How to teach: English - Chris Curtis 2019

Questioning
How to teach non-fiction

Non-fiction is English teacher Marmite. There are many of us who turn off at the thought of it, thinking, ’I didn’t spend years at university to analyse a newspaper. I studied the pioneers of modern literature, for goodness sake! The last thing I want to do is study the work of a two-bit hack.’

The problem with teaching non-fiction is how rapidly we reduce it according to generic features. This is a diary. These are the features of a diary. Here is an example of a diary. Spot the features of a diary. Now, write your own diary. This approach produces generic writing. I have read countless examples by students and, overall, the issue lies with the reductive process of teaching non-fiction and not with the individual. You’ll have a great newspaper article if it has alliteration in the title! (Yeh, right.) Non-fiction has heart and we teach it as if it doesn’t.

Admittedly, non-fiction doesn’t lend itself to lessons as easily as poetry or fiction. But it is more accessible and probably read more often by students out of choice. As a teenager, I read libraries full of non-fiction on the making of TV shows and films. I loved them. I didn’t read many novels, but I’d read TV Zone from cover to cover and learned all about the making of Star Trek and Doctor Who. Non-fiction is grounded in reality; it seeks to report the world as it is and that is undervalued. Fiction involves imagining, visualising and constructing a world in our heads while non-fiction involves trying to understand our own. I could tell you endless facts about Doctor Who and other TV shows. They are all relatively useless, but they helped me understand the shows and their production. I didn’t want escapism when reading, I wanted knowledge and understanding. Of course, the two elements are interchangeable and fluid: students understand through experience and learn from knowledge.

Non-fiction should be a consistent reference point in the classroom. We should be switching constantly between it and fiction. Students shift levels of verbal formality all the time, yet ’code shifting’ related to genre and text style rarely happens in the classroom. We section off lessons for poetry or non-fiction. Rarely do the two meet and mix. Non-fiction shouldn’t be saved for a unit of work. Your lovely unit on persuasive texts may well be teaching students that non-fiction is boring.

The beauty of non-fiction is in its immediacy. Spending five weeks studying different examples of persuasive writing kills off interest, ideas and connection to the subject. Newspaper articles are written within minutes of the event. Diaries are written on the day. Letters are written as the writer thinks. Each of these texts are immediate. The writer didn’t spend two months exploring how they might present their ideas and they didn’t go through twenty drafts. They just got the ideas down on the page. You don’t spend six weeks writing an email complaining about the description of an item you bought on the internet. While fiction needs attention, thought and time, non-fiction lives in the moment. It should be written in the moment. Read in the moment.

Pick non-fiction texts you personally find interesting. Don’t obsess over making non-fiction fit the hole in the curriculum that needs filling. It can be separate. Keep a focus on immediacy; read quickly and write quickly. Show its relevance to now. Get students to think, react and discuss.

1. Questioning

Questioning can work on so many levels with non-fiction. To properly understand the world, we need to ask the right questions. Usually, people cite open and closed questions as the main variants, but I think we can be more selective and intuitive with our questioning.

The older a child gets, sadly, the fewer questions they ask of us. My daughters couldn’t stop asking questions in their toddler days, yet that dies down as kids enter their teenage years. We need to focus on getting our students to ask more and better questions. Here are some simple alternatives to standard questioning:

Questioning the alternatives: Why not …? Why doesn’t …? Why wouldn’t …?

Questioning that aids evaluation: Which is the best/least/most/weakest …?

Questioning that makes students take a position: If you were against this, what would you say?

Questioning the consequences: If ______________, then why _______?

I like also to dress up the questioning and look at texts from different enquiring viewpoints. I take the classics and link the questioning to how detectives approach a crime. Sherlock Holmes would make inferences. Miss Marple would relate things to her own experience and knowledge. Poirot would look for the inconsistencies. Morse would look at the different perspectives.

I give students the following on cards or on a PowerPoint and we interrogate the text. They form questions of their own then pass them on to another group or pair. They are given sentence stems to help form their ideas. I love getting students to talk about non-fiction texts and this approach allows them to do it freely.

Sherlock Holmes — inferences/reading between the lines.

What clues are there that …?

How do ____ and ____ link together?

What is the connection between _____ and ______?

I can infer from this that …

This suggests that …

It seems that …

______ evidence and ______ evidence show that …

Miss Marple — relating to our own world/experience/knowledge.

Where have you seen this before?

What other subject has this? What skills from RE can you bring in to explain this?

This reminds me of …

We saw this when …

I notice that _____ has happened when ______.

Poirot — looking for the flaws and inconsistencies.

Which bits don’t add up?

Where have they contradicted themselves?

What are the weaknesses in their argument?

They say ______, but it doesn’t match up with ______.

I notice that they say ______, but later they say the opposite. I don’t think they are completely certain because …

Inspector Morse — looking at the perspectives.

What does the other person say?

How does this person’s view differ from the rest? Does everybody agree with this point?

One person said ______ while the others said ______.

From a different perspective, it can be seen that …

I struggle with reducing or simplifying reading skills to a few key strategies as reading is a vast, complex and multilayered process, but this approach makes sure that there is a focus when interrogating a text. A while back, English teachers were led, by the infamous National Literacy Strategy, to believe that there were several strategies good readers employed.¹ For me, this was a simplification of the process of reading. For example, one strategy was to visualise a text. Yes, it made a nice activity, but it rarely engaged with the ideas in any depth. It was a simple consolidation task. Plus, if I only saw pictures when I read, I’d have a vastly oversimplified view of what was really going on. This approach, however, sets up students to interrogate the text.

Ideas are at the heart of English and, if we don’t look at how students engage with them, we aren’t really teaching. They might struggle with the answers, but every student can ask a question regardless of ability and they should be made to do so regularly. Questioning and ideas go hand in hand.