What advice would you give for starting our roles in September when we have all our own classes on our own?
How do you establish yourself as a new teacher at your school?
- Be as familiar as you can with the systems and processes – e.g. how do you give a reward? Who do you talk to about a concern? How do I give sanctions and record them? Who are my key people? Always ask “silly” questions – there’s never a silly question.
- Nobody is expecting you to get it right all the time. Go into your school knowing that you’re doing something with moral purpose, that will make a difference to the lives of young people. Be prepared to learn; prepared to make mistakes; prepared to learn from those mistakes. Think about how you will talk, move, act like a teacher – how will you get out of the car? How will you walk into school? Are you trying to exude that you are confident and pleased to be there? Really important that children feel you want to be there with them. Go in with enthusiasm and a love of our subject in your heart – it spreads!
- Being organised is important. Be open to learning from your colleagues about when the best time of the day is to plan – it might not be when you expected it to be. Be ready to learn all the time: this is what makes teaching English special. Students will pick up on your energy – be true to who you are and students will respond to that.
How do you maintain teaching/classroom autonomy when you are expected to follow the schools’ curriculum?
- A difficult question that teachers grapple with every day! Especially in subjects that are perhaps not quite so well understood by SMT. Have faith in your knowledge and how important your subject is. Find the balance of doing what the school requires of you, with doing what you believe matters in the classroom. It takes time to get to know what is required of you in a new school.
- You won’t change the school in your first year of teaching – your purpose during this time is to hone your craft. Try to key in to why the school has shaped the curriculum the way they have; what does that school think English is? Look for opportunities to introduce texts not on the current scheme of work that you can wriggle in… Suggest books or short stories, get involved with projects like Poetry By Heart, set up a competition. You can enrich the curriculum while you get to understand why your school teaches English the way it does.
- In some schools, the texts will already have been selected and sequenced. Our subject is so interesting because it argues with itself about what it is: why do we choose Oliver Twist as the best example of a bildungsroman? A curriculum is 2D: you will breathe life into it, creating something children can engage with. Everyone is arguing about curricula all the time: that is what English is, and why it’s so exciting! See Jo Heathcote’s new book, Enriching English: Curriculum with soul.
I feel that there is a focus in schools, in English, on knowledge rather than skills. Speaking to qualified teachers, they generally agree that skills should be the focus but they are far more difficult to develop and assess.
- Knowledge – skills – understanding. The problem is making a hierarchy out of those three things. All are crucial in the experience of our subject. Sometimes students want “knowledge” – something they can learn and revise – we can use their desire for knowledge to help them refine their skills and develop their understanding. We can use our autonomy to introduce texts that reflect the cultural capital of our students. Knowledge and skills aren’t binary opposites – what does knowledge mean in English? Not just the date Dickens was born. What we sometimes consider to be skills are part of the knowledge and vice versa. There’s the perception that knowledge is part of the right-wing political agenda; teachers tend to be on the other end of that spectrum. Skills enable students to become free-thinking individuals not people who fit neatly into molds, which is what those who are sceptical of the knowledge model worry about. It’s unhelpful (and artificial) to reduce teaching and skills to knowledge vs skills.
- Look at Barbara Bleiman’s What Matters in English Teaching?. At the heart of English is what you make from a text, and how you think it speaks to other texts. It’s really important to keep in mind that our subject is a discipline of its own beauty and rigour – not just a facilitating subject.
- It’s not contentious to teach children facts; but we definitely need to teach them to do stuff (i.e. concepts) with those facts!
How would you make teaching and learning more inclusive for disadvantaged pupils without compromising the curriculum? For me, it is daunting to teach complex ideas and concepts to pupils who have no interest in English or academia in general, therefore what strategies could I implement to broaden my practice, which could grip pupils to engage?
How do we engage students who do not view English as relevant to their future careers?
How do you approach teaching content that pupils believe is not relevant to them?
How do you approach teaching content that pupils believe is not relevant to them?
- Create a working definition: what is English? This gives you ammunition for these conversations. You have a clear sense of the purpose of our discipline to share with students. Check out the EMC’s 18 Reasons to Study English. English is about us, how we think, how we speak: us. About being human. If we could call it something else, it would help! It’s so much more than the English GCSE, which can give the sense that you can be wrong – that grammar is more important than anything else but what about meaning?
- In English, we’re sharing stories – but this can be lost at KS4, and so consequently we lose this at KS3. In a classroom where this is happening – you are doing it together (not to the children) – interrogating, exploring, testing – those children are bought in. How do you use pedagogy to invite children in? Find the story and share it.
- Encourage students to see English as a creative subject – give them a hook that’s about who they are as individuals and their personal development. Tell them the different topic areas you cover – so much wider than any other subject in school. Help them to see that the skills they develop can be applied in every other subject and everywhere else in their lives now and in the future. English is about so much more than getting people into the workforce.
- Reading! Possibly the most important skill we can introduce students to. Reading for pleasure is a good way in. Freeing reading from the task of writing, which often seem to be inextricably linked. You can read with your ears – listening to stories is a wonderful thing – bedtime stories are not a given. Complex stories with moral dilemmas, love, battle, death! See https://classictales.co.uk/.
- Schooling is an opportunity to push children outside their day-to-day culture: a note of caution in the conversation about inclusion and disadvantage.
How might we bring more elements of digital literacy into our teaching in order to better play to our students’ strengths? What do you think is the greatest gain our pupils get from the study of English?
- We can help students to use digital literacy in a better way than they do instinctively. English as a space for original thought and creativity vs AI: but it’s not quite as simple as that. We’re all waiting to find out!
- Draft – re-draft – edit: writing to hone is lost in KS3. Easy edited writing = a good space for spending time on editing.
- Within the discipline we’re still unclear about what “digital literacy” encompasses. Software? Gaming? Different media?
- Do we want more digital literacy? There might be space for a subject where we look at each other rather than the internet.
- Long form vs short form texts in lessons – different types of media in English. Expecting them to sit and look at a page whereas they’re used to moving around quickly online.
