I first started blogging a few ways ago as a way of thinking about and sharing ideas surrounding English teaching. Like I suspect most blogs, it was mostly something for me: a purely personal source of pedagogic introspection and reflection. When I started, I didn't imagine it would become popular and even further from my... 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 →

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.

This is the first in what I hope will become a series of blogs offering a step by step guide for how I teach certain key aspects of English. It's by no means intended to be definitive or 'the' way to teach whatever it might be, but will hopefully offer a couple of useful strategies.... Continue Reading →

Here is a very quick and partial list of some key images and quotations for Macbeth. Given the nature of the activity this list was intended for the aim was not to produce a full list of all the best or most useful quotations and so please see it in that context. It is, by... 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 ! Question: Write a... Continue Reading →

As far as maxims in the English classroom go, 'show don't tell' is right up there with 'don't use the word nice' and 'no, the writer doesn't do that to make you want to read on'. The reason these become maxims, though, is because it's really quite difficult to explain why , for example, we... Continue Reading →

A couple of days ago, I posted the below on Twitter as a kind of passing remark on what I happened to be doing at that moment: https://twitter.com/__codexterous/status/1379714660161699840?s=20 However, it generated some interesting questions and so I thought I would pull together my personal process for managing, collating and keeping track of the many, many... Continue Reading →