Our regular blog author, Jill Carter, has prepared some revision tips and advice for your students – pass it on! You have two English Language exams so get clear about what each of these requires. Look for patterns so you can prepare more effectively for both. For both exams, you will need to be able […]
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Our regular blog author, Jill Carter, has prepared some revision tips and advice for your students – pass it on! You have two English Language exams so get clear about what each of these requires. Look for patterns so you can prepare more effectively for both. For both exams, you will need to be able […]
Read moreIf I write a text of any kind and someone said to me ‘Can you develop this?’ I would ask, ‘How?’ or ‘What do you mean?’ and I would hope that they could tell me. Yet, often, we don’t do this with students. Marking, now known more fashionably as feedback, is hard work, often undertaken […]
Read moreThinking about the new closed book literature exams, we’re going to have to face up, very soon, to how we teach our students to learn quotations. Along with writing exams by hand when they only ever usually type or text, learning quotations by heart is probably (in my opinion) one of the single most pointless […]
Read moreFor several years I have been helping my sister-in-law navigate her way through her 3 children’s English GCSE routes. This has spilled over into offering advice to other parents and what has struck me so forcibly is how much they want to help and how little information they are given to work with. With a […]
Read moreJust before the summer I had a meeting during which someone important in a school told me that they’d like to start preparing students for the demands of the new GCSEs from Year 7. This could be radical practice in some schools; we seem to have lost the knack of joining the thinking between the […]
Read moreThe new GCSEs are now timetabled – looks like it will be very similar to the ‘olden days’ – Lit first at the end of May followed by Lang at the beginning of June. One of the things that has always struck me about impending exams is that they tend to appear out of nowhere […]
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The new Literature exams often ask students to analyse an extract and then to refer to texts as a whole. OCR uses the term ‘moments’: for example, ‘Explore at least two moments from… to support your ideas.’ I like this idea of selecting moments. My interpretation of this is that it designed to develop interpretation […]
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Once upon a time, many many years ago, I was subjected to my first Ofsted. I was terrified and, worse still, I was teaching Treasure Island. I remember a wonderfully helpful Learning Support teacher spending hours with me cutting out bits of paper, making some kind of treasure game or something. It was so convoluted […]
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We asked some of our authors and experts to share their hints and tips for teaching Shakespeare. Here’s a round-up of the top five classroom activities and ideas: Start by admitting Shakespeare is ‘difficult’ and everyone is on unfamiliar ground with the language. Make it relevant – encourage discussions about Iagos in the playground and […]
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