these exercises were too mechanical to be memorable. Others focused too much on meaning without the articles being relevant. This page from our original booklet is guilty of both of these in turn:
In the new material, I have tried to balance it so that the meaning of the articles is much more integrated with the quality of the description of the image. So that while there is still the long term purpose of confidence in using the articles, the pupils' task is strongly focused on creating meaning:
In this unit, we were particularly aware of the danger of giving pupils language as a "one off" to help describe their picture, but which would never be seen again and would soon be forgotten.
This has led to some pages in the booklet being removed. This page helped pupils go beyond describing what was in their picture and add some comments on the style and mood.
In theory, they could work on their fluency on using these expressions to talk about several pictures, before applying it to their own:
But in reality, it was only really ever used to concoct some sentences about their own artwork for the French Exhibition. While it looked good, a few weeks later they had forgotten what it meant, and the vocabulary and structures are not revisited later in the year. There may be some pupils who enjoyed the impression of sophistication the structures allowed them. But on balance, this page has been cut.
For other pages, we took the opposite view. This page was intended to act as a way to construct a model text getting away from the repetition of il y a...
Again, it did the job of scaffolding pupils' writing and adding sophistication to a description. But the objective was the short term one of creating a description for the Exhibition rather than an objective for learning to be retained and deployed fluently.
You can see in the pages with the Kandinsky and Hockney pictures above that we introduced these more varied structures much earlier in the unit, rather than as a last minute sophistication boost. We included a lot more examples for pupils to practise describing. Here they work with a partner to talk about a picture and see if their partner can recognise which one it is:
This also works well with pupils selecting a picture and the teacher having to guess (in French sentences) what shapes there are without looking at any of the pictures.
The overall outcome of our reflections was that it's the dynamic equilibrium of all these competing factors that has to be managed. Both in the creation of resources and in the classroom. Picking the Art Exhibition Unit as our focus sharpens attention to things like the balance between making things attractive and distracting.
In this next example, the page on the left was already in the booklet. It picks up on French the pupils already know for saying "I have a dog who is called..." and repurposes it for saying things like, "There is a dog who is swimming". I needed to create more opportunities to practise this so it would start to be internalised, with pupils learning about the endings of -er verbs for 3rd person singular and plural in the present tense. The original page on its own was too mechanical and divorced from creating meaning for anything to really stick. In creating the page on the right, I had to be aware of the danger of using artwork that would help make it more engaging, but simultaneously could shift the focus away from the nitty gritty of the language and onto the weird and wonderful ideas in the paintings!
On this occasion it was a risk I was prepared to take. If pupils are intrigued by looking at paintings by Chagal and their imagination is sparked, then that's not something I want to stamp out. If the resource is well written, there is the possibility that the art could make it more memorable. And using vocabulary they already know for animals, and structures that they will see again in Year 8 (-er verbs), I am happy that this shouldn't be a "one-off" and soon forgotten.
This is a good reminder that we are not looking for simplistic answers of what is good and what is bad according to cognitive load theory. We are examining the messy and diverse reality of learning in the classroom. We will report back on how it works...!
Next Post: How do these ideas play out when we rewrite other booklets?
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