5 ways we ensure success with anthology poetry

The poetry anthology is arguably one of the hardest components of the AQA GCSE Literature qualification. Between having to learn and recall a whopping 15 poems prior to the exam and then having to juggle the analysis of two texts simultaneously in the exam, the anthology poetry question asks a lot of our 16-year-old students.

Here are 5 strategies we use to ensure students’ success in this component, complete with links to loads of free resources. We teach the ‘Power and Conflict’ cluster but the resources are easily adaptable.

1.       Explicit teaching of ‘Big Ideas’

We coach students to compare the poems through similar ‘Big Ideas’ that they reflect. We explicitly teach Big Ideas such as ‘Nature is more powerful than man’ and ‘Identity can be complex and confusing’ that students then use as a basis for comparison in their essays. A full list of our Big Ideas can be found here on our Topic Guide. We begin teaching these in Year 10 and move into the nuances of each one in Year 11. We find these give students much more confidence in planning a comparison and they also reduce the likelihood of students just ‘feature spotting’ in the exam, which often leads to arbitrary analysis and comparison (eg. ‘Both poets use a metaphor…’).

2.       Planning sheet

As mentioned, the Big Ideas then become the basis for the comparative essay. From Year 10, we teach students to use this sheet when planning a poetry essay.

It works an absolute treat. Students are taught to explore row by row (rather than column by column) to give ample opportunity for comparison. The Big Ideas in the centre of the plan are used to form the introduction but also the topic sentences of each analytical paragraph. We start off with really detailed plans: each box will be crammed full of ideas, references and analysis. By the time we get to the exam, students are confident enough to just put the key components in the plan, namely the Big Ideas and the quotations/methods that facilitate analysis/exploration of these ideas. Below is an example of a student who used this approach in his GCSE exam last academic year. He started the year on a Grade 3 in Literature and ended up with a Grade 6 overall. On this question, he scored 20/30 for a ‘clear’ response. He reported later that he struggled to think of a reference for one of the boxes but it came to him later: he knew that the plan needed to be quick and efficient, just enough to give him a focused ‘line of argument’ for his essay. His full essay and two other marked scripts from 2022 can be found here.

3.       Model answers

Our Year 11s sit fortnightly ‘Big Writes’ in which they practise responding to exam-style questions. Before each of these, we show students model essays that demonstrate the skills we want them to mirror.  We talk through each model carefully, focusing initially on how the essay is constructed with the Big Ideas at the centre as the basis for comparison. Seeing high-quality models and then replicating their style and approach is vital for GCSE success. Here is a bank of 10 ‘Power and Conflict’ model essays that we use/adapt depending on the class.

4.       ‘Why that method’ sheets

In a previous blog post, I explained how we developed ‘Why that method’ sheets to improve students’ analysis and reduce the amount of vague, unspecific comments on the impact of methods. In teaching anthology poetry, we make most use of the general ‘Why that method’ sheet (which includes the most common language methods like metaphors, personification, juxtaposition) and also the ‘Why that poetic method’ sheet, which is obviously specific to poetry features. All of our sheets are saved here.

5.       Strategic ‘Do Now’ tasks

As mentioned at the start of this post, one of the most difficult aspects of the poetry anthology component is the requirement to learn such a large number of poems and be able to recall details about them in the exam. As we all know, retrieval practice is essential to improving students’ recall and embedding knowledge into long term memory. We do retrieval practice every day through our strategic ‘5-a-day’ tasks. We use common misconceptions to inform what we want students to practise in the first 10 minutes of every lesson. With anthology poetry, we know that the following are imperative: understanding the Big Ideas, recalling some key references/quotations, clear analysis of the methods used. Thus, our poetry 5-a-days include questions that require: recall of Big Ideas, recall of quotations (usually through cloze activities), and analysis of these quotations using the ‘Why that method’ sheets, such as the one below:

A full explanation of how we use our 5-a-days, along with examples, can be found in this blog post.