Helping Students Develop their Written Analysis Skills at GCSE
It took me years to find a formula that works when getting GCSE students to write about other artists. I suspect I’m the only teacher who has tied themselves up in knots, creating word banks and boxes and matrices. I’ve tried them all.
Of course, the ‘official’ guidance from some exam boards is that students need minimal written evidence at GCSE, but we all know that annotation works wonders and as a previous moderator myself, I know the marks are much easier to find when a student has signposted their responses and understanding with meaningful written analysis.
And to be fair, I hope we’d most of us agree we’re trying to offer students more than teaching just to one qualification – we’re trying to ‘unluck’ the world of art for them so that they can understand and enjoy what other artists create. Finally, the very bottom line, we need to start them on the analytical journey so that they ready for A level which demands the more extensive written response.
So what to do?
Here’s not what to do!: I forbid my students from writing at length about ANYTHING – to be more accurate, I don’t tell them not to write, but I get them to write on a tiny piece of paper so they have to spend more time deciding what to write than on the writing itself. If I’m lucky enough to be teaching in a school where homework is a functioning process, I instruct students to write a maximum of 3 sentences that are SHORT and to the point. Obviously, there’s no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution – I’ve taught in all types of school – schools with high amounts of students using English as an additional language; schools where there’s no homework culture at all; and for a while, in a private school where my students would happily write 3 pages of ‘guff’ for homework, which quite often merited no more marks than the 3 sentences, I’d be lucky to squeeze from the classes in one of my less-advantaged schools. One of my students was lucky to live next to a very famous contemporary artist, who granted her an interview, which she transcribed beautifully into her sketchbook, but still got a very average grade because she’d done nothing with it. She’s listened and transcribed but NOT responded ! She’d not used what she learnt. She’d clearly not thought about it.
And there’s the big clue. Many students can copy meaningless data from a website [or worse still, spend hours transcribing what they’ve read but without thinking what it means], but telling us where the artist was born, or the name of their art college is usually pointless. It’s how the student RESPONDS to the artwork that makes the marks.
We/you need a quick and practical way to get students to respond in writing to the artists and artwork they examine.
How?
How to Encourage Quality Written Analysis Skills
Simple:
Simile and metaphor. You can talk about formal elements until you’re blue in the face but identifying primary colours or tonal range rarely inspires the student artist and worse it doesn’t get them to make their own exciting journeys and innovations.
But if you teach them to respond with similes and metaphors, suddenly they can’t just regurgitate facts but have to think for themselves and more importantly it sets their minds and hands whirring onto adventures of their own.
Consider these 2 pieces of analysis:
“Georgia O’Keeffe [1887-1986] was a modernist painter. She was born in Wisconsin and died in Santa Fe and married Alfred Stieglitz. She painted flowers and bones using bright colours which make them stand out and cartoon-like. I really like how she does close-up in her painting ‘Red Canna 1924’, which uses hot colours and smooth textures”.
OR
“ ‘Red Canna’, 1924 by Georgia O’Keeffe reminds me of a hot fire burning right in my face. The reds and yellows look like a carnival costume and the orange is like a shirt my brother wears which always cheers me up. O’Keeffe lived a lot of her life in the desert and I wonder how she managed working in that heat. I’m going to look at vibrant clothing to create my own burning paintings”
Arguably the second piece of writing won’t win any awards for sophistication with its reference to the student’s taste in clothing, but it will come as no surprise that the student who wrote the 2nd extract got a far higher mark for art response than the student that wrote the 1st. The writing is of course only one part of the jigsaw but it’s still a vital part and one that if done well [and by ‘well’ I mean genuinely demonstrating the student’s OWN thinking and engagement] will signpost their responses to the examiner.
Even more excitingly it gives the student ideas as to what to do next. Student 2 above was a real student and unlike every other student in the class, he went far beyond looking at flowers and took himself off to the Notting Hill Carnival where he took a whole load of exciting photos which he then used to make his own exciting, really exciting, fiery paintings.
How to Teach Written Analysis Skills
Teaching students to use simile and metaphor is easy. I make it a quick starter at the beginning of every lesson and use it in the plenary as students go out. It’s a habit they are using from year 7 and I’m even using it with Primary age students at the moment.
Who cares if Cubists use/used geometric, angular shapes or Kehinde Wiley uses ornate patterns? I want to see the work of students that observe a cubist portrait ‘looks like the artist drew a portrait onto a sheet of glass and then stamped on it, angrily reassembling the broken shapes’ or Wiley’s subject ‘seems to glow as if she’s spotlit against a piece of wallpaper from my nan’s house’.
Similes and metaphors…
- make students think for themselves rather than producing generic, meaningless statements
- suggest interesting starting points for what the student could do next
- ensure that every sketchbook in your GCSE class is different and interesting for you AND the examiner to read
- make marks because they signpost each student’s OWN response
- are an easy habit to teach
- are quicker and easier for the student to write – I would argue a bad student and a boring artist will spend 2 hours transcribing pointlessly another person’s thoughts off the internet; the exciting artist will STOP and think and write a few simple sentences of their own.
Even a student learning to use English for the first time or with significant reading/writing difficulties can offer a simple word that suggests how they feel about an artwork.
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