Minesweeping the curriculum: making English intervention work at KS3

The practice of intervention lessons during KS3 is well-established, but fraught with problems. The theory is that students who are struggling in English are given extra sessions – before or after school, or during the school day – through which they ‘catch up’. Often the reality has been much messier. It’s involved groups of students being taken out of other subjects (usually MFL) because either their attainment, attendance, behaviour or all of the above is poor. They are given three or four extra English ‘skills’ or ‘literacy’ lessons per fortnight, which can at times seem to do more harm than good.

By U.S. Navy - U.S. Navy All Hands magazine U.S. Navy All Hands magazine November 1952, p. 4., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32011162

The reasons are various: for students who don’t like the 6 or 7 hours of English that they already do, an extra 4 hours of it is unappealing to say the very least; groups can be tricky to manage; the planning and resourcing demands on individual teachers are very high. On top of that, ‘skills’ focused English teaching can be brain-stompingly boring. Why? Because it has little actual substance or content. Students stumble along through bitty, incoherent, worksheet-led lessons, or are launched off into poorly-planned ‘projects’ on the World Cup or whatever, in a desperate attempt to provide relevance, or spark engagement.

However, you’ll be pleased to learn that I think we’ve cracked it. Here’s what’s changed, and why it’s much, much better.

1) We have a defined and organised KS3 English curriculum which specifies core knowledge and content.

It does seem that all roads lead to curriculum at the moment. This is another example of the startling gains to be made by getting core content fully organised. Because we know exactly what the students will be learning about, the concept of ‘catch-up’ has been replaced by pre-learning. We can ‘minesweep’ the students’ education, by staying two weeks ahead and identifying, with precision, the words, items of knowledge and ideas that are most likely to metaphorically ‘blow them up’ – to leave them baffled, lost and intellectually isolated whilst their word and knowledge-rich peers nod-along with teacher. The outcome we are striving for is that intervention students are able to sail with confidence into their core English lessons, knowing that they are much more likely to ‘get it’ when they get there.

With year 9, for example, students learn about Romanticism – a wonderfully rich but conceptually tricky subject. By studying the lessons and resources in advance, we can identify the 'mines' which will most likely catch them out - concepts like hubris, the sublime, the idea of a ‘revolution’, what is a ‘movement’, the Enlightenment etc; words such as oppression, liberty, awe, society, civilisation. Interventions are there to make sure that the kids know enough of these words and ideas; they become notions that they’ve heard of and know something about. Therefore, when they come across them in lessons, they are able to enjoy a spark of recognition, they can 'join in', and contribute meaningfully to the group.

Furthermore, clarity in advance on the formative and summative assessments enables targeted preparation, helping to generate the higher success rate that has such a profound bearing on students’ self-perception and ongoing levels of motivation.

2)  Highly structured, well resourced lessons.

In the delivery, we’ve been influenced by introducing ReadWriteInc, the synthetic phonics course which we use for weak readers in Year 7. Whilst we don’t do RWI in the interventions I’m writing about here, the training was high quality, and opened my eyes to the higher level of intentionality which is possible in teaching – similar to an extent to the Direct Instruction approaches that Tom Needham has written so well about. It’s a mode of teaching in which almost every aspect of delivery is thought-through and deliberate. In practice, this has meant:

-          Using structured, bespoke booklets rather than exercise books. Here's an example (albeit with wonky formatting) of one which introduces Y9 to Frankenstein – the text with which they’ll begin Year 10. This, I find, guarantees a structured approach, and has the subsidiary benefit of providing regular fresh starts for students. If they don’t do very well, or are absent for, a particular booklet, they get to start again on the next one, without leaving a demoralising residue of poor quality work in their books.

Booklets tend to follow this structure:

1. Start with a recap quiz – true or false, MCQ or short answer. This includes core content from previous topics across the year and from previous years.
2. New vocabulary. This is directly taught – briskly and purposefully – with choral repetition from the students. We use flashcards, in sets of about 8 (although this can be too many). The words are usually tier two words which students need to understand or engage with the topic – so in the ‘Macbeth context’ booklet, they would include things like tyranny, regicide, ambition etc. We also slip in words from prior topics as reminders. Students are then given their own flashcard packs and test each other in pairs.
3. Read an article which provides new knowledge. The structure for this is that the teacher explains what it’s about and some main ideas to look out for. Students then read it in pairs. They do this by reading one sentence at a time each. Whilst partner A reads their sentence, partner B reads along, and helps them out with any tricky words – remembering that the words from the flashcards are likely to be included and emboldened in the text. THEN – and this is important – the teacher reads it to them – expressively and confidently. This is the point where the text can be discussed, questions asked and answered (by teacher or students), and any misconceptions cleared up.
4. Comprehension questions about the text.
5. A longer written piece connected to the topic – could be analytical, non-fiction or creative writing depending on the topic in hand – all needs properly modelling and teaching of course.

There are of course variations within that, and it’s advisable to adapt to need – for example, a teacher might choose to begin a lesson with paired flashcards – but essentially that’s the process. Some booklets include sentence practice – lists of 10 incorrectly punctuated individual or pairs of sentences, which students correct, and they tend to last three lessons each.

Of course the problem with this is that it takes ages to resource: writing the articles, writing the questions, creating the cards, doing the thinking. BUT – and again, we are back to the advantages of a solid curriculum – it also feels like efficient work in the long run, because we can be confident that these resources will keep being used; they’ll maintain relevance and validity for years.  

As you may have worked out, I am part of the teaching team for these groups, in Year 8 and 9. It’s fantastic – the most enjoyable, meaningful teaching I’ve ever done, and I’m forever grateful for the advice and insights provided by twitter teacher types in helping us to improve our teaching and get moments of joy. These days, I tend to finish lessons with the same phrase: ‘Well done – now you can take pride that you know a little bit more about (the world / the topic / whatever)’ – and I’m more confident than ever before that they will.