tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2293780396032891284.post2659329387122249661..comments2024-03-21T03:09:03.203-07:00Comments on Teacher's Notes: Questions are a good place to startMrs C Spaldinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04502078924264017983noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2293780396032891284.post-5460362200459648912016-02-08T09:44:19.178-08:002016-02-08T09:44:19.178-08:00Hi David,
Thanks for the comment.
I don't ag...Hi David,<br /><br />Thanks for the comment.<br /><br />I don't agree that this student has 'no useful knowledge of poetry'. It's evident she understands the way metaphor works, even without the subject terminology to express it. I certainly don't *despair* with this as a starting point. And, as I said, there are significant and specific reasons this student is lacking the wider subject knowledge we would have hoped her to attain at this point on her schooling which would've enabled a more critical response.<br /><br />You're right to flag up I'm wrong to say I don't scaffold students' understanding of an unseen poem. Of course I do, by teaching the skills required and, yes, I do expect this teaching to be learnt and retained. What I meant was I can't scaffold their understanding of the specific content and methods used in a specific poem. Of course I teach 'how poetry works, linguistic and structural features' and there is 'deliberate conscious practice'.<br /><br />I'm afraid you're incorrectly inferring I was taught to fear 'the curse of knowledge'. This simply not what I believe. What I do believe is that students should be given the confidence to ask, the knowledge to enable them to formulate better questions, and, if necessary, the skills to find their own answers.<br /><br />This topic wasn't the initial subject of the Twitter conversation that inspired your blog post and, I must admit, it wasn't a subject I had planned to blog about. Thanks for helping me clarify my thoughts somewhat. Time to shake hands and move on. Best wishes.Mrs C Spaldinghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04502078924264017983noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2293780396032891284.post-17174955721469757152016-02-08T03:09:34.524-08:002016-02-08T03:09:34.524-08:00Thanks for the clarification. The student's re...Thanks for the clarification. The student's response above exemplifies precisely why I despair at the primacy of the question. It appears - and obviously it's a short extract removed from context, so accept I could be wrong - to have been written by a students who has learned some generic process of asking questions but without having acquired any useful knowledge about poetry. It's just not true to say "The nature of the unseen response ...doesn’t allow this understanding to be scaffolded by the teacher in a format that can be learnt and retained". It absolutely does. How - by explicitly teaching how poetry works; by explaining what a poet might know about linguistic and structural features and by reading lots and lots of poetry. Then when students know enough to understand what you're doing you can model the thinking which goes into high quality critical response. When they have seen how these processes work well-designed scaffolding helps them to internalise this knowledge. Them with lots of deliberate, conscious practice of applying what they know to many different unseen poems they start to become expert. Writing about an unseen poem then really does become about questioning and interrogating the text but this expertise - which is very often tacit to an English teacher who will have passed through this threshold years previously and will therefore likely be suffering from 'the curse of knowledge' - doesn't happen without instruction and hardwork.<br /> David Didau @LearningSpyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06195532885950834949noreply@blogger.com