"They have been at a great feast of languages, and stol'n the scraps."Shakespeare- Love's Labour's Lost I spent last year as a teacher-vagrant, lugging boxes of resources from room to room, teaching in spaces unsuited to my subject and struggling to set up routines with classes who I taught in four different places. I imagine…
"For brave Macbeth, well he deserves that name" This week I had a familiar experience: that satisfying moment during a unit on Shakespeare when every student suddenly decides it's not so bad after all. The Scottish play isn't my favourite by a long stretch, but it is my favourite to teach. I've taught it to…
One of the greatest challenges of teaching literature is the constant struggle to cover whole texts in enough depth and complexity to prepare students to write about details confidently, without running out of time or killing the enjoyment of the narrative itself. I've lost count of the number of students who've cheekily drawn my attention…
"What do you mean there are no past papers Miss? How am I even supposed to revise then?" As mentioned in a previous post on decoding question types here, my resolution for this year is to share as much as I can with other teachers, especially those also teaching CIE's new English specifications. I'm certain…
“Consume less; share better.”Hervé Kempf As a new teacher of the Cambridge English IGCSE and A level last year, I was surprised to find so few resources online. In the last couple of years, the beauty of teaching AQA and WJEC was being able to delve into a twitter treasure trove filled with great resources…
Classroom is well known as a tool to aid student and teacher organisation, but can it help to reduce cognitive load on students too? Despite being somewhat sceptical of any hype around shiny edutech, I'm excited to be joining the Google Education Summit here in Kathmandu this weekend and talking about Google Classroom. I love…
Planning Curriculum for Connection Building “The curriculum is coherently planned and sequenced towards cumulatively sufficient knowledge and skills for future learning and employment” Ofsted inspection framework 2019 The recent OFSTED focus on curriculum intent, implementation and impact may have frustrated some, but now I’m outside of Ofsted’s reach, I’ve been able just to take advantage…
"The purpose of schooling should be to help each child find their element, and the only way to do that is to ensure that each child has a broad and balanced curriculum." How can we do this in English? Conscious text mapping might be the answer.
"Reading is thinking with someone else's head, instead of one's own."Schopenhauer- Recently, I had the oddly perfect experience of reading Boys Don’t Try alongside Sally Rooney’s booker winning novel Normal People. Both books had that excellent brain-worming effect of being in my thoughts and conversations for weeks, as well as each seeping into my experience…
Great teachers "take joy in going off piste, using deep subject expertise to go beyond the syllabus".Tom Sherrington, The Learning Rainforest The Year 10 Great Poetry Debate Arriving in a new school this year, teaching a new exam board and a new GCSE syllabus to Year 10, I think I often failed to go 'off…
Fail Better Teach 