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Blog2020-07-15T11:13:15+01:00

Why ‘using the curriculum as a progression model’ is harder than you think

Since first hearing the idea that the curriculum should be the model of progression on Michael Fordham's blog, I immediately and instinctively felt that this was right. Of course, I said to myself, we will know whether students are making progress if they are learning more of the curriculum. Voila! And, like many others, I left the notion as a self-evident truth that required no further explanation. Once it is [...]

By |September 8th, 2021|Categories: assessment, curriculum|Tags: |6 Comments

Curating a reading curriculum

One of the roles of a school is to curate a sequences of encounters which students have a entitlement to experience before they leave. For many students, school may be the only time in their lives when they are given no choice but to navigate their way though events that are unfamiliar and intellectually demanding. Selecting a sequence of books which students will have read to them is a [...]

By |July 21st, 2021|Categories: curriculum, reading|8 Comments

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

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 [...]

By |July 10th, 2021|Categories: curriculum, English|Tags: , |4 Comments

School rules

Should schools have rules? Obviously, yes. No one - I think - disputes the necessity of having rules that keep people safe and make life easier and more pleasant for everyone involved. So, a rule setting out acceptable behaviour in a science lab or DT workshop are clearly important and sensible. Rules governing minimum expectations of how students should behave in classrooms and social spaces are also desirable, as [...]

By |July 4th, 2021|Categories: behaviour, leadership|Tags: |10 Comments

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

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 [...]

By |June 25th, 2021|Categories: Featured|9 Comments

Echo reading: Building a bridge between text and meaning

As a student I was one of those kids who was desperate to be picked to read. When we studied Romeo and Juliet I got to read Mercutio, a part, I felt, I was born for.  I threw myself into it and felt I really connected with both the character and the play. This was obviously how to do things. Fast forward to my PGCE. For the first weeks of [...]

By |June 22nd, 2021|Categories: reading|Tags: , , , |5 Comments

Schools and the Tyranny of Merit

One of the books I read last year that has most stayed with me is Michael Sandel's The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? In it, Sandel argues that meritocracy is inherently harmful to society and has brought about the huge divides in politics across the western world we've witnessed in recent years. The divide between 'winner's and 'losers' gets ever deeper and, while Sandel acknowledges that [...]

By |May 27th, 2021|Categories: leadership|Tags: , |4 Comments

The problem with ‘it makes the reader want to read on’

One of the most common and irritating of responses to be found strewn through students' literary or linguistic analysis is that a writer will have a made of particular choice in order to 'make the reader want to read on.' So far as I know, no English teacher has ever advised their students to use this phrase and, in fact, a great many explicitly forbid its use. From where, [...]

By |May 23rd, 2021|Categories: English, writing|3 Comments

A reading curriculum: Gap-widening vs gap-narrowing

The idea that education acts as a Matthew Effect that disproportionately benefits those who start with most is an uncomfortable but well-understood phenomenon. Everything we do in schools either widens the advantage gap between the most privileged and least privileged students, or narrows it. This is, I think, a real dichotomy: anything that, on balance, appears net neutral is in fact acting to keep the gap a yawning chasm of [...]

By |March 21st, 2021|Categories: Featured|6 Comments

How should writing fit into the English curriculum?

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 [...]

By |March 3rd, 2021|Categories: Featured|7 Comments

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

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 [...]

By |February 9th, 2021|Categories: English|Tags: |0 Comments

Making Meaning in English

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