Category: For Students
fifteen Useful Ways I’ve Got Better Over the Past five Years
As I begin a new job I am inclined to reflect on some of the ways I think my practice has got...
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Three Thoughts on Focus and Attention for Teachers and Students
The actual terms ‘focus’ and ‘attention’ are sadly poor terms for what they can really do. They are unduly technical and dry. They connote task completion and work. As teachers we want to inspire students to experience our lessons, not to just do stuff.
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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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Some thoughts about transfer – how learning and school are always in tension
As always we are often called into why we are doing this course in our free time. It reminds me...
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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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RAFT – A Model for Transition for Year 13 Students
1. What did transition look like for you when you had moved from highschool to uni/ last country...
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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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Planning a lesson for interview – revealing a philosophy of teaching and learning
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:
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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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A simple example of Inducting rather than deducting – Teaching 1984 Conceptually
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.
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Lesson Plan Example iGCSE Literature – Cambridge 04575
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.
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