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Of Mice and Men

Whose English literature is it anyway?

2014-05-27T20:28:04+01:00May 27th, 2014|English|

Have you heard? Education Secretary, Michael Gove has personally intervened to ban the only books worth teaching in the entire canon of English literature. Twentieth century American classics like To Kill A Mockingbird, A View from the Bridge and Of Mice and Men (Not to mention one of my personal favourites, The Catcher In The Rye.) have been summarily removed from English classrooms.  Only, he hasn't. Here's what he has actually said: I have not banned anything. Nor has anyone else. All we are doing is asking exam boards to broaden – not narrow – the books young people study for GCSE. [...]

Anatomy of an outstanding lesson

2014-03-15T18:37:34+00:00January 22nd, 2013|English, learning, planning|

I'd want to make clear at the outset of this post that I no longer believe there is such a thing as an 'outstanding' lesson and would like to refer you to this post. Outstanding lessons are all alike; every unsatisfactory lesson is unsatisfactory in its own way. Leo Tolstoy (and me) It's all very well writing a book called The Perfect Ofsted English Lesson, but it does rather set you up for a fall. People expect you to be able to bang out Grade 1 lessons to order. Anything less than outstanding would be a bitter disappointment. I've reflected a number [...]

Forget the answer, what's the question?

2011-09-24T16:37:17+01:00September 24th, 2011|learning|

We all know the value of effective questioning, but should it be the students rather than the teacher doing a bit more of the asking? After reading about Question Formulation Technique (getting students to think of their own questions rather than just answering mine) a few weeks ago I was really keen to give it a whirl. Tait Cole However, Dylan Wiliam's SSAT 2010 keynote is still ringing in my ears: we (teachers) should not waste time on self indulgent gimmicks if it causes us to move away from AfL and other proven high impact teaching & learning strategies. [...]

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 [...]

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