Learning from my mistakes: an English teacher's blog

For years, I have struggled with ‘group work’ in lessons.

This week I was lucky to see a production of Macbeth with students from my school.

Silence might be golden, but talk is magical.

One of the problems around plays and teaching them is that students struggle to analyse them.

Homework is one of those tricky things in school.

I have written at length about knowledge and its use in English, and this isn’t going to be one of those blogs, but it is about mapping out the thought processes in English lessons.

'We conclude that children appear to prioritise efficiency over completeness when reading, generating inferences spontaneously only when they are necessary for establishing a coherent representation of the text.’

I have experience of working with students of all levels, but one of the biggest issues I find with writing fluency is not often related to the content but it is spelling.

One of the things about oracy is that we often focus on the what rather than the how students speak.

I’ve discussed at length how English cannot be reduced to a simple checklist of things.

In terms of metacognition, cognitive load and cognitive load theory is one of the biggest concerns of any English teacher.

Today, I am writing a eulogy for someone very close to me.

Teaching students to write with effect is quite a tricky thing.

Effect is such a funny thing to explore when reading texts.

Over the past few years, we have been working on how we can use booklets effectively.

We never really talk enough about the complexity of reading and writing.

I wrote on using film clips to explore structure and the structure question on the exam paper last year.

Vocabulary is great at times, but we are in danger of infantilising students, if all we do is teach words.

For the last few years, I have been sharing my reading and reading recommendations.

In previous blogs, I have talked about knowledge retrieval and its problems in English, so I am not going to rehash or revisit the argument.

As we get closer to the end for our Year 11s, it is so common for us to throw (metaphorically) everything and the kitchen sink at them.

It is that annual time of year where I teach Question 3, the structure question, to students.

One of the biggest areas for English teachers is the ‘why’ aspect of analysis.

In the time I have been teaching, I have seen the teaching of English compartmentalised in so many different ways.

Over the past term, I have been working on quite a bit of creative writing with students.