How to ignite units with a driving question
I’ve often, ironically as an English teacher, struggled with the concept of creating units in a way that compliments peoples’ proclivity for story structure. Dan Willingham explains this strategy in Why don’t students like school?, outlining that stories are “psychologically privileged” and advises that “organizing a lesson plan like a story is an effective way to help students comprehend and remember” the new knowledge and skills.
With this in mind, it is interesting to note the type of language used in the inquiry based learning community about how to frame or begin a unit. Terms such as ‘driving question’ or ‘provocation’ abound, given their ability to encourage initial intrigue and engage students’ passions, interests and/or background.
There is some overlap here. A story ordinarily begins with a ‘call to action’ or initial exposition designed to draw the audience into the world of the character and care about their travails. The same can also be achieved at the beginning of a unit in English.
Planning Priorities
Referring to Trevor MacKenzie’s Inquiry Mindset, he advises that teachers take three things into consideration when formulating a driving question or provocation: the students, the curriculum and the assessment.
Students
The students in respective year groups are at different stages of their appreciation of the world around them and themselves as learners. Consequently, when choosing a topic and formulating a provocative question, this is dependent on the relative maturity of those learning. For example, the topic of sustainability is probably appropriate for Y7s who are familiar with the national, local and school based initiatives to be more green that have proliferated in recent years. However, the topic of romance or unrequited love may be better suited to 9s or 10s, who have likely become embroiled in the middle school romances that compete with curriculum for their attention. Once we arrive in high school, discussions around whether democracy is actually beneficial for a nation are more plausible for the 12s and 13s, who have no doubt studied forms of government in the humanities and/or become interested in contemporary politics or participated in ECAs like the Model United Nations.
Staying with students, there are further considerations to make around a choice of topic. Depending on where you teach, where the student population culturally hail from and/or how responsive you want to be to current events can also be factored in. Added to this is the opportunity to build interdisciplinary links with other subjects, which means understanding and implementing elements of the curriculum that are specific to your school context.
A great resource is the IB MYP’s list of global contexts and possible explorations and the IBDP’s list of global issues. Neither are formulated into questions nor are they tiered by age or subject but they are a great starting point for considering topics that would be relevant to students and therefore illicit a foundational layer of intrigue that can run alongside their growing confidence in the unit’s disciplinary matter.
Assessment
Utilising a backwards design model, teachers are tasked with ensuring that pupils are prepared for external examinations at the end of middle and/or high school through a well structured curriculum. This of course can be bastardised in the case of KS3 students having to complete assessments that are curiously similar to that of their GCSEs but nevertheless, it would be remiss to pass up opportunities to prepare students for standardised tests through appropriately formative tasks.
Considering my own context, students are eventually required to demonstrate their reading, written and oral abilities through: summary writing, short form analysis, directed writing, evaluative reading and writing, narrative or descriptive writing, an analytical essay on set texts, an analytical essay on unseen poetry, an analytical oral presentation, a comparative essay and an analytical essay on an unseen work of literature or language.
As a result, each and every unit from Y7 onwards looks to introduce knowledge, skills and their requisite assessment in a way that prepares students for such challenges in a holistic manner. There is little talk of exam specificity until the actual assessment is nigh and in general, tasks done in KS3 are shorn of any exam board expectations in favour of exploring the disciplinary concepts that underpin them.
However, there is an underlying but vital need to consider such outcomes when deciding upon the nature and parameters of any assessment. A commonly offered suggestion given in the IB’s MYP is that students have a hand in deciding their own outcome. This is achieved by sharing the success criteria and goals of the unit before asking students to consider the outcome they feel would best suit not only the aims of the unit but also their personal preferences. I’m deeply sceptical about this approach lower down the school. Whilst IBDP and A-Level students have been introduced to a subject’s body of knowledge, reliable research skills and approaches to self-reflection when working, a Y7 student lacks the ability to draw on such a wealth of experience. There is a reason therefore why a student in high school can be expected to attempt the IB’s Extended Essay but why it would be folly to expect the same level of independence for most students in middle school.
