Using thesis statements as a roadmap for a 'conceptual' response
For the last few years I have been on an almost biblical style mission to increase challenge in my lessons. This came from my feeling that after the 2015 reforms, I had somehow de-skilled myself in the art of achieving those top grades; I had taught a succession of lower sets for years and the standards seemed to have shifted so much that I wasn't really sure what they were looking for anymore.
Then in the July, I received my timetable and with delight, I saw that I was going to take my amazing, bright, politically engaged year 9 class through GCSE. This is where my mission got turbo-charged. I wanted to ensure that these kids got the best possible grades they could and to facilitate this, I needed to know my stuff.
I went on pilgrimages to as many regional AQA meetings as I could, so that I felt I completely understood what the mark scheme was looking for, engaged with other professionals on social media and used the guidance in the EEF's Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning report - I wrote about this here.
Most of the work I have been doing recently has been based around guiding students on how they can achieve that elusive 'conceptualised' response in English Lit that embodies a Grade 9 essay. Much of the reading I did online about getting into the top band talked about students using thesis statements to come up with a conceptual idea for question responses so I did some reading about thesis statements and realised that they may just be what I was looking for.
One of the journals I read said: "Living in a world of globalization, communication of various forms has become crucial. Should it be of a colloquial or formal use, language plays a vital role in our lives. As in every other area, communication is the lifeblood of academia. Therefore, argumentative discourse is of an essential nature to both scholars and students" (Bërveniku, 2017). So, I knew that I needed to make my students see that 'conceptualised' just meant to come up with a thread of an argument and follow it through the rest of the essay.
This was strengthened after reading the AQA Examiner's report in August. Here is just a snippet.
We started out by looking at what a thesis statement is and tried using a thesis statement generator I found here. But my class found this to be quite complicated, so instead I decided to use @shadylady 'What/How/Why?' structure to generate our own thesis statements. Becky is amazing and you can find her blog here and Twitter account here. The students were already used to this structure as they had been using it to structure their analytical paragraphs rather than a PEE/PETAZL/PEEL structure. I had long thought that this rigid structure was more of a hindrance to high ability students and this was confirmed in the AQA Examiner's report where it said:
We are currently studying A Christmas Carol, so, we looked at the question: "Starting with this extract, explore how Dickens presents redemption in A Christmas Carol." We had already done quite a lot about this theme, so as a 'do now' starter activity, I got them to spend ten minutes as soon as they came into the room to consolidate what they know about redemption in the novel; they then had a lot of information they could draw upon to create thesis statements.
After this, we looked at various past exam questions for ACC and using what/how/why generated some thesis statements together. An example of this was for the question 'Starting with this extract, explore how Dickens uses the Cratchit family to show the struggles of the poor.' Together we came up with: Dickens uses the Cratchit family as a symbol of how money does not bring happiness, through the use of positive descriptions and hyperbolic language, to emphasise Dickens' message that the rich should consider the struggles of the poor all year, not just at Christmas time. Broken down, it looks like this:
WHAT - Dickens uses the Cratchit family as a symbol of how money does not bring happiness
HOW - through the use of positive descriptions and hyperbolic language
WHY - to emphasise Dickens' message that the rich should consider the struggles of the poor all year, not just at Christmas time.
When we were all happy with being able to generate our own thesis statements successfully, we looked at how they could be used as a road map for an essay. I explained that each point that was made in the essay needed to be linked to the thesis statement, so it wasn't just an idea, it was a concept that they needed to persuade their reader was true. We looked at an essay and highlighted the thesis statement. We then highlighted where in the essay the student made reference to the concept they laid out at the beginning. I felt that having done this, the pupils really understood what I meant about a thesis statement guiding their response. The essay can be found here.
Now, I wanted pupils to come up with their own thesis statements for the redemption question, so I asked them to produce concept maps with their thesis statement written in the middle and around it they could include anything they could write about in their answer. For guidance, I set them the challenge of including some of the following things in their map:
I was really pleased with the results and will be embedding this approach further as we revise the other Lit texts in the run up to the exams.
