GCSE

Of all the different forms of writing that we study in English, poetry often seems to be the one with which students feel the least comfortable.  The fact that it simply doesn’t look like prose creates an instant barrier.  It’s unsurprising then that young people find the requirement to explore… Read More

Academic writing just means that our students need to write in a formal manner that reflects their level of educational and is distinct from how they would converse orally or via text.  A good approach is to gradually introduce students to a range of ways in which they can ensure their writing is more academic.  I find it helpful to divide these into three aims: being concise, being precise, and being sophisticated. Read More

The run up to GCSEs can be a very difficult time for Year 11 students. Often, they are still learning new material but are aware of the need to practice and consolidate earlier learning so they are ready for their examinations. This year’s Year 11 students may feel even… Read More

By Peter Edmunds When I was a trainee teacher back in 2017, I was frustrated by how much my students were struggling with calculations. Really frustrated. Calculations were the easy part of physics, I thought. Of course, I now know that I was suffering from expert blindness. Just because I… Read More

Summer exams for students, and for teachers for that matter, are assessments that are worked towards for the whole of the school year. With such high stakes surrounding GCSE exams, students often feel a heightened amount of pressure in the lead up to them. As well as teaching students the… Read More

If you’re teaching GCSE students this year, you’ll know that exam boards recently released advance information for the exams taking place in summer 2022 to help address the pandemic’s impact on teaching and learning. This advance information provides a list of topics from the specification that will be assessed on… Read More

Ever wondered how on earth you will fit all that science into the time you have left with Year 11? I had that same thought for years as a Head of Science, with the turbulence of the past couple of years proving this to be even more challenging. After multiple… Read More

Quite rightly, schools are taking steps to ensure that their English curriculums are more representative of the diverse country that we live in. Many students, regardless of their background, still feel isolated from what they have been learning in their lessons. As teachers, we need to ask two questions before… Read More

Recommendations for how to get back to ‘the new normal’ seem to be everywhere you look nowadays. They roll in like crashing waves: mental health, wellbeing, catch-up programmes, behaviour, discipline. So, where to begin? How can we as teachers support the emotional wellbeing and emotional education of our students and not just make a token gesture? It can feel overwhelming, especially when your students will have had such varied experiences of home learning, home life, interactions with friends and more. A person-centred approach To truly support your students’ emotional wellbeing, I believe we need to take a person-centred approach, rather than falling into the trap of making assumptions. It’s so easy to paint a broad picture of what we think our students need but it’s far better to know. It is my belief that if we expect our students to explore and get comfortable with their myriad of emotions, we have to consistently do the same – not only as part of our own personal wellbeing, but also as part of our planning process before we teach these emotional health and relationships lessons. Of course, to maintain our professionalism we cannot share our personal issues with students, but it is hugely valuable to find an empathy and understanding around the challenges of really ‘seeing ourselves’ and contemplate the scarier aspects of how to reveal these to others. Healthy relationships start with the relationship we have with ourselves When teaching about relationships in RSHE it’s good to remember that having healthy relationships with our friends, co-workers and students must start with the relationship we have with ourselves. For example, if we have very little self-respect and are continually putting ourselves down, pushing ourselves to the limit or refusing to admit or talk to others about our fears and worries how can we expect others to do these things? So, let’s take a minute to put this into practice right now. How is your self-respect? Do you make sure you rest, eat healthily, drink water throughout the day? Do you speak kindly to yourself? Do you recognise when you need to talk to someone and do it? If you haven’t had a chance to think about how you are for a while, please spend a moment reflecting now. I recommend doing this regularly; self-reflection is a valuable life skill and knowing the signs of when we are disrespecting ourselves means we can ask for help, and in turn allows us to build empathy and an understanding of others, including our students, who often find it much harder to see and communicate their truths. Having been through this process of self-reflection and assessment, we can then begin to consider how we might feel about opening up to others in a group context. What might help? What might shut us down? Of course, we are all different, but taking time to consider these things will help us see how we can best support our students as we ask them to do the same. How do we bring self-reflection into the classroom? First of all, we start with remembering two equally important elements that are fundamental to every good PSHE/RSHE lesson: creating a working agreement (this is a useful way to establish rules at the beginning of the topic which are then referred back to regularly), and signposting to further support (within school, the community and online). Then we think about our cohort and suitable activities to engage them. For some classes talking and listening will be familiar but others may need time to get comfortable with the idea of talking and listening openly to each other. Be aware this may not be a Hollywood film style easy flow, ‘kids-pour-their-heart-out-instantly-and-everyone-is-bonded’ experience! But I assure you, if you do this regularly, every day if you can, your pupils will increase their emotional intelligence massively – I have seen this happen. Alternatively, if this feels a real no-no currently with your class, you could ask them to complete anonymous questionnaires or write on post-it notes and share their feelings that way, then you could share these anonymously back to the class. Further activities to explore respectful relationships A more in-depth activity you can do too is from Your Choice for Key Stage 4, my latest co-authored resource with the fab’ Simon Foster.  Amongst many topics that address the challenges of being a teenager in the 21st century, one of our lessons explores what respect looks like in a variety of contexts. Take a closer look at lesson 2.1 ‘Respecting others’ and try it with your class Reassessing our relationships as we move back out into society, to our ‘new normal’, feels more important than ever. People, and our relationships with them, may well have changed, but bringing self-awareness back to us as individuals will empower us all to acknowledge ourselves, to become aware of our feelings and to talk about them. This in turn will give space for others to do the same and create a stronger sense of self and community. In my book (if you’ll excuse the pun), this can only be a good thing. Read More

