Poetry in motion – part two · Mon Mar 17, 22:34 by Eleri Straker
It’s coursework moderation time and I, like every other English teacher in the country, am drowning in essays. So as I’m in the process of getting my Yr 11s to polish up their poetry comparison skills by looking at Other Cultures poems, it seemed like a good idea to do some peer marking.
Lesson one was to divide the class into small groups of not more than three students. I then told them to choose any two poems from the Other Cultures section of their Anthologies. They were then to spend the lesson brain-storming the two poems, making note of similarities and differences; looking at poetic devices and techniques and comparing themes.
The next lesson, I handed out sheets of A4 paper and told them to nominate one student from each group to be the scribe while the other members of the groups dictated to them what they wanted in the essays. This took two lessons. Then today, the fourth lesson of the sequence, I collected the completed essays then distributed them back to the class, ensuring that no group received their own work.
I then gave each group a copy of the mark scheme for poetry comparisons and asked them to mark the essays strictly according to the criteria given.
Some forty-five minutes later, I asked each group for the grade awarded and their justification for giving it, then asked them to read out what they believed was a good paragraph that demonstrated the reason for the given grade.
It was fascinating. They were really hard markers!
I then asked the class whether or not they agreed with the mark awarded, then gave them my opinion on the paragraphs chosen, either agreeing or disagreeing with the markers’ view. As it turned out, they were pretty accurate in their assessment, and as self-appointed moderator of the groups, I allowed the marks to stand.
What was useful in this exercise was that the students were forced to look for specific points in the essays then to understand exactly what constituted an A or A*(one essay was awarded the highest grade and when a sample was read out, the class agreed unanimously with the mark)or any of the other grades. They got to see what the difference between “recognising”, “understanding” and “analysing” poetic technique was and by the end of the lesson, most of the students could judge pretty accurately whether or not an essay made the grade.
The students worked their little socks off in this exercise, but then so did I. This isn’t a lesson in which a teacher can just sit down and let the kids get on with it. Quite the contrary. For all four of the lessons, I raced around between each group, discussing their ideas, then in the final lesson, discussing their opinions of the work that they were marking.
I found it an interesting exercise and the impression I got was that the students learned a lot, both from the initial three sessions when they shared ideas and from the marking exercise, where they learned to recognise analysis, something which, hopefully, they will remember in the coming exams and be able to put into practice.
