Thoughts about teaching, literature, and teaching literature
I like to spend a lot of time explicitly teaching, modelling, and rehearsing with students finely crafted introductions. I do this for each of the questions we face as part of AQA GCSE English Literature. By the time of the exam, students should be able to produce a really precise and confident introduction for any... Continue Reading →
We often think very carefully about what material we want students to retrieve, but of equal importance is how they retrieve it. As with much of teaching, this ‘how’ is probably best filtered through the lens of subject specificity, triangulated of course with the underpinning science of how we learn. Yet, the mechanism by which... Continue Reading →
The Game of Crossing Out is an exceptionally fun retrieval game that is very simple to organise and gets students thinking. Here’s how to play: 1. Students first of all write down everything they can remember about a given text, theme or idea. This really can be anything. You explain that the more they write,... Continue Reading →
I’m currently working my way through an excellent series of Massolit lectures by John McRae that looks at unseen poetry. They’re great, really useful for teachers preparing unseen poetry, with lots of excellent choices and ways of framing an encounter with them. However, I’ve been especially struck by a question John McRae asks across several... Continue Reading →
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 →
I’ve used this lesson a few times now for different classes and texts and it always works well. It is super simple and low prep so I thought I would share. Here’s what you need to prepare in advance: 1. A set of mini flashcards or PPT slide with a selection of key images/quotations from... Continue Reading →
Last week, I was fortunate enough to present to a group of PGCE students about some of the key ideas underpinning What How Why. It was a great session and really very fun, with the group asking some really excellent questions about WHW and how we might use it. The future of English teaching is... Continue Reading →
One of the great innovations of David Allen’s Getting Things Done productivity system is the idea and value of ‘capture’. He argues that trying to keep ideas in our mind rather than writing them down is one of the main sources of everyday stress. By trying to remember, say, a task we need to complete... Continue Reading →
Recently whilst reading an article in NATE’s excellent Teaching English I came across this from TS Eliot: ‘Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood’. I think this is a fascinating idea to contemplate. First, I’m interesting in the qualifier ‘genuine’. Does this therefore imply in Eliot’s mind there is genuine and then disingenuous poetry?... Continue Reading →
If you teach English Literature at GCSE or A Level at some point you will need to teach either a single volume of poetry or a poetry anthology. The typical way to approach this, and the way I do it, is to take a poem or maybe two poems at a time and devote one... Continue Reading →
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