The allegory of Animal Farm draws students in, like a puzzle to be ‘solved’: who are Mr Jones, Squealer and Moses ‘really’; what is the Windmill? Understanding the historical context for Orwell’s writing provides a satisfying ‘solution’ for students, but it can sometimes overshadow engagement with the text as fiction. The characters aren’t just metaphors, they are ‘real’ within the story; the novel is carefully structured by Orwell, its themes stretching beyond its immediate context and Orwell’s original intentions. Here are three key talking points to help students engage with Animal Farm’s story and themes, and three activities to help them see the text as a construction, open to conflicting interpretations. 3 discussion points with questions: Orwell was a committed socialist. Animal Farm is a criticism of totalitarianism, not socialism, but it’s not always been read this way. Let students engage with controversy over its publication, as well as aspects of the text that leave us questioning. 1. Socialism Orwell presents socialism as an ideal situation, where “everyone worked according to his capacity” (chapter 3), but it doesn’t last in Animal Farm. Ask your students: What causes the animals to rebel? How do they achieve success? What goes wrong? How does Orwell's metaphor make his meaning ambiguous e.g. with the animal 'types'? 'Animal Farm is doomed from the start': Is this a fair reading? Can animals/men maintain equal control in a democracy, or is it inevitable that some will rise and some sink? 2. Power and propaganda Orwell maintained that the key passage in the novel was the creation of ‘special rations’ for the pigs, agreed by all of the pigs. Ask your students: What allows the pigs to take control? Does Orwell suggest power always corrupts? What kind of a leader is Napoleon? Would Snowball have been any different? How is the idea of totalitarianism still relevant today? 3. Freedom of speech Orwell struggled to find a publisher at a time when Stalin was an ally, and saw this as cowardly censorship, saying that “Liberty is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” Ask your students: Squealer’s propaganda is clearly harmful, but is Benjamin’s silence also damaging? How does Orwell emphasise the power of words? Should we be able to say or write what we want? Are spoken words different to published ones? Should artists be political?    3 activities: 1. Understanding structure Once students have read the text, get them to summarise key events in each chapter. They can then come up with a short title for each instead of the existing numbers. As well as being a good revision tool, this helps in understanding narrative arc, or patterns in the structure. An additional aide is to sequence the titles in a storyboard, each illustrated with a key symbol e.g. Chapter 1 might become “Working Together”, “Beasts of England”, or simply “Comrades”, with an accompanying image of two animals singing together. 2. Understanding genre and setting Get students to ‘redesign’ the allegorical framework of the novel by planning a retelling or a film remake of Animal Farm, but changing the setting. The story could take place in: the Amazon jungle or African savannah a typical secondary school (this might prove controversial…) using popular toys (as in the film Toy Story) Afterwards, ask the class how choice of setting introduces other meanings e.g. awareness of existing stereotypes, or conflicting interpretations. How does this relate to the setting of Animal Farm? 3. Reading through different eyes Give students cards with roles or perspectives to adopt: this could be done in small groups (where students discuss their different ‘readings’ of the text) or as a whole-class, for instance, through hot-seating. A good starting point is to use a range of characters from the text to explain their version of events: roles might include Jones, Squealer, Snowball, Benjamin, Clover, Boxer, Moses, etc. This can then be expanded to encourage students to move beyond their own readings. Ideas for groupings might be: Different interests: a primary-school student, an older student, a teacher, a parent, an artist/film-maker Social roles: owner/employer, administrator, office worker, farm or factory worker, soldier, journalist Critical perspectives: Marxist, feminist, New Historicist, psychoanalytical. (These perspectives would need scaffolding e.g. with key questions – a way of simplifying them might be to give students cards with a reading ‘focus’ e.g. political, social, historical, emotional.) By Lucy Toop, a freelance writer and secondary English teacher in South London, and author of the introduction to the Collins Classroom Classics edition of Animal Farm. Read More