Shakespeare and GCSE assessment.

Thomas, Peter

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As English departments up and down the land gear up for the new GCSE specifications, there may be a tendency to go for a complete revamp of Schemes of Learning, lesson plans and assessment procedures. It is true that the new weighting of 60% English/English Language and 25% Literature on Controlled Assessment requires careful planning and organisation, but that's the only real change in the latest version of English Made New. What's reassuring and unusually good news is that Teaching and Learning principles and practices remain largely unchanged. Where they are changed, they are improved. Yes--you read that right. It takes some effort for a hardened sceptic like myself to take this positive view, but every way I look at it, there is something valuable to be gained across the Literature spectrum--and especially where Shakespeare is concerned.

The positives amount to eight significant improvements in what we do with students and Shakespeare in the classroom, and how we express a professional value of what they do. We are looking at some welcome refinement to curriculum and assessment here, and it's important to grab the opportunities and exploit them as Awarding Bodies look for examples of positive and successful practice to build into their ongoing professional development guidance and standardising.

The detail of what follows is based on the AQA specs, but much of it relates to all Awarding Body specifications.

Positive no. 1: revised Assessment Objectives

'Revised Assessment Objectives' may not sound like something to celebrate over a glass or two on Friday night at the Marker and Ferret, but a quick look is enough to suggest that someone at QCDA has thought creatively, practically and humanely about what matters in response to Literature. There: I've said it. My trusty and well-worn keyboard put up some resistance to completing that statement, but there it is, and I mean it, for about the first time in the twenty six years I've been involved in exams and coursework.

Look for example at a major improvement in Enl. The AO for group talk used to be:

'participate in discussion by both speaking and listening, judging the nature and purposes of contributions and the role of participants'.

Now it's:

'Interact with others, shaping meanings through suggestions, comments and questions, and drawing ideas together.'

The improvement is in the helpful detail of kinds of interaction and discourse maintenance that makes the objective a very practical guide to developing attainment. This makes Assessment for Learning more than a pious hope. It makes it direct student prompting at the point of performance.

Look at the sensible importation into En2 of the SCH dimension that I thought was always there (especially re. 'Different Cultures' poems) but which, to my surprise, hasn't been there in the previous AOs.

Look at the En3 improvement. The AOii was:

'Organise ideas into sentences, paragraphs and whole texts, using a variety of linguistic and structural features'.

Now it's:

'Organise information and ideas into structured and sequenced sentences, paragraphs and whole texts, using a variety of linguistic and structural features to support cohesion and overall coherence.'

The improvement is in the distinction between 'information' and 'ideas', and the reminder that within-paragraph organisation (sentence sequences) matters as well as paragraph organisation, and that textual cohesion and thinking coherence are two aspects of the writing process.

But best of all, look at AO4 for Literature. This used to be:

'Relate texts to their social, cultural and historical contexts and literary traditions'.

Now it's:

'Relate texts to their social, cultural and historical contexts; explain how texts have been influential and significant to self and other readers in different contexts'.

Now that is about as liberating an assessment objective as was ever written--for candidates, for teachers, for Moderators and those who write the CA tasks bands. And notice the omission of the unrealistic 'literary tradition'.

For years now, since GCSE began in 1988, examiners have been instructed to value personal response, but it has often resulted in confusion as to what is valid. Is it enough for a candidate to start a sentence with 'I think' to trigger an approving tick, or does it require something more sustained, structured, supported or developed? The new AO4 is a very helpful prompt to candidates and teachers to make the personal response one of relevance to the reader (or other readers) in relation to a context of time, circumstance, preference, belief or just cussed wilfulness. It makes SCH a practical, realistic, personal business of appeal, relevance and meaning rather than an exercise of bolt-on Encarta facts about witchcraft in Elizabethan times or industrialisation in the nineteenth century.

Positive no. 2 CA markshare 25%

Another feature of the new specs is the relative generosity of reward for what candidates do. Gone is the miserly 5% for English (10% for Lit) of the current spec. Now, candidates will earn 25% of their Literature marks for their Shakespeare work. This rectifies an unfair and iniquitous meanness in markshare that has meant that teachers have sometimes not dared to mention to their students what they will gain for their Shakespeare work.

Positive no. 3 CA Linked texts

In AQA, the CA requires a linked text task between Shakespeare and an English Literary Heritage text (prose, poetry or drama) which opens up the field for interesting comparisons for those who want to work on comparison. What is particularly good for Shakespeare study is the fact that Shakespeare is an ELH author, so the CA can link one Shakespeare play with another. 25% for studying Shakespeare is a big improvement on 10%. There is enormous scope for novel, pleasurable and innovative pairing of plays based on character (e.g. Falstaff in Henry IV and Merry Wives) or device (concealment in Twelfth Night and Much Ado or themes (e.g. the craft of politics in Julius Caesar and Coriolanus). This is an invitation to study parts of two plays to see how a) consistent Shakespeare is in his ideas and/or techniques or b) how varied he is in his ideas and/ or techniques. Whether students are encouraged to do mechanical linking or more exploratory and evaluative comparison, this is welcome scope for choosing texts outside the departmental stock cupboard.

