A few weeks into the start of our course – when trainees had begun to spend the mid-week in our placement schools while retaining the first two days of the week in faculty – many of us began to question where the practical overlaps between the two existed. Most of us had chosen the PGCE route for its blend of pedagogic theory and practice but were struggling to see just how it was that these two worlds might magically coalesce within the space of the classroom. How, for example, a subject studies session in faculty that explored ways of looking at Pre-Raphaelite painting might slot into a poetry topic within school; or how a cute book making activity could be made relevant to classroom learning at KS3 or KS4. Sometimes I could imagine the utility of a given approach – I would be able to hold its usefulness in my head if you will – while working within the creative hub of faculty, but lost this capacity the moment I stepped into my (very attainment driven) placement school, where every lesson must move inexorably towards students’ end of term assessments.
Then, a week ago, it began to make sense.
I was asked to plan and deliver a lesson that would introduce a group of Year 7 students to their next topic, the novel A Monster Calls. This is a challenging novel in terms of content, with its tight focus on a young boy and his mother, who is not responding well to advanced stage cancer treatment. There is a third character in the novel, an ancient yew tree, who visits the boy and whether the boy wants to hear them or not, tells him stories. Like the novel itself, these stories do not have happy endings. They have the quality of fable, and reach a long arm into the past in order to help the boy make sense of the present. I was thinking about this aspect of the novel, the reaching back, and the character of the tree; whether it comes to the boy as friend or foe, and where was the line – which the boy himself is struggling to find – between the real yew visible from his bedroom window, and the tree that invades his home at night and demands his attention?
Over the same few days I was reflecting on a faculty session that we’d had on oral storytelling from the Classics, which urged us to incorporate classical resources into our English curriculum. I was still trying to make sense of this session; in my present school I was doubtful of having the freedom to dedicate a single lesson to the story of Icarus, let alone a whole half term unit.
Then, back to thinking about A Monster Calls, I started wondering about the value assigned to trees in storytelling, both through time and within different civilisations. Lunchtime arrived. I sounded out the germ of an idea with other trainees: maybe I could use tree stories from ancient myths to introduce the novel, carrying the focus a little away from the novel’s hard content, while locating it within ancient traditions of storytelling. By the end of lunch, from a wide pool of suggestions, I had three ‘trees’ in my head: the Greek myth of Apollo and Daphne, Treebeard from The Lord of the Rings, and the Norse tree of life, Yggdrasil.
I then worked these stories up into a lesson plan. We started with a 2-minute clip from Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbour Totoro in which the giant Camphor tree grows from tiny seed to full height in a single night. I then gave students a version or an excerpt of one of the three stories listed above. They read the stories individually, and then in small groups of 4-6 had to develop and briefly rehearse a way of presenting their story to the rest of the class. We did some brief preparatory talk around this – ideas included mime, choral reading, the use of sound effects – and then students got to work. Twenty minutes later we listened to, watched, and enjoyed each group’s tree story.
At time of writing this lesson remains my favourite of those I’ve taught. I see now that this is because so much productive learning was taking place in a way that felt natural – ‘student-led’ I think is the term for this. At times the lesson was noisy, as groups talked through (or argued) their ideas, and at times it was messy: students spilled out into the corridor to rehearse a mime, others knocked over chairs in their enthusiasm to create ‘a set’. I had given students written material that was challenging, leaving them to tease out what was important to them about their assigned tree, and they rose to this challenge. The brief readings and performances that concluded the lesson each captured something of their tree’s story that was intelligible – and memorable – for the rest of the class. A bonus: it was good to see students up and out of their seats, working and talking together, after the recent isolations of so much screen learning.
What I took from it most of all, though, was how effective a lesson can be, and how enjoyable, when I was able to briefly – for those 50 minutes – really join the dots between the conversation and debate and study of faculty-based subject studies with teaching practice in the space of the classroom.
Cambridge PGCE English 