Research School Network: Developing Disciplinary Practices in the English Classroom ‘How do we improve the way we teach the reading of poetry?’ asks Johnny Richards Greenshaw Research School’s Assistant Director

In my last blog, I talked about the complexities of developing disciplinary practices in the classroom, and introduced our guidance resources to support schools and departments to begin this process.

At Greenshaw High School, we wanted to further embed Disciplinary Reading practices in the English Department, and began with poetry. This choice was partly on the basis that our collective knowledge and confidence with poetry is weaker than that of the novel – something I have found when interviewing for ECTs, and something we find with our pupils as well.

Doing Disciplinary Literacy in the purest way possible

So, we planned the Autumn sessions with the mechanisms of Professional Development in mind, looking at first to build knowledge and motivate teachers.

Session 1 was designed as an introduction to Disciplinary Literacy, answering these three questions:

• What is disciplinary literacy?
• Why should we teach it?
• How does literature fit in?

Session 2 focused more on literary literacy, including the ideas of ​‘Noticing’ and ​‘Analogising’ when reading literature (David Didau, Making Meaning in English). Here, we tried to answer the questions:

• What is English literature?
• What does literary literacy involve?
• How do we read poetry?

The sessions were well planned, founded on research, and were connected to practices that had been developed as a school a couple of years prior, such as the ​‘Big Five Reading Strategies’. They also included tasks to garner more thinking, and develop discussion around what it means to read in the subject.

Despite how thoroughly planned the sessions were, they did not land particularly well. The theory was well founded, but there was perhaps too much of it. Perhaps the very term ​‘disciplinary literacy’ was off-putting. What was certainly clear was that it was hard to see exactly how it might all fit into the classroom.

How to respond when things don’t go too well

In tandem with these Professional Development sessions, we had also reformed the way we approached reading the GCSE anthology poems with our Year 10 pupils, alongside our own booklet for the GCSE poems. Parts of both the booklet and the reading approach were inspired by Andrew Atherton’s Experiencing English Literature (I will reference this book again – do read if you have not).

In it, Atherton talks about how he created his own anthology, with double-spaced lines to allow more space for pupils to make their annotations. In our booklet, we ordered the poems to suit our teaching sequence, had two copies of each poem (the second double-spaced), added vocabulary definitions, example essays, and revision materials such as key quotations at the back.

Our approach to reading the poem followed this structure for the first of two lessons:

• Before reading – ​‘What is the structure?’
• ‘What resonates?’
• What is the tone and the perspective?
• What is the poem’s message?
• A summary bringing these ideas together

I first explained this process to the department in a fifteen minute slot in the first week of Autumn Term Two. Needless to say, there were teething issues.

What we realised, and something that I had not fully considered when starting the process, is that this approach, or at least part of it, was the practical example we needed to help the department see Disciplinary Literacy and its application.

Even though it was perhaps not the purest way (I considered it Disciplinary literacy ​‘light’), this gave us our answer for Session 3. When everything eventually clicked. I realised that while we all needed to ​‘know’ it, we also needed to ​‘feel’ it.

I will look at this process in more detail, what we’ve learned, and where we are now, next time.

You can find our recently published Disciplinary Literacy guides in Our resources section:

• Understanding Disciplinary Literacy. An introduction
• Understanding the Discipline of History. A guide to Disciplinary Literacy in the History classroom
• Understanding the Discipline of English Literature – Poetry edition. A guide to Disciplinary Literacy in the English Literature classroom – Poetry edition 
• Understanding the discipline of Mathematics. A guide to Disciplinary Literacy in the Mathematics classroom.