Schools are working very hard at the moment to make sure that ‘adaptive teaching’ is an established idea, and is a successful part of everyday practice. This post (based on work I have done with schools) offers one framework for reflecting on or auditing that practice. This has, in turn, emerged from discussions around what... Continue Reading →
A ‘key learning question’ is simply a way of framing the learning in a lesson or across a sequence of lessons – of setting the learning agenda for pupils. It is an alternative to the traditional ‘learning objective’, replacing a statement of what pupils will learn, or of what they will aim to learn, with... Continue Reading →
Colleagues and I have been working with primary schools to develop an alternative to listed ‘success criteria’ for writing, which we call ‘boxed’ or ‘expanding success criteria' (or often just 'the rectangles thing.') It is very easy to adopt, and teachers have been finding that it can transform how writing is talked about and approached... Continue Reading →
A reflection on some different ways to structure discussion of a text in the classroom. The example is from Key Stage 3, although the principles are applicable to any phase. The text below is one which we used to read with Key Stage 3 pupils at Parkside Community College, in Cambridge, when teaching about World... Continue Reading →
Practical tools for reflecting on the what, why and how of English teaching A friend’s nephew, when in Year 8, remarked to him: “I used to enjoy English, but all we do now is write PEE paragraphs.” If this is a pupil’s view (even an unfair one) of English in their school, then something has... 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 →
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 […]
Thoughts on how students are taught to write critically about texts in exams This post was originally an article for NATE‘s Teaching English (Issue 12, Autumn 2016) Preparing for the new English GCSEs has compelled English departments to put their Key Stage 4 curriculum through yet another revision. For many, this has been taken as an opportunity […]
Thoughts on learning objectives and on the way we frame learning in English
James Durran 