Study

asdfasfasfasdf sadfasfd sadf fasdfasd asdfsadffsdafsda sadfd asdf asdf asdf asdf asdf asdf asdf asdfdsafsfad dfasfdsa asdffdsa asdffd asdfasdf asdfadf sadfasdfsa dfsaf safdasfd sadf sadf sdafasdf asdf dfasfasdfa

Reading for School

asdfsafdsaf asdf asdf adsf asdf fsadsad fadsf sdfa asdf asdf asdf fdas asfd dfsa fdsa sadf adsf dafs sd af sdaf dfas dsfa sdaf

A thought: make students write as intensely for a common writing task as they do for an exam.

by thequillguy | Jun 28, 2020 | Conceptual Teaching, For Teachers

So much of my training has involved inspiring students for whom there is little intrinsic motivation for study. I have taught in schools where the consequences of this can be visceral. Teaching students like this is a different job, although you cannot separate good teaching from behaviour management (although you can separate behaviour management from good teaching, it seems). If a student trusts you and desire to work (often it is even just because of your persona as a teacher), the enable them to create and analyse at length outside an exam is an ambition not often mentioned.

Essay Scenarios – Practice in Elite Sport Transferred to the English classroom

by thequillguy | Jun 25, 2020 | Conceptual Teaching, For Students, Metacognition

I think the thing with metacognition is for students to move beyond listing subject-specific strategies (which isn’t that tricky), and instead to actually conceptualise what they might mean. Writing is an idiosyncratic process so what works once may not work again (at least for a while…). It is also a fairly tacit process, so just articulating a strategy again is not necessarily helpful.

Planning a lesson for interview – revealing a philosophy of teaching and learning

by thequillguy | Jun 24, 2020 | For Students, How to Plan and Mark

These past few years I have both seen and delivered a number of interview lessons. I believe these lessons reflect the philosophy of the observer as much as they do the capability of the teacher. The stakes for an interview lesson are high: will you be given a job? Or as an observer, can you judge that that teacher’s wider operation? These outcomes are pragmatically important but also reflect more profound approaches to the profession. So with this tension in mind, here are some of the ways I think about interview lessons:

Thoughts about Narratology and Prosody at iGCSE- PRIORITISING THE TEACHING OF FORM

by thequillguy | Jun 21, 2020 | Conceptual Teaching, For Students, Literature

Narrative theory is undertaught I think. I have had to self-educate myself. It is essential when responding to novels because without it there is an undue focus on finding figurative language. Finding figurative language can be a huge issue when that might not be what the narrative is doing, especially when focalised on a character who is uneducated (or just normal!). Therefore, understanding focalisation is key… to whom do the words belong?

A simple example of Inducting rather than deducting – Teaching 1984 Conceptually

by thequillguy | Jun 14, 2020 | For Students

Today I tried a simple tweak in my introduction to 1984.

My colleague Brian Taylor (see his work here!) created a useful resource where students considered 1984’s contemporary implications by reading examples of state-sanctioned oppression.

Lesson Plan Example iGCSE Literature – Cambridge 04575

by thequillguy | Jun 10, 2020 | Craft of Teaching, For Students, How to Plan and Mark, Practical Teaching

The act of planning a single lesson plan for review is a necessary but problematic element of teaching. Geoff Petty, an educationalist whose consequentialist approach influences contemporary thought, says expert teachers do not necessary focus their planning on one-off lessons, but rather on the ‘bigger picture’. That bigger picture can include ideas for outside the class, adult-needs models of education, wider elements of cultural capital, and even just the assessment that the students are building towards.

Some issues of the focus on close-analysis of literature – iGCSE and IB. How we do things differently?

by thequillguy | Jun 7, 2020 | For Students, Practical Teaching

I think we’ve seen some students really lack motivation to tackle literature. It’s bigger than one classroom, and maybe even in one school. Kierkegaard bemoaned how the humanities were losing their true purpose (posing questions about how to lead a better life), and Rosenblatt believes the same, too.