Passive Amplify sits at the Passive row and Amplify column of the PICRAT grid. Below: real English lessons for middle school (KS3, Years 7 to 9, ages 11 to 14) that sit in Passive Amplify, plus anti-examples that look like it but sit elsewhere.
Persuasive writing: stepping through eight drafts of a model paragraph in version history
Year 7 can spot persuasive devices in a finished text, but their own first drafts stay flat, because a finished model hides the decisions behind it. Over the week before the lesson, the teacher wrote a paragraph arguing that the library should stay open at lunch, naming a version in Google Docs each time it changed: the first draft, the version with a statistic added, the one where a rhetorical question replaced a plain statement, and so on to the eighth. In class the teacher steps through the named versions on the board, with each change highlighted in colour, explains why a word was cut or a sentence moved, and returns to earlier versions to set them beside later ones. Students watch and note three revisions in their books, each with a before, an after and the reason given. They finish by marking one sentence in their own last piece of writing that they would now change, ready for the redrafting lesson.
Tools: Google Docs Nine ideas for your own version in Generate
Grade 6 listen to the teacher's Mote voice notes on each section of 'The Listeners'
Year 7 are starting a poetry unit with Walter de la Mare's 'The Listeners'. The teacher shares a Google Doc through the class's school accounts, holding the poem with Mote voice notes attached: one reading the whole poem aloud, then one on each section that talks through a single thing, such as the silence after the Traveller's knock, the phantom listeners 'thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair', and the final 'Tell them I came, and no one answered'. Students listen with headphones, following the words on screen, and replay any note that went by too fast. The teacher then brings the class together to read the poem aloud, and students write a paragraph in their books on who they think the listeners are, using two details the voice notes pointed out.
Tools: Google Docs, Mote Nine ideas for your own version in Generate
Analysing a poem: hear Tennyson's own 1890 reading of 'The Charge of the Light Brigade'
Year 8 have read 'The Charge of the Light Brigade', published in December 1854, about six weeks after the charge at Balaclava, and can say what happens in it. Today is about its rhythm. From YouTube, the teacher plays the wax-cylinder recording made in 1890 of Tennyson reading the poem himself. It is faint and crackly, so students have the text in front of them, and they listen to the opening once without writing. On the second playing they put a mark over each syllable the poet leans on, starting with 'Half a league, half a league, / Half a league onward', where the weight falls on each 'Half' and two lighter syllables hurry after it. The teacher replays the opening lines several times at three-quarter speed, using YouTube's playback setting, so each stress can be picked out of the crackle, stopping after the first 'Rode the six hundred', until the class agrees where the beats fall.
Students then write in their books how a rhythm of one heavy beat and two light ones suits a cavalry charge, and why Tennyson might have ended each of the six stanzas on the words 'six hundred'.
Grade 7 watch a filmed stage version of The Tempest's storm scene with captions on
Year 8 are starting The Tempest, and the opening storm scene is hard to follow in performance because the shouted lines are lost under the noise of the storm, which is part of Shakespeare's point. The teacher shows a filmed stage production of Act 1 Scene 1 from YouTube on the board, choosing a clip with accurate closed captions, and plays it first with the sound up and no captions so students feel the chaos. On the second viewing the captions are on, and students can read the Boatswain's 'What cares these roarers for the name of king?' and Gonzalo's joke that the Boatswain 'hath no drowning mark upon him' as they are shouted, while the teacher pauses at three moments to say who is speaking. Students then write a short account in their books of who holds power on the ship during the storm and why that matters in a play about power and rule.
Grade 8 hear Auden's 'Musée des Beaux Arts' while the teacher zooms into Bruegel's Icarus
Year 9 are reading W. H. Auden's 'Musée des Beaux Arts', whose second stanza describes Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, the painting in Brussels long attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The teacher reads the poem aloud while the museum's high-resolution image on Google Arts & Culture fills the board, and zooms in on each detail as Auden names it: the ploughman who 'may / Have heard the splash', the sun shining 'on the white legs disappearing into the green / Water', and 'the expensive delicate ship'. Students, whose handout carries the painting as a small reproduction where Icarus's legs are barely visible, watch the details appear in the order the poem finds them. The teacher then reads the poem a second time without stopping, and students write a paragraph in their books on why Auden leaves Icarus until late in the poem, as the painter leaves him in a corner of the picture.
Tools: Google Arts & Culture Nine ideas for your own version in Generate
Lessons that look Passive Amplify but sit in another
Useful counter-examples when you are checking your own lesson placement on the PICRAT grid.
This page is one of a growing set of PICRAT examples by cell, subject and grade. Page maintained by Andy Perryer.