Category: English teaching

My notes from recent TES Podcast where English teacher, Chris Curtis (Learning from My Mistakes blog and new book How to Teach English and former Whovian) offers some great advice teaching writing. The TES gives an overview of his ideas in the podcast.

• Encourages a degree of emotional detachment as a teacher (eg. conversations about mistakes; “if we live in fear, we’ll never push the boundaries”

He identifies three issues confronting the teaching of writing:

• “beige writing” – students write very standard answers. Students default to “waffle mode”, a comfortable form of writing. Needs to be challenged.
• fluency – some students don’t have writing fluency and aren’t able to write quickly.
• blank page – students don’t know what to write and panic.

He offers some solutions:

• 200 word challenge – a weekly writing task that changes each week. His department have been doing this for 5 years. (Example of these challenges from Curtis’ blog.)
• “sexy sprouts” – starting writing with an emotion in mind. He describes this as “transformative”. (From idea about how to make a reader feel different emotions about sprouts!)

On students’ accuracy:

• He won’t correct student’s mistakes. He circles mistakes and gets students to self-correct. “Channeling” students to see mistakes, not fix them.
• We have to expect a better quality of work from students. Students need to take ownership.
• Every lesson has to be an opportunity to improve accuracy.

On grammar:

• Avoid teaching discretely.
• Move away from “This is a grammar lesson.”
• Believes you can have creativity and grammar rules.
• Need to be explicit about grammar rules.

On analytical essays and formal analytical responses to texts:

• We’ve become convoluted about analytical-style writing. Everything is being thrown at an essay with the hope that it’ll sound good. Not making the clarity of ideas the priority. Good analytical writers are “pared down”. Simplify.
• Better to start big and zoom in (when responding to texts).

Tips for the end of term:

• Find something that works and do it with every class.
• Reading aloud to classes. Students listening to a teacher telling a story.
• Find texts that “teach themselves” (that’s why the classics work).
• Find systems that work for you.
• Write with students. Make it a social experience.

It’s a Literacy-focused issue.

John Hodgson’s editorial explores briefly the definitions of literacy and suggests two paradigms exist: one as the functional, autonomous ability of a child to read; the other:

…involves reading the world and reading the word… and connects personal response and social awareness.

Hodgson cites the work of the New London Group and the concept of “multiliteracies” in the 1990s – and this becomes the touchstone for the various discussions on literacy presented in the issue.

I found the following articles incredibly interesting:

Literacy Constants in a Context of Contemporary Change by Margaret Mackey – using Professor Keith Oatley’s work on cognitive psychology and Reading and Writing, Mackey argues that a discussion about the nature of current literacy is founded on its psychological functions. She discusses initial literacy acquisition (as a physical activity) and agrees that, quite early on, reading is an encounter with another mind which causes us to think beyond ourselves. After that, Mackey explores children’s reading, recreational reading, literary reading (associated with the “function of thinking”), deep reading (I understand as engagement with a text that sparks thinking or response), critical reading and conversational reading (essentially social media). I was interested in a reference to Miall and Kuiken’s definition of literariness as “defamilirisation” of style or narrative that cause a reinterpretation of a conventional feeling or concept. Mackey suggests that reading behaviours overlap. Finally, she advocates for a broader understanding of what modern (multimodal, I guess) literacy and that “Pursuing what we value about reading will be better achieved by understanding our own priorities even as we respect the lively ways contemporary readers navigate today’s new possibilities.”

The Thought Chronicle: Devaluing a Multimodal Repertoire of Response in Teacher Education by David Lewkowich – is a fantastic promotion of multimodal responses to texts. I love his assertion that “how and what we choose to read and write invariably affects how we choose to teach, and how we choose to communicate our understanding of social and individual experience, and our love of language and literature” and – especially: “Such choices, therefore, also affect how our students come to learn and how they come to know themselves in educational spaces.” Absolutely ageed! Lewkowich presents what he calls the Thought Chronicle, essentially a creative journal responding to studied texts in a variety of forms. He reproduces his assignment brief to his trainee-teachers which aims to “demonstrate knowledge in a variety of ways”. (As an aside: I think this approach is liberating in how it breaks free of the reductionist exam-response approach to measuring knowledge.) He discusses the role of teacher as expert and how sharing knowledge which is “non-authority”. His phrase “uncertain becomings” not only refers to trainee English teachers but anyone – child or adult – engaging with texts. Really love this quote from Nikos Kazantzakis: “True teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create their own”. There are six pages of highly interesting examples of pieces from thought chronicles reproduced. Highly-inspiring article!

