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For years, I have struggled with ‘group work’ in lessons. And, I’d admit that that was born out of a sense of control and desire to manage the behaviour in the classroom effectively. You can monitor and control behaviour easily if only one person is speaking at any one time. You can address rule breakers and reinforce the rules quickly and simply. Tom, remember the rule: only one person speaks at…
This week I was lucky to see a production of Macbeth with students from my school. It just so happened to coincide with many other schools visiting at the same time. The theatre was awash with Year 10 and Year 11 students and they were spellbound, silent and mesmerised by the production. Not a peep could be heard. Not a phone going off. Not even a rustle of sweet wrappers. As one colleague (not an…
Silence might be golden, but talk is magical. It is interesting that the latest focus is on oracy when the past decade has been obsessed around silence. We’ve obsessed around silent students, silent classrooms and silent corridors. The major proxy for learning has been silence. SLT have been patrolling corridors to see that classrooms are quiet. Good teaching has always been marked by the amount…
O ne of the problems around plays and teaching them is that students struggle to analyse them. Give them a piece of prose and they can analyse it until their hearts explode. Yet, dialogue is always the one that stumps them. For years, I have seen teachers teach plays focusing on dramatic devices or the same few big quotes. The problem is that students are not experiencing analysing dialogue. Real…
Homework is one of those tricky things in school. The only people that seem to like it are pushy parents, who think every child should be doing at least four hours a night on homework. Students don’t like it, because it gets in the way of things like life, social time, time with one parent as their parents have split up, football training and so on. Teachers hate it, because it is an endless cycle…
I have written at length about knowledge and its use in English, and this isn’t going to be one of those blogs, but it is about mapping out the thought processes in English lessons. We don’t spell out the internalised thought process in English. To the outsider, or an average student, the processes must look magical and effortless. They see a student coming up with a great idea and within seconds…
'We conclude that children appear to prioritise efficiency over completeness when reading, generating inferences spontaneously only when they are necessary for establishing a coherent representation of the text.’ Joseph , Wonnacott, Nation (2021) The above piece of research is probably the one piece that has stuck with me. The emphasis of efficiency over completeness. We see that so much in our…
I have experience of working with students of all levels, but one of the biggest issues I find with writing fluency is not often related to the content but it is spelling. Now, this isn’t a ‘bash spelling’ blog but it is about exploring our relationship with spelling. The two easiest things to spot with any piece of writing are handwriting and spellings. Parents often mention handwriting or…
One of the things about oracy is that we often focus on the what rather than the how students speak. Communication is much more than words and phrases. It is how we control the flow of speech. Or, more importantly, how we empower students to dive in and swim in the spoken discourse. One area I have been working on, with some success, is dealing with the infamous ‘I don’t know’. The blanket answer…
I’ve discussed at length how English cannot be reduced to a simple checklist of things. There seems to be an endless desire to homogenise subjects. Something that works in one subject must always work for another subject. That isn’t the case. One area that English struggles with is identifying the top elements of our subject. We have these phrases like ‘flair’, ‘confidence’ and ‘creativity’ which…