Parameters are therefore needed to effectively structure students along their way to engage in independent tasks by the time they enter the upper echelons of school. Although I might offer Y11s their choice of text type when completing an evaluative reading and writing task, I would only do so in the knowledge that they have learnt the prerequisite content and skills to construct the likes of speeches, letters, blogs or reports and therefore make me confident that they won’t be cognitively overloaded by the task in hand.
If you know that the unit needs to have a rhetorical outcome then there are some topics that may be better suited than others. Likewise, analytical tasks and creative tasks benefit from certain although hard to define provocations. As an example, for Y9, we look at the idea of society’s fears as a way to explore and create a descriptive piece, we use dreams and family to access our first analytical piece, we use the news to practice our rhetorical expression and a consideration of the literary canon as our final analytical task. Admittedly, some of these are applicable to all 3 types of writing whereas others seem more relevant to only one. It is through close consideration of the final outcome and its parameters that you can assess each theme or driving question in terms of its individual merits
Ultimately then, keeping in mind what the assessment is and what it is preparing students for is vital for synergistic curriculum planning that seeks to not only prepare students for external examinations but also makes the most out of a driving question.
Curriculum
When I first began teaching, the curriculum could be cut into thirds or quarters along the following pattern, in no particular order:
1. narrative/descriptive unit where students wrote a story, diary, descriptive piece or some form of empathic writing
2. rhetorical unit where students wrote a letter, speech or essay designed to persuade others of something
3. analytical units in which students wrote about an aspect of a novel, novella, set of short stories, play or set of poems
Then, sometime during the 2010s, came the emergence of a theme based curriculum where rather than being simply shackled to a single text or type of writing, teachers could interleave examples of the above within a thematic frame like ‘masculinity’ or ‘money’. This approach may or may not have still culminated in one of the three outcomes above, dependent on the school’s approach to assessment.
In recent years, this process has been textured further with David Didau’s Making Meaning in English as well as Sam Gibbs and Zoe Hellman’s The Trouble with English and How to Address It. Both texts point to the long-term benefits of incorporating repeated concepts that are central to the study of English. Each unit therefore would cover, consider and consolidate the same key elements. For Didau these are: Context, Grammar, Metaphor, Story, Argument and Structure. For Gibbs and Hellman, these are: Texts are constructs, They make use of patterns, They are informed by the contexts, Every text is an argument, Readers construct meanings as they read.
Now, we may still have similar outcomes as those listed above but ones that have been constructed through the lens of a particular theme and with the conceptual fortification of English’s key ideas. This is somewhat reflected in the IB’s MYP framework that calls for a global context (theme) and related concepts (English’s key ideas) to be placed at the centre of every unit. An example of this in my own school would be the way in which we study Macbeth.
The theme or driving question that we access the play with is ‘What makes something a classic?’ This calls into consideration any art or entertainment that the students enjoy and allows them to discuss, debate and learn more about why humanity considers certain works as a classic of their genre. Using Didau’s conceptual framework, the play opens up opportunities to talk about how context influenced Shakespeare’s writing, the multiple and repeated usage of metaphors in the text, the arguments that the play is making through its themes, how the audience is held in thrall thanks to the story and structural arc of the characters as well as finally, how we can manipulate our grammar to formulate sophisticated thesis statements and analysis of the play.
Curriculum therefore calls for consideration around what are the underpinning concepts, knowledge and skills that we want students to intentionally return or sequentially attend to during their years learning the subject domain. Having the same 5 or 6 concepts in every unit is paramount but defining what aspect of these concepts are to be explored requires prolonged collaboration within a department. Sarah Cottingham’s book on Ausubel suggests that teachers begin broadly and pursue granularity over time. If that is the case, when teaching argument, teachers may choose to begin with pathos, ethos and logos initially before eventually exploring the likes of satire further into the curriculum. As a relatively nascent approach within the discipline, little exists by way of example of how this is structured, although Didau’s follow up field guide does a decent job of outlining how it has been implemented across Ormiston Academies in the UK.
In search of a useful visual
The above venn diagram hopefully demonstrates the opportunity costs if a teacher or department were to neglect or limit the consideration of one of the three areas.
