Thoughts about teaching, literature, and teaching literature
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 →
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 →
I first encountered whole class feedback several years ago and was instantly captivated. And what's not to love? It promises a significant reduction in workload, no longer spending countless hours huddled over a slow burning lamp with pen in hand (forgive the Dickensian rhetorical flourish) whilst simultaneously, even miraculously, improving student outcome. I remember the... Continue Reading →
You would struggle to find a greater advocate for using What How Why, or, for the acronym fiend within all of us, WHW. I use it all the time. I use it as a way to scaffold how we approach or think about a text. I use it as part of retrieval Do Nows. I... Continue Reading →
Recently, I've been thinking a lot about cold reads: how they work, how they maybe don't work, whether they're a good thing, bad thing, or whether they deserve their increasing popularity. I'm not sure how much this post will offer as I suspect, or certainly at the outset, my answer to all of the above... Continue Reading →