References:
Bërveniku, D.E. (2017) 'The Art of Argumentation: A Sociolinguistic Approach to Developing Thesis Statements (The Case of Kosova High School Students).' Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 3(2) PP. 271 - 286.
For the last few years I have been on an almost biblical style mission to increase challenge in my lessons. This came from my feeling that after the 2015 reforms, I had somehow de-skilled myself in the art of achieving those top grades; I had taught a succession of lower sets for years and the standards seemed to have shifted so much that I wasn't really sure what they were looking for anymore.
Then in the July, I received my timetable and with delight, I saw that I was going to take my amazing, bright, politically engaged year 9 class through GCSE. This is where my mission got turbo-charged. I wanted to ensure that these kids got the best possible grades they could and to facilitate this, I needed to know my stuff.
I went on pilgrimages to as many regional AQA meetings as I could, so that I felt I completely understood what the mark scheme was looking for, engaged with other professionals on social media and used the guidance in the EEF's Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning report - I wrote about this here.
Most of the work I have been doing recently has been based around guiding students on how they can achieve that elusive 'conceptualised' response in English Lit that embodies a Grade 9 essay. Much of the reading I did online about getting into the top band talked about students using thesis statements to come up with a conceptual idea for question responses so I did some reading about thesis statements and realised that they may just be what I was looking for.
One of the journals I read said: "Living in a world of globalization, communication of various forms has become crucial. Should it be of a colloquial or formal use, language plays a vital role in our lives. As in every other area, communication is the lifeblood of academia. Therefore, argumentative discourse is of an essential nature to both scholars and students" (Bërveniku, 2017). So, I knew that I needed to make my students see that 'conceptualised' just meant to come up with a thread of an argument and follow it through the rest of the essay.
This was strengthened after reading the AQA Examiner's report in August. Here is just a snippet.
We started out by looking at what a thesis statement is and tried using a thesis statement generator I found here. But my class found this to be quite complicated, so instead I decided to use @shadylady 'What/How/Why?' structure to generate our own thesis statements. Becky is amazing and you can find her blog here and Twitter account here. The students were already used to this structure as they had been using it to structure their analytical paragraphs rather than a PEE/PETAZL/PEEL structure. I had long thought that this rigid structure was more of a hindrance to high ability students and this was confirmed in the AQA Examiner's report where it said:
After this, we looked at various past exam questions for ACC and using what/how/why generated some thesis statements together. An example of this was for the question 'Starting with this extract, explore how Dickens uses the Cratchit family to show the struggles of the poor.' Together we came up with: Dickens uses the Cratchit family as a symbol of how money does not bring happiness, through the use of positive descriptions and hyperbolic language, to emphasise Dickens' message that the rich should consider the struggles of the poor all year, not just at Christmas time. Broken down, it looks like this:
WHAT - Dickens uses the Cratchit family as a symbol of how money does not bring happiness
HOW - through the use of positive descriptions and hyperbolic language
WHY - to emphasise Dickens' message that the rich should consider the struggles of the poor all year, not just at Christmas time.
When we were all happy with being able to generate our own thesis statements successfully, we looked at how they could be used as a road map for an essay. I explained that each point that was made in the essay needed to be linked to the thesis statement, so it wasn't just an idea, it was a concept that they needed to persuade their reader was true. We looked at an essay and highlighted the thesis statement. We then highlighted where in the essay the student made reference to the concept they laid out at the beginning. I felt that having done this, the pupils really understood what I meant about a thesis statement guiding their response. The essay can be found here.
Now, I wanted pupils to come up with their own thesis statements for the redemption question, so I asked them to produce concept maps with their thesis statement written in the middle and around it they could include anything they could write about in their answer. For guidance, I set them the challenge of including some of the following things in their map:
- Characters
- Settings
- Stage directions (if relevant)
- Themes
- Symbols/motifs
- Author intention/ message
- Context
Here is one of the maps they produced.
References:
Bërveniku, D.E. (2017) 'The Art of Argumentation: A Sociolinguistic Approach to Developing Thesis Statements (The Case of Kosova High School Students).' Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 3(2) PP. 271 - 286.
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