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OAT English curriculum project

2023-02-26T15:49:39+00:00February 26th, 2023|English|

Since January 2020 I've been working for Omiston Academies Trust as their Senior Lead for English. Over that time I and the amazing team of lead practitioners I lead have created what we think is a fantastic English curriculum. Not only have we been working on a book which will explain the entire process from intent, to implementation to impact, we've just launched a website - OAT English - to host all of the resources and training materials we've created. All the materials are covered under a Creative Commons license so that - as long as you don't try to [...]

Using mini whiteboards in English

2023-03-31T16:34:52+01:00October 9th, 2022|English|

According to TeacherTapp, 72% primary and 45% secondary teachers use mini whiteboards (MWBs.) There are big variations between different subjects in secondaries with 69% of MFL and 57% science teachers claiming to use them but just 28% of English teachers. Why might this be? Are MFL and science lessons just better suited to using MWBs? Are English lesson much more concerned with the kind of extended writing that best lends itself to exercise books? Judging from the poll responses above, primary teachers appear to be more concerned with checking students' understanding during lessons. Charitably, we might claim that in secondaries [...]

Implementing English: five useful teaching strategies

2022-10-09T13:57:32+01:00October 9th, 2022|English|

Working across 43 schools means I get to see a lot of English lessons and talk to a fair number of English teachers. In oder to support our teachers we've been working on identifying what we think are high impact, low effort approaches to teaching English that any teacher could adopt or adapt. I've learned from every single one of our schools and, working with my colleagues in the English lead practitioner team, have been working to combine and refine many of the great ideas and approaches I've experienced to a set of  simple teaching strategies we can use to train [...]

Embedding reading fluency in the KS3 English curriculum

2022-05-30T17:00:30+01:00May 29th, 2022|English, reading|

Last year I wrote about 'echo reading': ...last week I ... watched English teacher Rhys Williams do something I’d never seen before. He was teaching The Tempest to a low prior attaining Year 8 class and was focussing on the moment in Act 3 scene 1 where Ferdinand and Miranda first begin flirting. What he did was to allocate lines to different members of the class that they would read aloud after listening to him reading them first, attempting to emulate his tone, emphasis and pronunciation. While I was watching I wasn’t sure whether it was working. The students were reading aloud with impressive [...]

Assessing English at KS3

2022-03-05T17:53:30+00:00March 5th, 2022|assessment, English|

Throughout my career, the de facto approach to assessing English at KS3 has been to use extended writing. After all, this is what students will be faced with in their GCSEs so it kinda made sense that this was what we should get them used to as early as possible. In order to take this approach, we need a markscheme. Most markschemes attempt to identify the different skills areas students should be demonstrating and then award marks based on well well these skills are demonstrated. The weakness of using markschemes - or rubrics, if you prefer - is that it comes [...]

Specifying a concept-led KS3 English curriculum

2022-03-10T21:56:34+00:00October 23rd, 2021|assessment, curriculum, English|

If we accept that we are using the curriculum as a progression model - if making progress means that children know more, remember more and can do more of the curriculum they've been taught - then that paves the way for us to move away from using unhelpful approaches like flight paths and age related expectations to make judgements about whether children are making progress. But what happens if it's not clear that knowing more, remembering more and being able to do more of the curriculum don't feel like progress? This, I think, is a big issue with the way English [...]

Do young adult novels have a place in the English curriculum?

2024-02-22T08:52:46+00:00July 10th, 2021|curriculum, English|

When I got my first teaching job I visited the school at the end of July to find out what I'd be teaching the following September. The Head of Department talked me through which GCSE texts I might want to go for. When we came to consider my Key Stage 3 classes, the brand new sets of Holes and Skellig had, unfortunately, already been nabbed by other teachers but he gave me the keys to the stockroom and told me to pick from whatever was left. On one side of the room were piles of unloved, dog-eared class sets of [...]

Specify, teach, assess: using the English curriculum as a progression model

2021-06-25T17:20:36+01:00June 25th, 2021|Featured|

One of the biggest barriers to the successful implementation of an English curriculum is that all too often students are assessed on their ability to do things they haven't actually been taught. This may sound bizarre, but it is, I think, an inevitable product of the belief that English is a 'skills-based subject'. Let's say you teach students a unit on 'Greek myth,' 'a background to Shakespeare,' or Malorie Blackman's YA novel Noughts and Crosses. How will you assess students' progress? Typically, some theme or aspect covered in the unit is brought to the fore and then students are asked to [...]

How should writing fit into the English curriculum?

2021-10-30T14:38:37+01:00March 3rd, 2021|Featured|

I think like many English teachers I've long been conflicted about the position of writing in the curriculum. On the one hand, of course writing is central to students' experience of studying English. Not only should we aim to make them technically proficient, but we should explicitly teach them how to master a range of written styles and genres. But, on the other hand, writing units are turgid. Although I always dreaded the moment in the academic calendar when the inevitable writing scheme of work hoved into view,  I felt guilty. Clearly, the fault was mine and I just needed to [...]

Making Meaning in English: An exploration of the role of knowledge in language and literature

2021-02-10T16:23:49+00:00February 9th, 2021|English|

I'm pleased to announce that Making Meaning in English is available now. (Quote MME20 for a 20% discount) The book is a discussion on the role of English as a school subject: What is it for? How has it been shaped? What’s been done in the past? What’s gone wrong and what’s been successful? It particularly examines what knowledge means in English. Clearly the approaches to acquiring knowledge that work in subjects like maths and science are less appropriate to a subject more concerned with judgement, interpretation and value. I suggest there is important disciplinary and substantive knowledge that tends to [...]

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