How to teach: English - Chris Curtis 2019

Forming an opinion – talking in lessons
How to teach students to analyse texts effectively

Before we learned to write, we spoke. Before students write about an idea, they should have the opportunity to talk it through. The balance between speech and writing in the classroom is difficult, of course. Too much talking sounds like students are doing very little work. Too much writing sounds like the teacher is Gradgrindian. The classroom is the training room. We are training students for exams and, more importantly, for real life, so it is important that we train them to discuss ideas. It’s a sad fact that discussion around the dining room table is a rarity for a lot of students nowadays. You only have to see a modern family at mealtimes. The challenge is to see who can avoid communication and eye contact the most. Social media allows people to express a point but not actually discuss an idea. That’s perhaps why trolling has become so prevalent; it is easy to express thoughts dogmatically. But ideas need discussing, shaping, moulding and shaving. Everybody and anybody can have an opinion; it is the intelligent ones who have evidenced and explored it, considering the alternatives.

A colleague of mine used to start discussions from a negative standpoint. She’d say to the class: ’Right, convince me that you are not all bigots.’ The great thing about this statement was that it made them defensive from the off. They had to explore justifications and express passionate opinions. We shouldn’t shy away from discussing difficult topics or ideas. If we do, then bigotries and misconceptions can remain intact and problematic views can fester and develop. Isn’t it better to talk about things? Recently, I have been addressing how girls accept low-level sexism in the classroom because it is seen as a compliment or banter. The classroom is a safe space and a negotiating table for the discussion of these ideas.

Place ideas at the centre of lessons. Collect them. List them. Take the following relating to the presentation of women in Macbeth:

✵ Women are more intelligent than men.

✵ Men are physically strong, but women are emotionally stronger.

✵ Men have reason to not trust women.

✵ Women see the bigger picture and men only see what is relevant to them.

A list of ideas often makes a better starting point than the text itself does. Students can openly discuss these statements without knowing much about Macbeth. They are universal ideas about the ’real world’. Some may be correct. Some are probably incorrect. But they all provoke discussion. Teenagers can spew forth their ideas on how males are emotionally stronger than females or how females are untrustworthy. The turning point is linking the idea to the text.

We want students to generate ideas on their own, but they won’t be able to create them from a vacuum. That’s why every lesson should focus on generating ideas, no matter how small or large. The English classroom can react to what is in the news that day: there are always ideas floating in the atmosphere. Take the election of Donald Trump. One of the many worms the opening of this can revealed was the debate about men and women in politics — especially regarding how men treat women. Some ideas are difficult, unpleasant or uncomfortable, but we patronise students if we don’t give them a chance to talk about them. Most problems can be resolved with talk, and we should use our classrooms to model this. The classroom should be a symposium of thought and not the closeted, scripted bubble of an Orwellian overlord.