How to teach: English - Chris Curtis 2019

Interpretations
How to teach students to analyse texts effectively

Teachers are pressed for time and, sadly, this means that we don’t have sufficient hours to allow for much organic analysis in class. I could spend years reading Romeo and Juliet, for example, and tease out so much from it that I’d never want to stop. But this is unlikely to be allowed. For some time now, I’ve topped up students’ knowledge of a text by providing my own interpretations. Take the following for An Inspector Calls:

Mrs Birling

✵ Highlights how women didn’t always sympathise with other women.

✵ Shows how people only care for their family and their reputation.

✵ Shows how people are only kind and charitable when it suits them.

✵ Shows how women abused their power too.

✵ Gives the audience an idea of what Sheila could become.

✵ Shows how inequality was caused by both genders — not just by men treating women badly.

When we have covered the content and are preparing for the exam, I provide students with a range of interpretations to give them what Andy Tharby describes as a ’bedrock of knowledge’.² Yes, students could come to these interpretations on their own, but often the pace of this is not conducive to learning or to the progress of the class. A bank of interpretations helps them to form new ideas. The less able students latch on to the idea and regurgitate it while the more able find that they don’t quite fit with what they want to say and so adapt them, developing a new interpretation. A bit like the concept of core knowledge (that basic information you need to grasp in order to access a topic), students need core interpretations. It is important they know that Mr Birling is a symbol of capitalism. When they have that core interpretation, they can develop others, such as:

✵ There are characters whose lives benefit from capitalism.

✵ There are characters whose lives are negatively affected by capitalism.

✵ There are characters who are the opposite of capitalism.

✵ There are characters who show us different types of capitalism.

When you know that Mr Birling is a symbol of capitalism, you can then interpret that Eva Smith is the collateral damage caused by the machine. Ideas don’t sit in the brain alone and, when placed together or in proximity, they can generate interesting and thoughtful new shoots. However, without the core knowledge or a rudimentary interpretation, students will not get further than the plot. They need something to metaphorically light the blue touch paper of original thought, but often that something is someone else’s thought. Therefore, I test and revise core interpretations. We can never know what the exam questions will be, so there is value in teaching interpretations based on several different elements of a text.³