Archive

Flat packed curriculum

Sep 25, 2022 | Category: English

“It is so easy to be wrong – and to persist in being wrong – when the costs of being wrong are paid by others.”Thomas Sowell Why do we buy so much flat pack furniture? First, it's many times more affo...

Embedding reading fluency in the KS3 English curriculum

May 29, 2022 | Category: English

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 a...

#echo reading #reading fluency

The case against Power Point as means of implementing curriculum

Mar 13, 2022 | Category: curriculum

First things first: I have nothing against PowerPoint. As means for displaying visual information it definitely has its merits. I have no issues with teachers using slides to share pictures, diagrams...

#Powerpoint #Teacher Guides

Assessing English at KS3

Mar 05, 2022 | Category: assessment

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...

#curriculum related expectations

Come work with me...

Mar 04, 2022 | Category: English

Since January 2021 I've been working for Ormiston Academies Trust as Senior Lead Practitioner for English. I had no idea when I started how much I'd love working for OAT or how much I'd relish the rol...

Using tenor, vehicle and ground to analyse metaphors

Feb 02, 2022 | Category: English

It's vanishingly rare to encounter a student in secondary school who doesn't know what a metaphor is. That said, it's equally rare to find students who are able to define what a metaphor actually is....

#metaphor #tenor vehicle & ground

The problem with marking and how to solve it

Jan 31, 2022 | Category: workload

Every teacher - particularly English teachers - has huge existential guilt about marking. When I worked full time as a teacher marking was the first thing to go when the stress inevitably piled up. An...

#marking #feedback #proofreading #whole class feedback #teacher presence

How should we teach students to interpret texts?

Dec 12, 2021 | Category: English

The default approach to so much English teaching is to present students with a text and then say some version of, "What do you think of this?" If you're fortunate enough to teach in a selective settin...

#cognitive load theory #Michael Oakeshott #IA Richards

The shape of assessment

Dec 31, 2021 | Category: assessment

As we should all now be aware, there are no external audiences interested in schools' internal data. If we're going to go to the trouble of getting students to sit formal assessments on which we will...

#mastery assessment

Is curriculum all that?

Sep 24, 2021 | Category: curriculum

Over the past few years we've all been putting a lot of thought and energy into trying to improve our specification of what we want students to learn and, whilst there have been some unfortunate conse...