Thoughts about teaching, literature, and teaching literature
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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