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... Continue Reading →
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.
Number #2 in an occasional series of short posts on feedback, appearing in no particular order
Number #1 in an occasional series of short posts on feedback, appearing in no particular order
Thoughts on learning objectives and on the way we frame learning in English
James Durran 