It is always risky to discuss something as complex as teaching and learning in terms of any sort of ‘model’. It is always reductive and probably wrong. However, at the moment I am finding it useful to think of classroom teaching working like this. (Click to enlarge) Based on well-rehearsed principles, this schematic might be... Continue Reading →
A short post about climbing frames: pitch high and support all pupils in reaching for that level. This is a photo of my two children at the ‘Yorkshire Dales Ice Cream Farm’ (not ‘pick-your-own’, sadly) taken about three years ago. They are the oddly gnomic-looking child at the top of the slide and – typically... Continue Reading →
Number #4 in an occasional series of short posts about feedback, appearing in no particular order. In many schools, there is a literacy ‘marking code’ by which all teachers are meant to abide. Typically, spelling errors are marked with an ‘S’, punctuation errors with a ‘P’ and so on. Some of these codes are highly... Continue Reading →
Number #3 in an occasional series of short posts about feedback, appearing in no particular order. When I was 11 or 12, I did this piece of creative writing for homework. It's called ‘An Angry Traffic Warden’. This was the written feedback which I received: There was clearly a process here: the mark had... Continue Reading →
Michael Rosen recently published a 'matrix' of different types of comments which children make about the texts they are reading: I have had a go at composing typical 'trigger questions' for each type of comment, for use in training. Click here or on the image above to download the questions as a Word document.
This is an approach which I have used successfully when revising clusters of poetry for GCSE. (Apologies for any parts which seem commonplace or obvious.) The basic idea is familiar - to practise summing up the ‘essence’ of each poem, so that students feel that they have a pinned-down overview of each – a handy... Continue Reading →
Number #2 in an occasional series of short posts on feedback, appearing in no particular order
Thoughts on how schools are assessing progress and attainment in English at Key Stage 3 This post is based very closely on an original article for NATE‘s Teaching English (Issue 8, Summer 2015) Post-levels, it has been left to schools to decide on how to track progress at Key Stage 3. A number of teaching schools […]
Number #1 in an occasional series of short posts on feedback, appearing in no particular order
James Durran 