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 ! Why and how... 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 →
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 →
Earlier today I was reading, or rather listening, to Rob MacFarlane’s excellent book Underland when I came across a fasctaining concept that I wanted to share, and that I think will have a lot of mileage with various GCSE and A Level texts. The concept is that of ‘solastalgia’, which, as MacFarlane outlines, comes from... 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 →
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 →
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 →
I've written a few posts under the general banner of strategies to help enhance student writing and analysis, whether related to generating initial thinking, scaffolding or modelling. So, here, in one place, is a collection of some of these ideas with a sense of how they might fit alongside each other. But, where do we... 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 →
Mobile phones should be banned from the classroom as they are nothing but a distraction’. Write an article in which you persuade people of your point of view. Dialling 999: An Emergency in Education Imagine, if you will, a class of thirty students. Imagine you’re the teacher. It’s Monday, Period One and you’re trying to... Continue Reading →
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