Speed Planning Power and Conflict Essays Through regular practise, you will speed up your thinking and your planning to better prepare you for tackling an essay in timed conditions. The more quickly you can select relevant details and make connections between poems the better. But how can you do it?

Step 1: Write ‘Both Statements’ for the cluster Task: write as many ‘Both statements’ as you can about any of the poems you have studied. You might link poems because of their message, tone, perspectives, ideas about conflict, ideas about power or even poetic devices. The more the merrier! Examples: Both ‘Storm on the Island’ and ‘Exposure’ show the power of nature. Both ‘Ozymandias’ and ‘My Last Duchess’ present the arrogance of men with power. Both ‘Ozymandias’ and ‘London’ criticise ruling powers.

Step 2: Flip the statements into questions Take 3-5 ‘Both’ statements and flip them into questions in which one of the poems is named  For example: Compare the ways poets present the power of nature in ‘Storm on the Island’ and in one other poem from ‘Power and Conflict’. Compare the ways poets present ideas about power and arrogance in ‘Ozymandias’ and in one other poem from ‘Power and Conflict’. Compare the ways poets present criticism of power in ‘London’ and in one other poem from ‘Power and Conflict’.

Why does this help? Of course some of the questions are more likely to appear in an exam paper than others and some may be so niche as to be very unlikely to appear. However, for this process it doesn’t really matter because what this task is about is increasing your thinking and planning speed. We can also build up a bank of ‘good’ questions and a bank of questions only evil examiners would set (though if you can think and plan for those then that’s a confidence boost, surely?).

Step 3: Speed Planning - 5 minutes: Give me one of your questions that you think is more likely to come up. I will demonstrate with your help how to speed plan in 5 minutes.

Step 4: It’s over to you Choose one of your questions. I will give you two minutes now to select and write down your chosen question. You will then get 5 minutes to speed plan. We will repeat the process a number of times so that you can learn each times from previous mistakes.

Step 5: De-brief What did you learn? What works? What doesn’t? Were some of the questions impossible? What does that tell us? Share your plans with someone else.

Step 6: Takeaways You now have 3-5 essay plans that they can write a paragraph or full essay for You now have a revision technique you can use – you can write their own questions and plan in timed conditions