gcse english

Using Threshold Concepts to design a KS4 English curriculum

2015-05-02T10:19:22+01:00March 24th, 2015|English|

The big change a-coming for curriculum design is that the final vestiges of modularity will soon have been licked clean from the assessment spoon; from September it will linearity all the way. Many English teachers have never worked in such a system and there's widescale panic about how exactly we can expect children to retain the quantity of textual information they will need to know in order to have something to analyse in a closed book exam. An obvious solution is to redesign your curriculum to harness what we know about the best ways of getting students to remember stuff. I've written [...]

Teaching texting

2011-08-23T14:43:29+01:00August 23rd, 2011|English|

A lot of folks are very worried about the impact of teenagers texting. In a Daily Mail article (oh! the shame), John Humphrys expressed the view that "SMS vandals... are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours" and goes on to warn of the danger of "our written language [ending up] as a series of ridiculous emoticons and ever-changing abbreviations". Sounds pretty dreadful, doesn't it? For as long as there have been mobile phones, it has been the job of schools and teachers to confiscate 'em. The standard approach seems to be blanket bans in classrooms and a grudging [...]

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