A simple classroom technique, when drafting and editing.
Recently, I have been doing quite a bit of drafting and editing of creative writing with Year 5 and 6 pupils, and I have been finding this little game useful. I’m sure it’s not original, and I have used it with older students since search engines became a thing, but it is still new to many teachers – so here it is. (It’s very, very simple.) Continue reading “Googling for originality”
One of the main ways in which teachers ‘give’ feedback to pupils is through follow-up questioning. This is sometimes the case in written feedback, but is particularly the case in oral feedback, as part of dynamic classroom teaching, in which feedback is folded into learning and is indistinguishable from the discussion and exploration of ideas. It is one key way in which teachers insist on deeper thinking.*1 In English, it is one of the key ways in which we push analysis and explore response.
Jim Stewart and I wrote this for the TES in 1994, after the first round of new GCSE exams in English and English Literature, replacing 100% coursework. I wouldn’t agree with everything in it now, or with all of the expression, but – as comes across – we were a very angry profession at the time. I’m posting it here as a piece of educational archaeology! Continue reading “From 1994: on coursework and exams”
An account of a poetry lesson, with some thoughts on efficiency, on how we treat texts and on knowledge.
When I became an Advanced Skills Teacher, in 2002, the designation was still fairly new. There was quite an intensive appointment process involving a portfolio of documentary evidence, a set of testimonials and a visit by an external assessor, who watched me teach a mixed-ability Year 10 class. For this, I served up a ‘sure-fire’ double lesson on a poem, which I thought went very well. However, while the assessor enjoyed the lesson and was complimentary about it, he had a major reservation. Just the week before (he told me) he had seen the same poem “taught very well in just half the amount of lesson time.” I found this a little irksome. I argued that I could very easily have ‘taught the poem’ in half the time, but that the lesson was about more than covering curriculum content as quickly as possible. But did he have a point?
James Durran 