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Teaching texting

2011-08-23T14:43:29+01:00August 23rd, 2011|English|

A lot of folks are very worried about the impact of teenagers texting. In a Daily Mail article (oh! the shame), John Humphrys expressed the view that "SMS vandals... are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours" and goes on to warn of the danger of "our written language [ending up] as a series of ridiculous emoticons and ever-changing abbreviations". Sounds pretty dreadful, doesn't it? For as long as there have been mobile phones, it has been the job of schools and teachers to confiscate 'em. The standard approach seems to be blanket bans in classrooms and a grudging [...]

Formative assessment and the mark scheme

2011-07-23T23:03:52+01:00July 23rd, 2011|assessment, English, learning, training|

I’ve been consciously and actively using exam board mark schemes as an essential component of formative assessment with my classes for some time now and thought it was time to share what I was up to more widely. I led a CPD session on this recently and while none of what I said was new or even particularly surprising, it did at least remind us what the point of marking all those essays is. Before putting my presentation together, I decided to check out what was out there already. Plenty of stuff on formative assessment but nothing specifically (nothing that I [...]

Rip it up: Hula hooping about literature

2018-12-16T22:59:11+00:00July 16th, 2011|English, learning|

I keep this post on the site to remind me just how far I've come. When I wrote this in 2011, despite teaching for 12 years, I knew practically nothing about education. I am now rather ashamed and embarrassed at my naivety but it's good, i think, to remind our selves that we all have feet of clay.  If you do decide to read on please know that I would now disavow pretty much everything that follows.  December, 2018 Day 1 Have just finished reading Phil Beadle’s book, Dancing About Architecture at 2.39 am. I received it in the post today and tore [...]

Zooming in and out

2013-07-19T12:08:59+01:00July 11th, 2011|English, learning, reading|

For some years now I have been using what I call The Grade Ladder with students to help them understand the skills required to perform at different grades. This isn't particularly original and has been around for quite while. I first encountered the terms 'evaluate', 'analyse', 'explore', 'explain' and 'identify' in GCSE English specifications but it's obvious at even a cursory glance that these skills are underpinned by Bloom's Taxonomy.   So, to IDENTIFY, students had to be able to give an opinion and support it with textual evidence; to EXPLAIN they had to show they understood the relationship between their [...]

Using Learning Continuums

2011-07-11T20:33:58+01:00July 11th, 2011|English, learning|

After reading How to Teach the Perfect Ofsted Lesson by Jackie Beere, I came up with the idea of the Learning Continuum. The idea is that the learning objective for a lesson should be viewed as a journey. Students can achieve outcomes that meet the objective at different levels. Aha, I hear you say, isn’t he just talking about differentiated outcomes? Well, yes, but the difference here is that the emphasis is placed on students continuing on through the learning journey over the course of the lesson. The diagram above is a useful way of explaining what I mean. [...]

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