WELCOME

Designing curriculum for more than a grade Emerging from the annual fog of mock exam-marking often leaves me wondering what we’re actually building toward in English. Assessment absolutely has its place, of course it does, but the gravitational pull of exams shapes far more of our curriculum than we often admit. By January, classrooms contort around timing drills, confidence gaps, and rubrics at the expense of all else. But schools push huge numbers of students through exams

Four years into my English HoD role, I’ve skirted enough pitfalls to know exactly what I’d pretend was intentional if I were starting again. I took over a fully functioning and high-performing Secondary English department four years ago. What had originally been an interview for a second-in-department role turned into a HoD position because of last minute internal promotions. The department was well resourced and the team were thoroughly adept in their roles. I put my present

“Be critical.” It’s a phrase students hear often, especially in English Literature classrooms. It shows up in the top band of every mark...

Metacognition sounds complicated. Conversations about it can certainly feel that way at times, partly due to the difficulty in containing...

While I was completing my NPQSL last year, I read a few case studies in which leaders created a team of “Champions”: teachers who would...

It’s that time of year again. Another year 11 cohort have disappeared into the ether of study leave and some tasty gained time can be put...

A standard poetry selection for GCSE, IGCSE, A Level or IB exams can be anywhere from ten to thirty poems. I often see teachers working...

Four weeks into the unit and our students are gradually engaging with the complex ideas around how context applies to their study of The...

As I’ve covered in the first two posts in this series, enthusiasm and engagement should always be your starting point if it’s likely that...

I like the idea that revision should be uncomfortable. I wish that had been explained to me at school as being a natural part of the...

I don’t hate it when students come into my classroom on the first day of a poetry unit and tell me how much they despise poetry. It’s...

In Part 1, I discussed some reasons for introducing a more challenging range of texts in an English curriculum that reflected a wider...

The next few blog posts in this series cover how we introduced more diverse, current and challenging texts into our English curriculum....