Thoughts about teaching, literature, and teaching literature
We often see description as a separate kind of writing to non-fiction, a distinction enshrined in most GCSE specifications. Yet, one of the biggest upgrades I think we can make to student non-fiction writing is to encourage them to include elements of description. In my own teaching this translates to using a structure shape I... Continue Reading →
Live modelling is something I do a lot. I think it is up there with one of the most effective and powerful strategies I use in my classroom. The capacity to expose students not only to an exemplar of excellence, but, crucially, the thought process and rationale that helped us to arrive there is of... 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 →
I wanted to share with you a really simple but incredibly effective strategy that I’ve been using for a while now. It has improved the quality of my class discussion, increased student participation, and generally resulted in a better exchange of ideas. Here it is… As you read a text with your class, whatever it... Continue Reading →
For the last few lessons with my GCSE class, we’ve been working on creative writing. Up until now, we’ve done a lot of work on refining and rehearsing certain sentence stems, most of which have been taken from Chris Curtis’ superb book, How to Teach English. This has included doing tasks such as the below... 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 →
When we arrive at the end of An Inspector Calls and witness the Inspector looking out at the audience, in a kind of ideological crescendo, bellowing his warnings about ‘fire, blood and anguish’, it would be difficult to imagine Priestley’s aim is not an act of conversion. Priestley, one instinctively assumes, is seeking to uproot... 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.
codexterous 