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 →
Ok: first of all an admission. The title of this post, with its impossibly bold claim to distil teaching poetry into a series of neatly packaged steps, is somewhat overzealous. In a manner somewhat, and unfavourably, all too familiar to the last year, I fear it will overpromise and underdeliver. However, what it will do,... 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 ! Yesterday, I posted... Continue Reading →
Yesterday, I taught a lesson about the literary canon to Year 10. One of the ways I tried to explain how the canon functions, an idea inexorably abstract to a group of 14 year olds, is through the example of Radio 1. Now, this isn't done out of any desire to increase engagement or play... Continue Reading →
The below outlines some of the questions students might like to ask when thinking about about unseen prose, either for A Level or even at GCSE. It is of course not an exhaustive list but perhaps a useful point of reference! Language Are there any specific words that are interesting or puzzling? Are there any images... Continue Reading →
Last year I created a full Macbeth booklet for teaching the play, which included: knowledge organiserretrieval quizzeskey extracts with lots of room for annotationsbig questionsplot outlinecontextQR codes to massolit lectureskey quotation bankmodel essay and essay structure A lot of this material, especially the retrival quizzes and key extracts, was supplied by previously available resources of... Continue Reading →
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