Lesson video

I'm Mrs Crompton and welcome to today's English lesson.

Our focus today is to write an evaluative response.

You will need a pen and paper, take a moment to make sure you've cleared any distractions away and have everything you need to hand.

So first of all, let's have a look at a statement.

And at this point, I just want you to start thinking about what you're reading and thinking about what your initial response to the statement is.

Ralston's situation was completely avoidable, he was reckless in his behaviour.

The only reason he survived is sheer luck so you can't call him heroic.

To what extent do you agree? We're going to see that plenty.

So let's just remind ourselves of what we mean when we say we're going to write an evaluation.

When we evaluate, we need to give our interpretation of the content, the what and our analysis of the methods, the how.

Now, in order to do that, we're going to use the following planning tool, which we actually have seen before way way back in week two, so I'll just go through the instructions again.

You need to take a piece of paper, put it into a landscape format and the rectangle part forms the edges of your piece of paper.

So what I need you to do is to draw the ovals onto the piece of paper, making sure that you leave space to write around the edges so it looks just like the one on the screen.

So that's your first task, a little bit of drawing.

As soon as you've done that, press resume on the video.

First impressions then.

So you've seen the statement already once and you probably did have those first gut responses to the statement.

And the statement is deliberately built to create those responses and we're going to split it into two sections.

So we've got the first part, which we will call statement, the second part that we will call evaluation, but actually they do blur a little bit in terms of skills.

You're going to still need to respond to the statement within the second part and you're still going to evaluate the ideas within the first.

So for the purpose of being clear, we'll start with it as Ralston's situation was completely avoidable.

He was reckless in his behaviour as our statement.

What are your gut reactions to those comments? And what I would suggest is that you break down even further and think about your response, do you think it was avoidable? And do you think you would actually want to describe his behaviour as reckless? Maybe take a corner for each of those ideas, that seems to make sense when you look at this and you are going to be working in the green section of your piece of paper, so around the edges of your oval and just writing down your initial response.

Then you're going to look at the evaluative part.

The only reason he survives is sheer luck so you can't call him heroic.

So there isn't anything specifically in the text that's going to say, the only reason I survived was sheer luck, you can't call me a hero.

So that means we're going to generate an evaluation of those words and you're going to give your response back to that idea.

So the bottom you might want to then think about, is he just lucky? Do you think of him as heroic? So it's over to you, I'm going to give you one minute to jot down and it's only a minute because you are jotting down words, phrases, key ideas, it's just in note form at this stage.

It doesn't have to be beautifully composed sentences.

Use the green section of your piece of paper and it's over to you, one minute, I will time it through.

Just finishing off in terms of jotting down your ideas.

If you need to pause me, you can, and we will move on to our next instruction, which is now to think about the evidence.

So so far I've asked you to respond with a gut reaction and very deliberately so because I really want you to be confident in your personal responses to the text.

We've read it, we've worked through it and I do want to capture your ideas and having the opportunity to think about something without reexamining the text to making it too clinical is actually quite a useful thing because those are the things that are really sat with you as you read the text and those are the things that are really quite important to capture in your answer.

It will be what makes you distinctive in your response and I want to hear those ideas so it's really important that we have those opportunities within our work.

Next step, however, is to be able to support why you think what you do and also to check that what you think can be backed up by evidence.

So again, we're going to work through the text.

We're going to look at the opening of the extracts.

So this is the work that we did in lesson one, rather than the whole thing, because that would perhaps take us several days to do so we're only going to work with the opening portion.

And I would like you now to reread the extract that's going to appear.

And I would like you to aim to select two to three quotations per statement and evaluation.

So two to three quotations that answer the idea that he is reckless and two to three quotations that back up your thoughts on him being lucky and not heroic.

And it's whatever you want to say about that but this is what you are targeting and checking as you read through the text.

When you have gathered those you will put them into the purple section in that first oval as indicated on the screen.

Now it might be at this stage that you gather more evidence than you will use eventually, that's fine too.

We can start to then sift through that.

So the control is over to you.

You are aiming to fill in that purple donut on the screen with your quotations and you have the extract that we're working with about to appear right now.

So control is over to you, pause, move on as you need to.

And welcome back.

So you should have the purple oval populated now.

