Thoughts about teaching, literature, and teaching literature
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
Anticipating and micro-scripting expected classroom interactions can be a really powerful strategy, helping to ensure a consistent and finely-tuned message. Whilst I wouldn't do this for most lessons, enjoying instead free flowing and responsive dialogue, I do think this can be especially effective for the first lesson of a new academic year. This post outlines,... Continue Reading →
Ahead of the new academic year I was going to write a blog about some ideas/strategies/approaches that I think work well (at least for me) in teaching English. But, instead I thought I’d do this as a video presentation. And so linked below you’ll find a 40 minute presentation talking about some of the things... Continue Reading →
Why and how do students make annotations in the books they are studying? The act of students annotating a book during teaching and class discussion seems to me one of those orthodoxies within English teaching that never goes unchallenged. I don't, by the way, necessarily think it should be challenged, but nonetheless it is a... 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 recently read and very much enjoyed Cal Newport’s excellent book Deep Work, in which he argues for the value and importance of work he labels, as per the title, deep work. This kind of work, Newport describes, tends to be cognitively demanding and requires sustained focus and attention unlike its opposite, shallow work, which... Continue Reading →
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