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…
In terms of metacognition, cognitive load and cognitive load theory is one of the biggest concerns of any English teacher. We might not dress it up with a fancy term, but we know that how much or how little we present of text can make or break a student’s understanding of a text. Too much of a text and you can overwhelm them with too much information. Too little text and you can strip the meaning…
Today, I am writing a eulogy for someone very close to me. Like most people, I’ve put things off. For example, I’ve been tempted to search the history of using ‘a’ instead of ‘an’ when forming the phrase ‘a eulogy’. I won’t bore you with the details. And, of course, writing this blog is another way for me to put off the inevitable. Anyway, a eulogy is about creating a sense of a person and what…
Teaching students to write with effect is quite a tricky thing. Over the years, I have seen writing reduced to tick lists. The problem is that no two good pieces are really alike. You could create one tick list for one piece and then you’ll need a different list for the other piece. Both are widely different. Presion, subtlety and nuance are not things you can easily put on a ticklist. They don’t…
Effect is such a funny thing to explore when reading texts. It is wrapped up in so many things. What has happened previously? What does the reader think will happen next? What is really going on in the story? A lot of what we expect from students is precision. Precise identification of a mood or a feeling.The best students are those that can identify a range of precise moods and even some of those…
Over the past few years, we have been working on how we can use booklets effectively. With Literature texts, there is so much you can do. That is the beauty and also the problem with it. How do you ensure students get a similar experience but allow the teacher some level of freedom to teach how they want? That’s why we have worked on our booklets that work alongside what the normal teacher does.…
We never really talk enough about the complexity of reading and writing. And, we certainly don’t talk enough about the emotional complexity of writing or the psychology of writing (and reading). Instead, we tend to float around things. We tend to impose feelings we have to those we expect students to have. I love reading so you will love it too. Newsflash: the majority of the country loves…
I wrote on using film clips to explore structure and the structure question on the exam paper last year. Here is the link to the blog: https://learningfrommymistakesenglish.blogspot.com/2023/03/i-am-ready-for-my-closeup-now-mrs-writer.html Students have a lot of background knowledge around film and storytelling, which we don’t employ enough in lessons. The sad demise of media elements of the…
Vocabulary is great at times, but we are in danger of infantilising students, if all we do is teach words. For teachers of A-Level English Language we are familiar with how children acquire language. After babbling, children start the ‘one-word stage’ at about a year old. Children learn words and use them for a range of functions. Take the word ‘ball’. In the one-word stage, it can mean a number…
For the last few years, I have been sharing my reading and reading recommendations. Feel free to use or adapt for your own school. All the books mentioned here have been read by me. The links below allow you access to the main documents. You will have to download them if you wish to edit them. Thanks Chris Academic Year 2025-26 Term Word Link Pdf Link 6 5 Term 5 Term 5 4 Term 4 Term 4 3 Term 3…
In previous blogs, I have talked about knowledge retrieval and its problems in English, so I am not going to rehash or revisit the argument. It is simply far more complex than learning several facts. However, there are occasions where I think we need more explicit teaching of knowledge. Symbolism is one particular area that we rely on heavily in English, but rarely do we teach it explicitly.…
As we get closer to the end for our Year 11s, it is so common for us to throw (metaphorically) everything and the kitchen sink at them. As they leave classrooms, we pile them up with different sheets to help. Each lesson tries to cover large feats such as the whole of a Shakespeare play in an hour. All fifteen poems in two lessons. Whole language papers in an hour. When we treat students like…
It is that annual time of year where I teach Question 3, the structure question, to students. The more I teach this question, the more I think we need to work more on symbolism in English. And, to an extent teach them the background knowledge to identify those symbols. Symbolism is what we think we do a lot in lessons. We look at poems and explore the symbols through similes, metaphors and…
One of the biggest areas for English teachers is the ‘why’ aspect of analysis. Why does the writer do this? Over the years, we have seen paragraph structures to address this and we even seen lists of verbs to address this issue. The problem is that whatever way we approach things we are using a pneumatic drill to open a flower. Things are usually more subtle, nuanced and complex than seems on…
In the time I have been teaching, I have seen the teaching of English compartmentalised in so many different ways. And, dear reader, you cannot put it solely at the hands of the GCSE exams. We’ve had the National Curriculum and APP grids along the way. They all attempt to make the subject an easily digestible tick list. When you do that, you see the general focus is one making the abstract…
Over the past term, I have been working on quite a bit of creative writing with students. And, I always find with each year that there’s something different I notice or explore with students. As I ease back into blogging, after taking a bit of a holiday, here are some problems I’ve faced and some possible solutions. Problem 1: Too much action and not a lot of description We’ve all had it. A…