And now what we're going to do is just have opportunity to review all of the evidence and to come up with a refined answer to the initial statement of Ralston's situation was completely avoidable.

He was reckless in his behaviour.

The only reason he survived a sheer luck, so you can't call him heroic.

And what we're aiming for in the purple section, so right in the middle is your, I suppose, line of argument would be the best thing to say, what is it that you actually think? And now we're looking for a well phrased sentence.

We're looking for you to think about big picture ideas within those comments.

Again, you can break it down.

However, it is quality expression that we are working on with this particular section.

So control over to you, take your time, think it through, get the wording just right.

And welcome back.

So we have been working with our question.

What we're now going to do is to think about how we're going to do the final part of our planning, because the planning we've done so far is really the thinking part.

What we've been doing is on picking the different elements.

We've had quite a messy plan.

What we do need to do is to neaten that all up and to start to put that into some sort of order.

And I mentioned this idea of, you're almost creating a line of argument, a debate around it, back up this statement so that you are presenting your ideas in a confident and critical way.

So what we're going to do in order to be able to organise everything is we're going to go back through everything that we've got so far.

We've got personal response to the statement and we've got the two elements.

Ralston is reckless, he is lucky not heroic.

We're going to make sure we've got our supporting evidence.

Rich quotation needs to be included in that, ultimately two to three quotations.

Not all of them have to be rich, that's really important.

Out of the two to three, one of them at least needs to be rich and then we're going to think about that bigger picture overview statement.

So to get to this point, to really refine the thinking, we're going to draw the following table and this final table is going to be our final plan.

And in this plan, we're going to sequence all of our ideas and make sure that we understand how we are travelling through our written response.

The first thing I'd like you to do is just to take a quick pause and actually take a whole piece of paper, draw the two columns and give them the two headings.

Don't necessarily try and section out where the lines are going to go.

We can do that as we move through 'cause you might find that you need to write a little bit more in one section to the next.

We don't want a messy table.

So over to you to draw the table, pause the video while you do so, and I'll take you through the next step in a moment.

Brilliant, so we're all ready with a table, fresh sheet of paper, still with our previous plan by our side and what we're going to do now is to really do the sequencing part.

This is where the planning becomes far tighter and we are thinking about the logical progression of our written response.

So we're moving from just having ideas to actually thinking about the outcome and how we're going to present them.

And with that idea of an outcome, it's really important that we remind ourselves of what we need to include in our response.

We need to give the following, a response to the statement, an evaluation of our evidence and the consideration of the methods.

Let's just have a look at these criteria and pick out a few key features.

So we need to give a detailed and critical response to the statement.

And by that, we need to make sure that we've got sufficient evidence to back up our points, that's what it means by detailed, but it also means detailed in our explanation.

And we're also being critical, as in, you are giving the personal response, you are giving your own opinions, you are making sure that you're on picking and exploring the content of the statement.

So we're going to examine the different elements of the statement, break it down as we've done.

So we've covered ourselves for this.

We've broken the statement down and we're going to give a considered personal response.

And we've got for the first part, he was reckless, three quotations that we've picked out.

We then move on to the evaluative part and we make sure that we are evaluating this idea, the only reason he survives is sheer luck so you can't call him heroic.

Again, we are going to have three quotations with a mix of the supporting and the rich evidence in there and we are considering the links between the ideas and generating a mini thesis to that line of argument, that sense of debate that you are generating.

Finally, we're going to make sure that we have considered methods.

Take into account the ways in which the writer has presented the ideas and how this has influenced your evaluation.

So think about any use of speech, think about the way that you might zoom in at a certain point.

And the structural choices are just as relevant as the rich quotations that you can analyse.

So the best way of making sure that you don't forget methods is to make sure that within your evidence, you pick a rich one.

What you need to do now is to go back to this plan.

And on this plan that we are going to have a sequenced selection and prioritisation of our evidence.

So you're going to go back through all of the planning and you're going to decide on how you are going to work from one piece of evidence to the next.

So almost like imagine the clouds and how you move from the anchor out to the next two bits of evidence but this time we're working down our columns.

As we're doing that, I also want you to think about the links.

Think about, however, in contrast, similarly.

If you use the language of an argument style writing, it actually helps you develop your thesis and it helps you develop your links.

We've had that language before, this is reinforced by, this is contrasted by, so use that here and plan those linking phrases within the boxes.

