From Superficiality to Well-Reasoned Arguments: Learning to Explain

Exploring Explanation 

We live in a fast world and it has become a natural expectation that good things arrive quickly, whether it be food, clothes or entertainment. There is no surprise that students think that this translates to their own writing and reading. We see this in the frustration students have with books, because the engagement isn’t always instantaneous, unlike in a film where music, lighting, special effects are working to enthral a viewer the second they start to watch. Students want quick answers and this translates to giving quick answers in their work. 

For many years, in my teaching, ‘explanation’ is the one aspect that separates students in terms of ability. Students of varying levels of ability can, and will, use information effectively in their work, but it is only the students with strong explanations who are able to transform knowledge into something meaningful and powerful. Knowledge is empowering, but explanation knits facts with developed reasoning. 

Fluency  

In my school, we noticed that we had a large number of students with a quick approach to explanations. No matter what we said or did they would write brief and concise answers. To tackle this ongoing issue, we changed our philosophy towards writing. Simply telling students to write more was not going to improve things. We felt that the fluency of their writing needed to be addressed. If a student wrote fluently, then they were more likely to expand and develop their ideas when responding to a task. As a department, we built in regular writing each week. We made it a habit that students would have time to write to develop fluency. 

Every week a different style of writing task was set. One week they would have to write a story opening and for another week they would have to write an argumentative piece.  The more students were exposed to writing, the more fluent their writing became. I found that not only did students like writing, but they enjoyed the challenge and the variety. Instead of spending six weeks planning and drafting a piece, they were having to think on their feet. This had a knock-on effect on their explanations in other areas; they were used to writing at length on a specific topic. Therefore, it wasn’t a challenge to write at length on a topic in other English lessons. The confidence and resilience of students had dramatically improved. When faced with another writing task, it wasn’t as daunting because they had been used to constantly being challenged to write. No longer did we have students panicking over the blank page.  

Oracy 

As the 2016 ‘The State of Speaking in Our Schools’ report confirms, the use of oracy in the classroom is inconsistent.¹ Like most schools, we would set regular speaking and listening tasks, but we didn’t use it to develop explanations. Instead, we were obsessed with just the content and the performance. In a bold move, we moved all work on poetry in KS3 from written analysis to verbal analysis. 

Therefore, Year 7, 8 and 9 students would not write one word about poetry analysis. Yes, they’d still write poetry, but we wouldn’t make them write literary analysis of the texts.  We wanted the focus to be on the ideas rather than the writing. Speech is our dominant mode for communication and our principle was that if a student could speak it, then they could write about it. The common approach in most schools to the new GCSEs was to make the work in KS3 a mirror image of the GCSE exam papers. We challenged this and went with verbal explorations of the poems and it has been some of our most enjoyable work. 

Each year group studied a collection of unrelated poems from a range of poets and for their discussion they had to compare how the poems treated an idea or concept. Over the course of the unit, students discussed, explored, investigated and debated the content and ideas in the poem. I would find that there would be a real buzz around these lessons and some of the most reticent children would engage verbally with a discussion. Speech is the most accessible part of English lessons, and, if we don’t engage with it, we are limiting the potential of some of our students. 

We have also applied more vocal elements into standard lessons. There is a growing understanding of the importance of vocabulary and especially Tier 2 vocabulary. When faced with a new text, we use talk now to explore the vocabulary.

Talking about the meaning of words is vital for understanding and building connections in lessons and the more students talk about words the better. We have found that discussing the meanings of words and getting students to recall the meaning of words has really helped students to understand texts better. For us, as teachers, it has helped us to clarify and avoid overgeneralisations of words, allowing for more subtle and nuanced understanding. We spend a large part of our time analysing the writing of students and very little time analysing their speech. If we analyse how we can improve their verbal explanations, then their written explanations will improve.  

Teacher talk 

The teacher is the dominant speaker in the classroom and they are also the main source of explanations. That is why for me the role I play in classroom discussions is pivotal. During speech, I have the power to offer feedback and direction, which I wouldn’t normally do in a student’s piece of writing. At the same time, I can direct and teach students to see how they too could improve their explanations. 

The shift from narration to exploration when discussing things is a common problem in writing. Students struggle from moving away from retelling a poem, novel or play studied to explaining what the writer is doing with his or her ideas. We all like to tell a story and oral narratives are ingrained in our culture. Oral explanations are not so natural. That’s why it is so useful, as a teacher, for me to tell a student what they are doing. Depending on the circumstance, I might use a question or I might be specific in my comments. 

The language I use in the classroom is incredibly important for helping develop improve explanations. I might simply say a word or a phrase to help students move from narration to explanation. Some examples might be the following interjections by me: 

I verbalise the discourse markers of written discourse to help show students the phrases that will help them elaborate, digress or divulge their explanations. The power of my interactions with the student in a whole-class discussion cannot be underestimated. A simple word or phrase can have incredibly impact on the flow of ideas. Often, the student is glad for a little pointer, as it gives them reassurance and direction. 

The immediacy of feedback in classroom discussions is largely undervalued, but in a classroom discussion I can mould, shape and develop how a student explains a point—something which is hard to do when marking. Furthermore, the classroom discussion allows the teacher to ‘name’ what is happening in a conversation and exemplify. 

Modelling 

For years, people have been looking for the magic formula to get students to explain better. A variety of structures have been created and employed. The problem with a structured approach to explanation, is that no structure can help students explain because explanation is such a complex thing and there is more than one way to solve a problem. 

I started using concrete examples within my teaching several years ago and they form the basis of a lot of lessons. We started requesting all our top students’ exam scripts and these are the ones we use with all classes. We model how to respond to the questions using these. Students have them when writing a practice response. Teachers can give specific vocabulary and structures, but a model provides something tangible and visible to work with. For years in teaching, I felt that I had to explicitly teach aspects, but over time I am growing aware of the need for some implicit teaching. Giving students a model and getting them to copy or emulate them is a powerful tool. 

Structures 

Naturally, students lack the internal syntactical structures to write about novels, poems and plays. It isn’t because they lack the skills, but because the teacher at the front of the class has spent numerous years reading textual analysis and as a result of osmosis they have absorbed the syntax that goes with poetry analysis, for example. Concrete examples help students see these syntactical structures, but sometimes explicit instruction is needed. Below is an example of such structures. 

I found that these were important for starting explanations. The opening part of an explanation is undervalued. I have seen students take ages to get to a good idea. It is common for students to search around for an idea when writing. They start writing and hope that they will find a good point as they write. These sentences helped students to start with a good thread of explanation. A point to develop and extend. 

There is a danger in providing students with huge lists of sentence openings because then students just attempt to write a paragraph by including as many of the sentences as possible. Putting the sentence at the heart of explanation is key. The sentence is the blue touch paper. From that, the student will get a decent explanation. I found that teachers are key here. They need to be the gatekeepers of explanation and explain to students that using most of the sentences is not a guarantee of success. 

Explanation is an incredibly complex aspect of the classroom for English teachers. For some students, a simple comment about making ‘the writer’ the subject of a sentence rather than ‘the character’ is enough to make a transformation. However, a comprehensive approach for us was needed. A clear strategy for developing explanation was needed and not quick gimmicks. Explanation is about how we speak just as much as our writing. If students cannot explain effectively in their speech, then how can they do it in their writing? That is why placing the emphasis on ‘speech’ and oracy is so important for students.

We write in a vacuum, but speak in a greenhouse of ideas. 

Chris Curtis is an English teacher and Head of Department. He is also the author of How to Teach English: Novels, non-fiction and their artful navigation and the blog ‘Learning from my Mistakes’.