english teaching Satan, Scrooge, Slippers: the magic of associative thinking in English How do we get students to think independently about meaning?
english teaching Putting the E E in Ectoplasm Yesterday was a disaster. I had to sluice it off me with soap, but still some of its muck remained behind my ears.
atomic essays Atomic essay #16 – 6 ideas for teaching narrative writing I love teaching narrative writing. There are some approaches I keep going back to that I feel work really well. This post presents and outlines six of them. They aren't a sequence; they're just things I do to help students practise aspects of writing craft.
atomic essays Atomic Essay #6 - context in one question, then a million more For me, when I'm thinking about context, I start by asking myself a question: How will this help to probe the meanings in the text, and how will it help me and my students make meaning?
atomic essays Atomic Essay #4: crafting dialogue I don't know much Stephen King, having only read The Shining of his oeuvre, but since I read his On Writing earlier this year, I've been thinking about his simple idea of the writer's toolbox.
atomic essays Atomic Essay #2: Missa Solemnis - The Catholic Mass in War Photographer We talk a lot in English teaching circles about knowledge. Knowledge interrelates and interconnects as we learn. I've been thinking about what role knowledge can play in analysis, asking myself exactly what knowledge I want my students to have, and why I'd want them to have it.
atomic essays Atomic essay #1: conversations with fragments in English I'm still thinking a lot about the subject of my last post: how treating English as a discipline at secondary stage might help unlock student engagement with the subject.
english teaching A little more conversation, a little less action, please: student motivation and the intrinsic value of doing English Mark Enser wrote recently in the TES about how the conversation around student motivation needs to change; since then, thoughts about student motivation have been top of mind. However, Enser’s piece merely resurrected old ghosts.
english teaching Building a house in a student’s skull — modelling in the English classroom Getting what’s in my head into a student’s head is not easy. It feels as though there’s a house in my head that needs dismantling and rebuilding somewhere in the student’s skull.
english teaching London: a commentary Today I tackle Blake’s Via Dolorosa, London. This is one of my favourite poems to teach from the anthology. My thoughts, in commentary form, are below.
english teaching Ozymandias: a commentary The premise is simple. I pasted Ozymandias below and wrote my thoughts about each line. This is by no means an exhaustive reading of the poem; such a thing is certainly beyond my capabilities.
english teaching States of matter matter: scaffolding thought via analogy in English We are the stories we tell.
english teaching An original narrative writing model response (with commentary) Literature is all about being human. I've been teaching a lot of narrative writing recently, and this is what I always come back to.
english teaching Narrative Writing: seven things students need to know I’ve been teaching a lot of narrative writing recently, and it’s got me thinking about how stories work.
english teaching The Schoolgirl with the Octopus in her Bag: Teaching GCSE Narrative Writing It’s the start of May and Year 11 aren’t having any fun.
english teaching The Transmogrified Hedgehog: how to approach poetry, for the prickly I have heard it, and you have heard it. Even if they’re too scared to make the sound, you can feel it in the wanting.
