What actually works when teaching extracts
Teaching extracts from packs might not be ideal, but when you’re a new teacher, you don’t have that much say in what you’re given to teach. So let’s figure out how to do this as well as we can.
My guess is that originally, someone had a good idea and thought, ‘hey, we should practice exam style questions’. But little did they know they were opening a Pandora’s box which meant that year 8 would be peppered with extracts from different books they’ve never read, don’t understand, from different time periods, and hemispheres that just aren’t at all connected.
If you do get given this kind of booklet or Scheme, here’s what to do straight away.
1) First, look at all the extracts, find the methods you want pupils to spot. Find things other than personification and similes because they are the default things pupils will look for, and they will never go any further, unless you make them. To make them, you need to know what’s there.
2) Know which exam board the pupils are going to be using. If they do AQA at that school, they need to be able to analyse the structure of an extract. If they do Edexcel, that doesn’t matter hardly at all. (See how to teach structure if you need to later)
3) Look at how long the extracts are, and decide whether you need the whole thing. A lot of extract schemes are ruined purely by the fact that it takes 20 minutes of every lesson to read the extract, and they don’t have enough time to figure out what to do with it. Pupils don’t get through the annotation and writing in one lesson and have forgotten it by the next lesson, so you have to re-read it, and you have the same problem again.
4) decide what you want to get out of that unit for that class. What area of their analytical writing do you need to focus on? If your school teaches in a 3 part format, in no more detail than that, then you need to decide what to call this new skill or skills. If it doesn’t have a name, you will spent all term giving advice that means nothing to them. Telling pupils just to be more precise or more nuanced doesn’t really work. They won’t know what you mean. Prep an example and a non example for the first two or three lessons of the unit, so you can show pupils ideal before and afters. This way, everybody has a chance to see there is a purpose to the unit.
5) decide whether you need to make set lists for what you want pupils to know by the end of the unit. If it’s very important to you that pupils know different words to describe the tone of an extract then prepare a list of 7 examples that you can use as a consistent prompt throughout the unit. You can also put these words in your starters or homework quizzes so they feel very familiar to pupils. As a general rule, pupils will need to see the word in use a few times before they feel comfortable using it themselves.
Why extracts are harder than they look
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Pupils can’t rely on memory, context or plot, and they don’t have the depth of reading to sense whether something is normal for a story or not.
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They are still trying to comprehend the text while we’re getting them to analyse it. That doesn’t often go well.
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The pupils can’t intuit the writer’s aim.
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Pupils often aren’t given a success criteria that’s easy enough to tell exactly when they are making progress.
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Pupils aren’t told how hard an extract is, so it might just be that it’s a reading age of 16 and not 11 like last weeks, and that’s why they suddenly find it so hard today, but they can’t really tell that.
Easy extract wins to try this term, if you have to teach those lessons and that extract pack.
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Create a sequence of questions that you use as standard to investigate each new extract so pupils can feel like they’re getting the hang of it. Include a narrative voice question: How do they sound? What impression does that create?
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Create a skills Ladder –Show this to the pupils in the starter, so they know this task has a point.
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Model choosing the best bits, then finding terminology, not finding the bits we can easily name first.
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Give pupils a clear list of devices (writer’s methods) you want them to memorise at the start of the unit. (remember to include non fiction devices if applicable)
If you have to make a pack of extract based work
So, let’s say you do actually have to create an extract pack for a good reason, how do you do it?
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First, assess what skills you’re trying to teach. All of them, cannot be the answer. Are you really trying to teach reading or are you trying to teach writing skills. What’s the difference between what you want them to have memorised and what you want them to be able to do?
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If you’re trying to teach reading then include a glossary, and questions about character emotions and the narrator’s emotions. Chat gpt. Might not be super useful for teaching analytical writing, but it’s really good at making glossaries. You can just tell it to choose the difficult words and get it to define them. Specifying a specific reading age helps it choose the difficult words, otherwise it’s choices can be a bit odd. If you’re trying to teach writing, then include some kind of resource that names the skills you want to see, and models how to do each one. That needs to come first. It needs to be clear to the pupils what the point is when they do extract work.
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Depending on how many lessons the pack has to cover, include quizzes on the things you wanted them to learn. If you want them to learn writing skills then get some quiz questions about what they are and some good and bad models for them to grade. Quizzing is not a cure all, but what is does do well is point out the the pupils that they are expected to have learnt stuff off by heart, and this is often lacking from the English classroom. But it’s so crucial. Otherwise you get year 11’s who still can’t write independently. They’re not able to build on prior knowledge because their prior knowledge was never secure.