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Debra Myhill

A simple theory about writing

2016-09-23T13:39:51+01:00April 23rd, 2014|literacy|

The first thing to say is this is not in any way supposed to be a complete or unified theory - I'm well aware that there are many other important strands to improving pupils' writing and have written about many of them before. But I do think this theory (which has been bubbling away on my mental back burner for a while now) describes just one of the processes that can turn otherwise able pupils from poor writers into much more able ones. That said, I tend to get a bit over excited about these sorts of things and am often mistaken. [...]

The glamour of grammar: in context or not?

2015-11-09T14:55:47+00:00February 13th, 2014|English, literacy|

It's something of an understatement to say that glamour and grammar are not usually closely associated in many people's minds. One of the 100 words David Crystal uses to tell The Story of English is ‘grammar’. It turns out that grammar and glamour come from the same root. Grammar originally meant the study of everything written but, as reading must have seemed like an almost magical skill to your average medieval peasant, grammar became synonymous with supernatural or occult knowledge. ‘Grammary’ came to mean magical or necromantic learning. And this leads us to ‘glamour’ which first meant a magical spell or enchantment and has since [...]

Principled curriculum design: the English curriculum

2014-07-29T21:27:26+01:00December 16th, 2013|English, Featured|

The tragedy of life is that one can only understand life backwards, but one must live it forwards Søren Kierkegaard Back in March 2013, I wrote about the principles underlying my redesign of a Keys Stage 3 English curriculum. It received a mixed response. Since then Joe Kirby and Alex Quigley have published their ideas on redesigning this area of the curriculum and have, in different ways, influenced my thinking. Recently, I've presented my ideas on the English curriculum to over 100 English teachers and the consensus seems to be that there is no consensus. Having thought quite a bit about [...]

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