What have you been reading? Further CPD findings and musings....

First and foremost, I wish to extend my thanks to the Love of Learning group this week who have taken the time to provide some very detailed synopses of their CPD reading. Below I will share with you the findings from Ryan Smith's chosen text 'How to Teach: English' by Chris Curtis.

Ryan kindly writes:

I chose to read 'How to Teach: English by Chris Curtis'. The depth and range of ideas supplied in this book will hopefully add to a love of learning for my students and the fact that they are all English-focused will allow a higher proportion of them to be usable for me as opposed to a more generic text.

The vast majority of CPD books or articles I have read have not been subject-specific. I know that as a result of this I will choose ideas that are similar to those I already use or that easily fit within my teaching style. My theory is that by having a book that is focused towards my subject I might feel more willing to try things that are more outside of my pedagogical comfort zone.

When considering 'what is my greatest take away or strategy learned from this text' then it has to be the really good ideas on trying to create ‘formulas’ for writing. I do something like this in text analysis, but haven’t got round to trying to make it work for creative writing. I like this because it seems like a more useful alternative to sentence starters, while giving students enough structure to feel like they have help. As they’re formulas, you can practice them in class too,

so they will have a sense of familiarity to students, even when applied in new contexts. I feel this would be particularly beneficial to my current year 10 class of boys.

The second idea I liked was to start discussions from a ‘negative’ stand point, giving students a sense of having to defend themselves or someone / something they like.

Finally, I wish to highlight this strategy centred around having students write about a specific object or idea, but write trying to create different feelings in the reader. This forces students to consider how their writing is making their readers feel and to really consider the effect of their writing and teaches them flexibility in their writing. This avoids me giving students a topic that lends itself to the feeling I want to create, which is the easier and usually chosen option.

The first thing I will be doing is creating knowledge organiser type documents using some of the formulas for creative writing to act as ‘learning mats’ for the students. Again, this would be aiming to bridge the gap between no help and sentence starters. I’d want to add some of my own to this too.