Positive no. 4 Task bank focus

CA tasks can be chosen and adapted from titles in one of two categories--'Themes and Ideas' or 'Characterisation and Voice'. The latter is very explicitly addressed to authorial craft in the dramatic genre, requiring candidates to get beyond the simple engagement with characters as real people and studying the ways that Shakespeare has created them as credible fictions with particular reference to tone, idiom, verse and sound. This makes a central aspect of Teaching and Learning and Assessment the study of playscript as a kind of writing for a specific context of performance.

Positive no. 5 Multimodality and post-print experience of Shakespeare

The first batch of task banks signals the importance of studying Shakespeare in performance, on stage or on screen. AQA guidance specifies the 'enrichment of candidates' experience through the study of multi-modal versions of the texts, for example stage productions, film and audio versions. They may, for example, consider how directors have presented aspects of the text in one or more versions of the text. Recognising that, in the drama genre, one's mature, educated preference may be for watched performance rather than private reading, and that this is even more the case for those developing their mature, educated preferences, is a decisive move away from the lingering clutches of O level. Shakespeare may, for some, be Literature. If Literature is what he is, his home is in the library or the study, not the classroom or the public space he actually wrote for. Printing for readers was not what he was about. People like me will continue to enjoy reading the print, but teachers in classrooms need to share with students all that is possible beyond the print stage of a drama text.

Positive no. 6 Cross-component skills

Constructing an effective skills-based English experience at KS4 depends on teaching the core skills and then applying them to the various components. It is helpful, therefore, that the new specification enables clear links between Literature and En3 and Literature and Enl. This skills crossover and adaptability of content can be readily seen in a Literature CA task based on character and voice and an English Language task for spoken language study. Similarly, Literature CA tasks based on presentations of heroism or the absurdities of people in love can be relevantly harnessed to Speaking and Listening.

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Positive no. 7 Mark scheme

The five band mark scheme incorporates a hierarchy of skills well suited to practical, hands-on experience of Shakespeare's text--Shakespearience. In the key terms of the five new mark bands there is a healthy emphasis on more-than-literal comprehension and identified feature-listing:

Band 5 Engagement

Band 4 Appreciation

Band 3 Understanding

Band 2 Familiarity

Band 1 Awareness.

There are, obviously, other key terms such as analysis and evaluation, but this key hierarchy offers incitement and reward for responses to text which go beyond the cognitive and rational.

Positive no. 8 Multimodal submissions

The AQA Literature specification includes in its Controlled Assessment mark scheme a hierarchy of attainment within the five bands specifically related to multi-modal submissions: e.g Band 5 'Multimodal submissions demonstrate sophisticated interpretations e.g. through use of imaginative visual or audio responses which illuminate the texts.' This means that a written response can be part of a package involving audio/visual material derived from candidates' own research or performance.

Positive no. 9 Choice: linkage and comparison

There is scope for assignments which respond to the two chosen texts separately as treatments of a linking theme or examples of a linking technique or as an integrated, comparative package going beyond an organisational linkage into a sustained comparative, judgemental, evaluative approach.

Positive no. 10 Doing Shakespeare

Making Shakespeare part of CA gives it all it needs to make the most of a teacher's expertise and students' practical engagement. In the document I wrote a couple of years ago for AQA, Twelve Ways of Improving Shakespeare coursework, I emphasised the importance of playing Shakespeare, doing Shakespeare rather than merely reading Shakespeare because that is the natural way to encounter the workings of script for performance. Subsequently, In The Complete Shakespearience, I have argued that doing Shakespeare is to the advantage of all students. I have never thought that active Shakespearience was a way of engaging the non-academic and the reluctant, suspicious and alienated. I have always thought that the most academically able students gain from abandoning detached cold scrutiny of print on page and making it live. Now, to my delight, the 2010 spec makes it clear that doing Shakespeare and responding to how Shakespeare has been done is a natural, necessary and productive part of the GCSE assessment agenda.

Some things in life do get better. Just when I thought it may be time to gracefully conclude my involvement with the GCSE assessment system, I find myself newly enthused and committed to the best thing for getting students into Shakespeare and for getting Shakespeare into students since GCSE began in the mid 1980s. Let's go!

Peter Thomas

A Principal Moderator for GCSE Literature Author of The Complete Shakespearience, recently published by NATE