Thoughts about teaching, literature, and teaching literature
GCSE English Language poses an interesting challenge for the English teaching community. On the one hand, it has the potential to provoke frustration and confusion in equal measure, with questions not saying what they really mean and it assessing knowledge about surf boards, as opposed to, say, English Language. Yet, within this, there is also... Continue Reading →
With the exception of A Level, the vast majority of my lessons begin in much the same way: 1. Students come into the classroom2. They find waiting for them a task that will take about 5 minutes to complete3. They complete the task4. We talk about it This is such an embedded routine in my... Continue Reading →
I first encountered whole class feedback several years ago and was instantly captivated. And what's not to love? It promises a significant reduction in workload, no longer spending countless hours huddled over a slow burning lamp with pen in hand (forgive the Dickensian rhetorical flourish) whilst simultaneously, even miraculously, improving student outcome. I remember the... Continue Reading →
Ok: first of all an admission. The title of this post, with its impossibly bold claim to distil teaching poetry into a series of neatly packaged steps, is somewhat overzealous. In a manner somewhat, and unfavourably, all too familiar to the last year, I fear it will overpromise and underdeliver. However, what it will do,... Continue Reading →
There is sometimes, I feel, an assumption that retrieval practice in the English classroom begins and ends with quotation gap fills or basic factual recall. Those making this assumption are often the same people suggesting retrieval practice doesn't work for English. It does, of course. And it's crucial to remind ourselves that you can't think... Continue Reading →
Yesterday, I posted this on Twitter and was surprised (but very happy) at the positive reaction it received: https://twitter.com/__codexterous/status/1358477772918767619?s=20 This has been one of the biggest, and I think most positive, changes I’ve made to my own way of thinking about authorial intent in recent years. The question stops being what might the author have... Continue Reading →
Previously posted in four parts, the below is a detailed moment by moment analysis of An Inspector Calls written to be both rigorous and accessible to students. It covers the entire play from start to finish. Setting the Scene The play opens with a set of detailed and specific stage directions and Priestley’s use of... Continue Reading →
I spend a lot of time at GCSE and A Level explicitly teaching and modelling various types of sentences that I want students to use in essays. These provide a very powerful way in which students can frame and signpost their analysis; a syntactic anchor to hold down their argument. In this post, I want... Continue Reading →
Updated: 10/10/2021 So, cards on the table: I don't like the English Language GCSE. I don't think it does a very good job of assessing, well, English Language. I think it does a good job of assessing student knowledge about other things (say, surf boards) but not the domain it seeks to assess. This causes... Continue Reading →
I really dislike the given AQA Poetry Anthology, not the poems, but the actual physical anthology. My students do too. In fact, I dislike it so much that I set about creating an alternative, that, whilst of course biased, I feel is far superior. This post is about what is included in this alternative and... Continue Reading →
It’s Friday. 2:55. The sky a granite-grey as the heft of the clouds seem to throw themselves into your classroom. You’ve just spent 45 minutes teaching, exploring, discussing a poem. In fact, not just any poem, but a great poem. A beautiful poem. Heaney’s ‘Blackberry-Picking’. Mid-sentence you notice a hand shoot up from the corner... Continue Reading →
The disciplinary disposition of English is one of possibility, exploration, and ambiguity. We write to explore an interpretation and to persuade our reader of it validity, but, always, with a clear sense it is just one of many ways we could understand that image, line or text. The epistemological horizon of English Literature as a... Continue Reading →
I’ve recently been playing with a new (to me at least) classroom setup and way of teaching poetry. I’ve used this strategy with various classes now and across various texts, although not yet beyond poetry. It is reasonably simple to set up and orchestrate, with its major benefit being to promote greater depth of discussion... Continue Reading →
Live modelling is such a powerful strategy to help disclose the deep disciplinary thinking that can so easily remain invisible to students. However, as with anything, it is also possible for it to go wrong or at least for it be used sub-optimally. One way this can happen is if we don’t focus enough on... Continue Reading →
A couple of days ago I came across this incredibly interesting observation by Peter Stockwell, which immediately got me thinking about lots of things related to essay writing: If there is a canon of literary texts that move in and out of preference over time there is also a canon of acceptable critical discussion that... Continue Reading →
For very good reason the last several years has witnessed an explosion in thinking about effective revision strategies, with an increasing focus on self-testing and retrieval. As we increasingly use and model these skills in our own classrooms so too do students increasingly use them in their own independent practice. Yet, whilst we may be... Continue Reading →
Recently, I’ve been playing around with and using a lot of OUP (Oxford University Press) Shakespeare materials and resources, which are proving to be excellent. In particular, I’ve been experimenting with their ‘Macbeth GCSE Revision Workbook’ by Graham Elsdon, which is part of the Oxford School Shakespeare series. I’ve been using this in the more... Continue Reading →
A perennial issue for English teachers is how best to prepare students for English Language. This is for good reason. Without a specific body of knowledge to teach, such as a literary text, it can all too easily descend into vague discussions orbiting around examination papers. In my own teaching, in order to address this,... Continue Reading →
Recently, I have been reading a lot about Text World Theory (and specifically the work of Ian Cushing and Marcello Giovanelli) as I think this has massive potential for how we frame a lot of English teaching and literary pedagogy. However, I’m still working my way through its implications and experimenting with how to use... Continue Reading →
Before outlining this strategy to help students to encounter and explore a poem, first a question: when teaching poetry, what is the appropriate weight to give to our own interpretation of the poem? I think this is a really interesting question. Presumably, before we teach a poem we read and think about it first, perhaps... Continue Reading →
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