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This is a truncated version of a recent ResearchEd presentation I gave, positioning my view of knowledge in the subject English curriculum.
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I like to know exactly what I’m going to be teaching in my lessons and how I’m going to teach it. As with many teachers, PowerPoint became the normal way of planning lesson activities: retrieval quizzes, new information, page numbers, questions, and models all painstakingly written up on to slides projected on to the screen.…
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Mock exam season is upon us. With it comes the dread of piles of marking, tight deadlines, and students pestering you for grades (I can already hear the “have you marked our mocks yet” reverberating around the school…) But I think the excitement – and I use that word in the sense of hustle and…
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I spend a lot of my time in a state of frustration at the AQA English Language papers. They don’t really know what they are (they’re closer to unseen fiction than actually assessing language) and because of that, teachers don’t really know either. I think I just about got the hang of it a couple…
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Recently, I’ve been thinking about behaviour. Specifically, the apparent differences between the ‘warm-strict’ approach (which full disclosure, is what I’m used to) and behaviour systems based on ‘When the Adults Change, Everything Changes‘ by Paul Dix. I remember that when the book was published, there was great fanfare around its contents. The contrast it provided…
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This is probably a rather self-indulgent blog, so apologies in advance. I wanted to write down what I’ve done during my first year as a Head of Department – and what a year it was! – which I think have helped our department go from strength to strength. It might be useful for other teachers…
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As part of my job, I have the absolute joy of seeing great practice in both primary and secondary schools. Recently, I was taking part in a learning walk in a primary school. I saw every class from nursery to year 6 in an effort to understand how literacy was being approached in different year…
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Planning a scheme of work is probably one of my favourite bits of teaching. Deciding what to include (and just as importantly, what to leave out) to help students understand and enjoy the texts they are reading, while at the same time developing their ability to speak aloud; write fluently; and think critically is a…
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The recent adjustments to GCSE English exams have meant that I haven’t had to teach the poetry anthology for two years – and I won’t be teaching it again until September. I’m pretty sure my teaching of the literature texts has improved dramatically with the practise I’ve had, so recently I started thinking far into…
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Obviously, subject knowledge isn’t actually a tangible asset. It isn’t something you can really quantify, measure or store – all of the ‘subject knowledge audits’ in the world won’t really identify what we as teachers know and how in-depth our knowledge is. Recently, I’ve been thinking about what the nebulous concept of subject knowledge really…
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