Unlock the art of writing with my comprehensive blog series. Dive into effective strategies for teaching spelling, handwriting, sentence construction, planning, editing, and much more. Explore disciplinary writing across various subjects. Whether you're a teacher or leader, discover valuable tips and techniques to enhance writing skills. From mastering the basics to refining complex compositions, my curated content offers practical guidance to unleash successful writing for everyone.
Thinking about better assessment is not always at the forefront of the mind of a busy English teacher. We are so hassled by marking, planning and well, teaching lots, that we keep our nose to the marking grindstone and, well…just keep on going. More recently, I have been trying
I have written a countless number of essays. At school, university, and back at school again, showing my students how to do it. In my fourteen years teaching I must have modelled hundreds of essays. I have likely set and assessed thousands of the blighters. My go-to strategy has always
The Rosetta Stone is one of the most famous rocks in all of history, providing one of the keys to the history of language as we know it. When it was found in 1799, the inscrutable script foxed the world – but by 1822 it provided the key to the mysteries
Sometimes a research study comes along and confirms what you suspected all along. The ‘Green Eggs and Ham Hypothesis‘ does just that trick for me. Now, ‘Green Eggs and Ham‘ is famously a very short and funny story by Dr. Seuss (otherwise known as Theodore Geisel). The ‘Green Eggs and
(Image credit: Jonathan Kim – https://www.flickr.com/photos/jkim1/452830868) If a student can’t write, all eyes turn to the English department. Whether it is a brief in an Art lesson or a write up of a science experiment, if the writing isn’t up to standard then
After over a decade of teaching English I am still finding new approaches and understanding more about how students learn to write. In the last year or so, my thinking has developed to focus upon the primacy of vocabulary knowledge and also the need for a huge amount of varied
If the path of repeated deliberate practice makes something like perfect, then imitating good models of writing provides solid foundations for the pursuit of writing excellence. ‘Shared writing‘ is one specific strategy that models writing in a highly effective way and is one of my favourite and most effective teaching
Firstly, may I say that this post is directly inspired by Ron Berger’s book, ‘An Ethic of Excellence: Building A Craftsmanship with Students’. My starting point is my current work with my Year 11 GCSE English group. We are undertaking mock exam preparation, but not in the conventional way.