Writing is the theme of this issue of English in Education. It’s an excellent collection of thoughtful pieces by English teachers and academics. The editorial sets the tone immediately:

Trying to develop excellent writing pedagogy in a system dominated by standardised, politicised assessments makes the task even more challenging.

The editorial, by Dr Jenifer Smith and Dr Mari Cruice, points out how the importance of the “primacy of meaning” in children’s Writing has been downgraded over the last 30 years. Towards the end of they make the point that teachers are looking back to the writing of educators from the 60s and 70s (something I’ve been doing increasingly) or drawing on their own practice as writers (something I’ve always done). The editorial ends with a warning:

Meanwhile, in mainstream classrooms, the dead weight of a prescriptive and reductionist viewpoint is hard to shift. And yet individuals, especially amongst the young, have learned somewhere that writing is a vital human activity and that it works for us in many different ways. It has a moral and humane heft, it underpins critically, it is inventive and visionary, it can anchor us. Of course, writing resists “mapping onto levels”, but the failure to take writing seriously as a fundamental element of human growth has become a failure to take responsibility for children’s intellectual growth and moral becoming.

Overall, the view of English teaching and Writing in particular is that our subject is in a pretty awful way. I agree!

I found the following articles in this issue particularly interesting and useful:

English and Meaning by Gordon M. Pradl – absolutely excellent presentation of the tradition of English teaching which I see myself as part which is child-focused and balance the “skills” and “cultural heritage” view of English with that of “personal growth” (enriching children’s social and cultural lives). There’s a terribly good section about the role of the primacy of meaning in the post-War teaching of English and its contrast with the present models: “[T]he current push for product accountability being imposed on our schools – where outcomes are often mandated by persons far removed from the actual learning encounters between students and teachers – can threaten the core ‘meaning making’ principle of our discipline. Meaning, it seems, remains resistant to measurement, especially of the short-term variety. Pradl focuses on the work of James Britton and David Holbrook.

Teaching Bad Writing by Myra Barrs – argues persuasively that current teaching of Writing at KS2 does not improve the quality children’s writing. She believes that current assessment prioritises form over content. One piece of research conducted by Barrs points out the disparity between what teachers think are the elements of good writing (meaning) and the comments they write on children’s work (all about form). She demands that there needs to be a course-correction and that English needs to be recognised in relation to the Arts.

“Death by PEEL?” The Teaching of Writing in the Secondary English Classroom by Simon Gibbons – Gibbons identifies the way that children’s writing has increasingly “constrained and constricted” by ever-prescriptive teaching. He says that teachers do not like structures like PEEL but find them a necessary evil (“necessary to arm pupils in their battles with assessment systems”). He concludes that “the teaching of writing is in a sorry state in many English classrooms”. There’s an excellent review of the history of Writing. Gibbons asserts that his experience doesn’t find the same issues in other English-speaking countries. He recognises that children’s experiences of learning to write are “a less than fulfilling experience”. Gibbons seems quite downbeat to me and ends on the hope that “Tides turn; times change”.

English Teaching and Imagination: A Case for Revisiting the Value of Imagination in Teaching Writing by Helena Thomas – I found myself agreeing with Thomas’ argument about the value and importance of developing children’s imaginations in the English classroom. Thomas sees teachers working in a climate of “unprecedented accountability” where “teaching is dominated by a policy discourse that shuts down debate”. She advocates for teachers to view themselves as practising creative artists and I found the section on “A brief note on implications for practice” excellent advice.

Additionally, the references of the articles offer a tremendous treasure trove of lost knowledge for English teachers (or for me, at least).