Category: Conceptual Teaching
Some thoughts on working hard at teaching
Teaching is a tough profession if you are emotionally invested. The institution of education is...
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It has been a while since I wrote
It has been a while since I wrote. My headspace has been in academic study, and distant-study at...
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Creating a healthy academic discourse
Creating a healthy academic discourse in a (relatively!) non-selective classroom with pupils who...
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What do we want to measure in schools and why
I received a thoughtful email from a colleague this week. My (redacted!) reply is worth sharing: ...
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Concept-based Learning PD
Recently we led a concept-based learning day for senior English. Here are some of our ideas,...
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HOW CAN WE CREATE KNOWLEDGE, AMBROSE PIERCE
I’ve been listening the Western Tradition this week whilst I’ve been travelling...
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Dissimilar transfer in concept-based learning- Some thoughts
I question concept teaching models that aim for skill based transfers in my subjects. Such an approach loses the power and relevancy of our discipline. Instead I say we should aim for insights, human interest elements. Between schooling and learning, aim for learning.
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Thoughts about my education and podcasting
Teaching students for fifteen years has allowed me to recognise the particular deficiencies of my...
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ATL IB – Considering concepts in a training task
1 Identity agency, voice, character, narrator, reader, author. ATL: Teaching developed in local...
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A thought: make students write as intensely for a common writing task as they do for an exam.
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.
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Essay Scenarios – Practice in Elite Sport Transferred to the English classroom
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.
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Thoughts about Narratology and Prosody at iGCSE- PRIORITISING THE TEACHING OF FORM
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?
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