I don’t know about you, but I didn’t touch a critical concept until I reached university.

Until then, literature analysis only loosely involved other people’s opinions on texts. 

However, with the switch to fully examined units for GCSE English literature and with all credit to the influence of teachers on Twitter, I realised that here was an opportunity to stretch the very top end in order to hit the elusive grade 9. 

My teaching of critical concepts took a two-pronged approach: 

1. Start early

To successfully teach critical concepts, you can’t just bolt them on in Year 11. Instead, start laying the groundwork for higher-order thinking from key stage 3 with critical thinking.

So, what might this look like? In Year 8, I teach a unit on transactional writing with the focus on gender. I introduce them to the basics of gender roles and expectations and this means they are then able to access ideas about the male gaze in Year 9 when we study poetry by Browning and Duffy.

It is doing this work pre-GCSE that ultimately paves the way for applying feminist theory to characters such as Lady Macbeth. 

2. Higher-ability lectures

Having taught this GCSE English specification since its inception, I have noticed that by the time those students who went on to get the top grades reached Year 11, their ability to analyse literature was usually pretty embedded.

Their responses are thoughtful and detailed, and they can range through the texts with some ease.

But despite this, to become critical and perceptive, I found they needed a boost. In order to help stretch this top end, I deliver a series of lectures focusing on critical concepts such as Marxism, feminism, Derrida and deconstructivism, Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, Locke’s archetypes, Greek tragedy and a number of others. 

Rather than insist on attendance, we invite students along (it’s a booster, not intervention) and they are expected to behave as befits a university lecture and expected to write until their hands fall off (that’s what I tell them happens at university, anyway).

Getting those elusive 9s

Because we’ve laid the groundwork, when the students read about Lady Macbeth’s tragic end, it leads to a discussion of the necessity for catharsis for the audience and deep responsibility the author has to satisfy his audience, be it contemporaneous with Shakespeare or modern. 

The sheer flooding of knowledge that they are provided with appears to open new vistas and suddenly the paradigm shift in class is palpable.

Sana Master is an English teacher at a school in Yorkshire. She tweets @MsMaster13