One of the joys of observing lessons is seeing the learning that takes place. Sometimes you can feel it too. A physical change in students’ demeanour as they absorb new ideas and experiences. They grow in front of your eyes.
I was lucky enough to observe such a lesson recently when visiting one of EMC’s new Associate Teachers. In the space of an hour, 25 Year 8s in a mixed attainment class turned into fledgling playwrights.
Interestingly, the lesson belonged to a unit focusing on a novel, Coram Boy, by Jamila Gavin. But by drawing on the book’s stage adaptation and guiding the students towards scripting a scene from the novel, the teacher opened up opportunities for her students to learn at multiple levels and in multiple ways. There was no single objective for this lesson, carefully planned and sequenced as it was, but rather a willingness to immerse students in ‘big picture’ textual experiences (involving both reading and writing, not to mention performing) that would develop their linguistic and literary capabilities in a broad sense, suited to their particular aptitudes. This, in turn, would provide the teacher with a rich formative understanding of how well her students could cope with this kind of work and how well they were reading the novel.
By giving a brief account of the different stages of the lesson, I hope to show the types of learning taking place.
Stage 1 Reading the scenes as a whole class
The teacher shared out the roles, including the stage directions, so that the whole class could read the script together. There was little teacher intervention during the reading, other than occasionally to make sure students understood what was going on. Cognitively, students would be starting to reflect in their own ways on the different experience of reading a playscript compared to a novel, including the different language resources drawn on by the writer and the different reading processes involved in coming to an understanding. These would not necessarily be at a conscious level, but the experience of reading in a different form would be available to draw on later in more explicit and directed ways.
Stage 2 Performing a scene in small groups
The playscript consisted of several very short scenes, which were shared among small groups. Each group developed a performance of their scene. There was lots of noise during this part of the lesson, but it was all on task, with the students engaged in interpreting language and giving it form through their actions and directorial choices. In talking about the lesson afterwards, the teacher commented that moments of noise and excitement like this can act as a release valve for students’ energy, making it easier to engage them in focused quiet or silent work later on, something which did happen.
Stage 3 Reflections on performing a scene
Rather than watching one or two of the scenes performed in front of the whole class, the teacher asked students to reflect on the process of moving from ‘page to stage’. They were asked to respond in their groups to the question, ‘How did you know what to do?’ Consequently, they began to give form to the processes activated at the start of the lesson when they experienced reading a playscript rather than a novel. The processes that they absorbed implicitly were becoming explicit. They had to think about how a playscript acts on its readers, but also on how they could work things out based on the prior knowledge gained from reading the novel, particularly in relation to character and motivation. The conversations at this point showed that students were becoming increasingly confident at articulating the processes by which they could bring meaning to the relatively light-touch script.
Stage 4 Thinking about audience
Students were asked to select a passage of their choice from part of the novel that they’d read previously, to adapt for the stage. Before writing this, they were asked to think about audience by sketching how they would position their stage and those attending. Would they perform in the round, for example, or to traditionally tiered staging? How would this affect the writing and any subsequent performance? It was a very interesting way to introduce the concept of audience which would, of course, be relevant to studying the novel itself.
Stage 5 From page to stage
Students were given 10 minutes to turn a passage from the novel into a playscript. There was no explicit modelling about how to do this; rather the teacher trusted that students had learned how to do this from the prior work and that she would be able to gauge how well students were coping by reading the work produced. She would also be able to move around the class helping individual students where required, given the work was done in silence. All the students managed to write to the task, with varying degrees of sophistication, as can be seen in this attachment. The scripts make for fascinating formative reading. There is nothing being targeted or measured at a narrow, component level; rather the teacher gets a sense of how students can manage transforming language into a different form, having engaged with how this had been done professionally.
What I loved about this lesson was that, in keeping with the subject’s core nature, it allowed students to explore and learn from ‘the simultaneous presence of many meanings’ (Wood, in Marshall, 2022, 142). At a big picture level, students were learning about how language and form communicate meaning and about how language needs to adapt to form and audience. But they were also continuing to develop their textual understanding of Coram Boy, building their knowledge of plot, character and themes. They were learning through their own thinking and engagement with the texts and also from their dialogic engagement with classmates. To have reduced the learning to a single component, even one as broad as those just mentioned, would, in this instance, have limited learning considerably, limited the teacher’s ability to make formative judgements based on the work produced and reduced the students’ experience of the lesson. I’m not so sure that in such an instance I’d have felt the learning taking place in the same way, that I would have seen the students grow quite so much.