It is also possible to illustrate the accusations made across both sides of the divide when considering the inquiry v direct instruction debate. The former are accused of only considering students’ preferences with little appreciation for curriculum content whereas the latter are characterised as only wanting disciplinary rigor and valid assessment for students that eschews personalisation.
Whilst I would’ve hugely appreciated this kind of visual at the outset of IB teaching, it doesn’t take into consideration the likes of Key Concepts (which I feel are so broad as to be redundant), ATLs or the Learner Profile. The last two, however, could fall within the circle of ‘students’ given their purpose of offering greater metacognition and self-reflection skills for those learning.
Examples
The units I outlined below are born of a few elements in my own context:
The social, economical and cultural background of our students
The social, economical and cultural background of the teachers
The external assessments they do in Y11 and Y13
Class sizes (approx 25 in KS3)
Our school / foundation philosophy
Other subjects’ curricula
Existing units and texts when I joined the school
As such, don’t expect that these will be transplantable wholesale into your own curriculum. There is however, hopefully enough in the details to outline the ways in which English can attend to the needs of the student, curriculum and assessment concurrently to create units that are rigorous, valid and personalised.
Y7 Can Characters be Role Models?
Unit in a sentence: students write a short analytical essay about one character from a set text to argue how and why they are depicted to be a role model by the author.
Students
Unit is framed around the theme of role models, which is an accessible topic for students to comment on from the outset
Opportunity to research which of the 10 IB Learner Profiles is their strongest and weakest at the outset of their Secondary experience
Option of choosing whichever character they believe symbolises 2 LP attributes in the set text
Present on a famous person of their choosing that they believe represents the LP attribute that they need to develop most
Assessment
Students write a thesis statement and two body paragraph essay, consisting of approximately 6 references to the text
Curriculum
Context: students learn about the influences that impacted the writer of the set text when producing the book and therefore the characters
Story: students learn about how characters are crafted and the ways in which they carry the narrative forwards
Structure: students learn how to structure an essay so as to develop an argument about one of the characters
Argument: students are taught that the book is a vehicle for delivering the author’s message and discuss what that might be
Grammar: students are taught how to manipulate syntax when constructing the likes of a thesis statement or topic sentence
Y8 How does fiction fight injustice?
Unit in a sentence: students write the beginning to a mystery novel by combining conventions of the genre with contextual information gleaned from their own home city.
Students
Framed around the idea of why human beings enjoy mysteries so much, which would immediately appeal to students prior interactions with the the genre
Opportunity to show their knowledge of and research in greater depth a social cause that they have learnt about through other subjects or Service work at school.
Given freedom to choose the characteristics of their detective based on the understanding that they are a brilliant but flawed individual
Assessment
500 - 600 word beginning of a narrative that shows understanding of genre conventions, characterization and structure
Curriculum
Context: students learn about the connection between real life social issues and how these are immortalised in fiction - students then mimic this by researching their own local issue and including it in their writing
Story: students study the way in which a character can be presented as an anti hero or flawed individual through the likes of dialogue and imagery
Structure: students learn about foreshadowing and how it helps to setup expectations for the remainder of the text
Argument: students learn how and why a writer would choose to form their argument about society in the medium of mystery fiction
Grammar: students are taught sophisticated sentence structures that are designed to interest the reader through manipulated syntax
Y9 Is the news bad for us?
Unit in a sentence: students research and write an opinion article based on the school community that would spread positivity.
Students
Allows students to immediately reflect on their own news consumption as well as the way they access and engage with the stories
Focuses on the type of stories most popular in the city students study in and a reflection on why this might be the case
Freedom to choose any topic they like within the school community and research this in the ways befitting an opinion article
Assessment
500 - 600 word opinion article that demonstrates knowledge of the text type, rhetorical language and thorough research.
Curriculum
Context: students learn about the relationship between a target audience and the content of a text that is seeking to cultivate and maintain a certain type of reader
Story: students learn about how non-fiction texts also make use of narrative techniques in order to engage readers
Structure: students look at the difference between news reports, features and opinion articles based on their respective aims
Argument: students study how to manipulate language so as to convince others of a particular viewpoint
Grammar: students study how to make use of the passive voice and other constructions that maintain a greater sense of formality.