Thoughts about teaching, literature, and teaching literature
If you enjoy this blog post, then you'll love my new book Experiencing English Literature. With dedicated chapters on teaching novels, plays and poetry as well as teaching generative writing, sentence-stems and essay structure, it is filled with actionable strategies ready for the classroom. You can order it right now HERE ! We often see... Continue Reading →
If you enjoy this blog post, then you'll love my new book Experiencing English Literature. With dedicated chapters on teaching novels, plays and poetry as well as teaching generative writing, sentence-stems and essay structure, it is filled with actionable strategies ready for the classroom. You can order it right now HERE ! Live modelling is... Continue Reading →
Unlike some of the questions on the Language GCSE papers, these two are actually pretty straightforward and familiar. There’s no hidden and inexplicable criteria (ahem, ‘summary’), but rather good old fashioned language analysis. Here’s how I teach my students to approach both questions, based around What, How, Why as a series of prompts to help... Continue Reading →
Students often like to write about enjambment and alliteration, likely because they’re very easy to identify, but they rarely do so well. Often points about these two poetic strategies might align to something related to flow, making the reader want to read on, or the alliteration of ‘a’ somehow and inexplicably mimicking something that the... Continue Reading →
If you enjoy this blog post, then you'll love my new book Experiencing English Literature. With dedicated chapters on teaching novels, plays and poetry as well as teaching generative writing, sentence-stems and essay structure, it is filled with actionable strategies ready for the classroom. You can order it right now HERE ! For the last... Continue Reading →
This post offers a very brief outline of a specific sequence of modelling analytical writing that I’ve recently used with a Y10 class. In it you’ll also see how I’ve used What How Why as a thinking tool first and a writing tool second as well as how we move incrementally from live modelled writing... Continue Reading →
It all too easy sometimes to get lost in the small stuff of textual analysis. The micro. The single words and images. This is, it goes without saying, key to any literary discussion, but so is the macro. The big stuff. The conceptual. How might we build into our classroom routines more opportunity for such... Continue Reading →
If you enjoy this blog post, then you'll love my new book Experiencing English Literature. With dedicated chapters on teaching novels, plays and poetry as well as teaching generative writing, sentence-stems and essay structure, it is filled with actionable strategies ready for the classroom. You can order it right now HERE ! When we arrive... Continue Reading →
Recently I have very much enjoyed playing around with Adobe Spark and making various literature-based posters. This has been done mostly for my own enjoyment, but I thought I would share what I’ve created should they be of use and interest to others.
When thinking about English and English teaching I like the word ‘resonance’. It seems to me to capture so much of what good English teaching and thinking is about. When we read ourselves, no doubt, we traverse the texts for little light bulb moments, moments of insight and connection. We’ve all experienced this: ‘Ah, that... Continue Reading →
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