Finally, when you're writing your evidence down, make sure that you know which bits are supporting statements and where your rich analysis of methods is going to come.

So what you will have is a column to work down for Ralston was reckless, from point one, point two to point three, and then your plan will take you to the next part and you will work down the next three boxes, he is lucky not heroic, point one, point two, point three, with everything mapped out so that writing up your response just becomes a process of working through this particular plan.

Now, this is going to take you perhaps 15, 20 minutes to work through really well.

And what you're going to end up doing are all of the following steps.

You're going to review all of the evidence that you've got.

You're going to make sure that you've identified the supporting and the rich quotations.

You're going to then sequence those points, making sure that you've thought about the links between one section to the next and the methods that you're going to comment on.

You're going to have considered what your final evaluative judgement and conclusion is going to be and you're going to check that if you've got any big picture ideas, you've managed to include those within your answer.

And you know whether you're going to put them at the beginning, at the end, as you move through a particular piece of evidence.

That's the purpose of this next step, so really careful planning, and this should be used as a little checklist that you've gone through all of these steps.

Finally, I'm going to give you the whole of the extract again, because it might be that you get to step two and think, I've not picked the right quotation, so you have got opportunity to dig back into the text.

So you now have control and what you're going to end up with is this particular plan, this A4 plan with the two columns, being a really detailed piece of work that has all of your links mapped out.

Here's your checklist, there's the text.

And then going right back on where I'm going to leave you is with the criteria.

So start from this screen, control is over to you, take your time, best work possible, really, really try and work through each element and extend your response wherever possible to bring in this fantastic big picture ideas that you've been having.

As soon as you're happy, I will be waiting for you to continue with the next step.

Welcome back, so we're ready, ain't we? We have got a beautifully sequenced plan.

So this is how it's going to work.

We're going to write it up in a few sections and I'll show you all of this and then we'll come back to this screen.

So we'll have an overview statement where you give your initial response to the whole question.

The purpose of that introduction is to set up the debate and I'm going to ban the following.

I don't want you to put, I partially agree, or I completely agree with this statement.

I actually want you to respond to the statement by stating what you think.

So get rid of those little bits of scaffolding way, you feel the need to say, I agree, I disagree, and actually tell me how you feel about Ralston's behaviour.

Is he reckless? Isn't he reckless? Ralston is ultimately an adventurer, therefore, to be reckless is part of his identity, something like that.

So try and be a little bit more ambitious, try and give more of that sense of your personal voice.

So number one banned is, I completely agree with this statement.

It's boring, let's have something a little bit more interesting.

We're then going to work through the first row of evidence.

So that is our evidence about him being reckless, remembering to comment on methods.

So it's just that little reminder there.

I'll then get you to pause, reread what you've written and then we're going to link it through to the second section.

We're going to be systematic all the time, work through the next row of evidence, which is that he's just lucky, he's not a hero, work through that before we then get to our final conclusion, big picture ideas, making sure that we're refining the phrasings, that reminder is there at the end and I'm going to make you recheck at that point.

So we're going to be working through the following steps.

That plan, the effort, all of your hard work will come to fruition at this stage.

So control is over with you.

Start by working on the first two points on the screen.

As soon as you're happy, then move on to the next.

So I'm just going to bat in at this point, before you start on this second section of your work.

And what I want you to make sure at this stage is that you are rereading your first two bits of writing, checking for your expression, checking the links before you begin, making sure that your line of argument is consistent.

And now you're going to be writing up the next steps to the end of your response, control back over to you.

And welcome back.

I hope you have found that the planning has really helped with the writing, I'm sure you have, and that is the key to a successful response.

The final thing that I would like you to do is to self-assess against our criteria, make sure that you celebrate, why you've got your evidence in, colour code it for yourself if you wish, pick up your quotations, think about those links and be critical.

Identify anything that you haven't quite got right, things that you want to work on next time.

So this is the final step, your final read through of your whole response, celebrate your successes.

Look at those little areas for improvement because we always have them, and then you've had a really productive lesson.

And welcome back for the final time.

All that remains for me to say is thank you for your focus today.

We will be continuing with our study of nonfiction texts next week, and we will also be using our Aron Ralston's work again so please do hold onto this work, bring it with you next week.

Enjoy the rest of your learning today.