1. Teach students to recognise a main idea and a discussion point in a topic Generally, essay topics contain a main idea – a focal point of examples which have to be discussed – and a discussion point – a part of the essay topic which invites interpretation or qualification. It’s important for students to…
Safety signs and warnings are important. After all, we want people to be aware of dangers and risks they wouldn’t otherwise know. But sometimes the warnings on safety signs are symptons of an over protective society: Yes, apparently people do die from doing this to vending machines, so perhaps it’s not such a silly warning.…
Choosing new texts to teach in the English classroom is always difficult. There are any number of “worthy” or “worthwhile” texts to teach and we often choose texts about difficult subjects, like racism, refugees, or the holocaust. While these sorts of narratives play a valuable role they are often far removed from many students’ experiences…
A little bit of practice goes a long way – a message we’ll be reinforcing next week at our workshops on how to prepare students for their Literature, English and EAL exams. We’ll be sharing basic strategies such as this one: Organising information for retrieval: In order to effectively retrieve examples when they need it…
Next week we’ll be running our workshop on how to take students from 30+ to 40+ scores in VCE English. As usual, we’ll be sharing lots of practical writing strategies about how to develop the sophistication of student work in each area of English. But we’ll also be focusing on the thing that nourishes good…
At about this time, English teachers are usually looking ahead to text selection for the next year. To help teachers of VCE in Victoria with this process, we’ll be running our annual Choosing The Best VCE Texts workshop next week. One of the text types we’ll be strongly recommending to teachers is poetry for these…
Next week we’ll be running our free workshops (at Northcote and Ringwood) launching our new version of Macbeth and sharing some great strategies about how to teach the text (whether you buy our book or not). One of the things we’ll be emphasising is that if you’re doing Shakespeare you need to saddle up to…
In two weeks, we’ll be launching our new edition of Macbeth – Shakespeare’s Tragedy Macbeth and How To Write A Truly Impressive Essay On It. Like our previous version of Romeo and Juliet, this edition of Macbeth will scaffold students to think about the play at a language level, not just a plot level. It’s…
In this newer area of the study design, students often struggle to succinctly introduce key examples and link them to the essay topic provided. In order to help students develop this skill, there are a couple of explicit steps we can use to scaffold students to write more concisely and clearly. 1. Teach students to…
The best scaffolding procedures are implemented with the intent that eventually students will be able to do something on their own. In other words, there needs to be a plan as to how, over time, we’ll remove pieces of scaffolding to allow students to practice tasks with increasing independence. Here’s a very simple example that…