The Education Continuum

BETT

Just off to BETT now. Authors of Teaching English using ICT are doing a seminar at 3.15 today - Powering Up English with ICT is in the Auditorium.

There are lots of new technologies and old faces to be found at London Olympia for the rest of today and tomorrow, so get down there!

Melanie Wilson
Commissioning Editor (Professional Education)

New edition of Getting the Buggers to Write out tomorrow!

The third edition of this bestselling book by education superstar, Sue Cowley, includes new material on writing in the Digital Age, creative ideas for getting boys to write and cross-curricular writing projects. There is also a brand new companion website, where you’ll find lots of useful extras, including advice about the teacher as writer – how you can use your writing skills beyond the school.

Sue also has a website dedicated to celebrating writing and the joy it brings to all. Sue is currently holding a writing competition, but entry closes soon. Why not have a go at entering it and you could win a copy of the new book! Check it out here.

 

Melanie Wilson
Commissioning Editor (Professional Education)

A Lesson in Literacy

Staff and pupils at Chenderit School in Northamptonshire were delighted and humbled to be awarded the TES Outstanding Literacy Initiative Award for 2011 having been a finalist last year. This tops a stellar year in which OFSTED recognised the school as Outstanding. Headteacher and author of Learning to Lead - Using Leadership Skills to Motivate Students Graham Tyrer said, ‘It gives us pause to reflect on where next for literacy in our national system. So, here are a few thoughts:

Literacy is at the heart of all things: it launches spacecraft, it allows us to start and solve wars, and it brings to life and enriches emotions and relationships; with it we can nuance and make sense of who we are and who we might become. The more complex and fine the craft of our words become, the more likely it is that we can live in a world championing justice, fairness and peace.

So, as the Department for Education in the UK makes plans for the new curriculum, here is my wish list:

Dear Mr Gove, Please make sure that we have schools where talk and listening develop skills of interdependence, debate and innovation. Young people are alive with invention and compassion and energy. Their talk is vibrant, assertive and often expresses their confusion with their endlessly complex lives. So be ambitious for them. Expect them to be able to talk poetry, science and justice. Be rightly wary of the sterility of functionality.

Help every teacher to believe in themselves as a teacher of words. Every aspect of every source of knowledge is crafted in language. I hope all classrooms celebrate, take risks and invent new ways of speaking, listening and writing. Words are so precious, vulnerable and robust. We must help all teachers to lead language learning with their students. Language doesn't stop at the door of the English classroom, it must be treasured and exemplified and experimented with in every part of the school and given as much status as so called subject content, most of which – if we are honest – will be ossified within a year or two.

If there must be assessment, keep it simple. Prioritise accuracy and flair in equal measure. An individual’s background is irrelevant; young people, their families and the people that make up the schools they attend are capable of the most astonishing insights and sensitivities. And to do that, no child should be left to drift through the system without being able to enjoy and feel confident that they have achieved core basic standards.

And have our students become expert in the discourses of learning. Have our students able to talk about, debate and invent new ways of becoming exceptional electricians, poets, plumbers, space explorers and medics. We become adept at skills when we learn how to learn, when we enjoy learning, when we feel ourselves leaders and inventors of learning.

Help us to open students' minds to texts they may never have heard of. Give us the freedom to choose texts that excite the children we teach and not drag them through a programme of medicinal reading. Let students see why some writers have gained status and others have not. Give them the choice as to what they want to use to make change and to be the poets, and innovators of tomorrow. Of course, they should not be allowed to journey past writing of the most extraordinary influence and beauty: but force march them and they will resent the very names of Shakespeare, Keats, Hardy, Pullman and Morpurgo.

Make the acquisition of skills personal, not linked to age. Allow students to accelerate through the craft of reading and writing and speaking at a pace that excites and liberates them. If language is important, expand the time they study, invent, refine and grow their linguistic skills. For at least an hour each day, students should be learning and inventing their language in secondary schools.

We want our young people to be whoever they want to be. Only if they are excited and skilled in the art of language will they be able to invent with others a future they deserve. So, describe rather than prescribe. Don't prevent invention: the language of innovation is the language of freedom.'

This guest post was written by Graham Tyrer, Headteacher of Chenderit School and author of Learning to Lead.

Melanie Wilson Commissioning Editor (Professional Education)

Great reviews of recently published English texts

Looking for some inspiration for your English classroom in September?  Reworking your reading list for your English PGCE course?  Check out two books recently praised in NATE journals:

Testing English

Reviewed in NATE: ‘Marshall is extremely well qualified to take this subject on – she is arguably the UK’s foremost expert in English and Assessment… It’s a well-written and compelling book that draws on a great range of academic literature and a career rich in assessment research…a must-read.’

 

Secondary English

Reviewed in NATE: ‘Even after ten years of national strategies, this book offers much to guide new entrants to English teaching through some longer-lived traditions of its thinking and practice.’



Alison Baker
Senior Commissioning Editor (Academic Education)

Guest post by Bethan Marshall, author of Testing English

Testing English is a book which looks at the way English has been assessed since the war. In particular it examines the way in which English teachers have constantly fought for a more authentic way of assessing pupils than sitting them down in an exam room and making them write for a couple of hours from anything as varied as a motorway at different times of day to Macbeth. At the heart of what English teachers were asking for was some kind of course based assessment so that pupils could write in a way that mattered to them. In so doing pupils would be able to redraft what they had written to convey their ideas ever more effectively.

This of course makes English teaching problematic. Wanting authenticity in what pupils write rather than simply testing what they can remember or produce in half an hour is controversial. It means too that teachers rather than looking backwards at what pupils have learned, as they would with exams, they look forward at what is to be learned; how pupils can get better at what they do; how they can progress.

The book looks at a number of research projects that explore this desire of English teachers to teach formatively and how, in doing so, how pupils can learn and develop. It looks, for example, at the King’s Medway Oxfordshire Formative Assessment Project and sees the way in which teachers organize classroom talk so that they listen to what pupils say. It looks too at the King’s Oxfordshire Summative Assessment Project and sees the way in which, through course based assessment pupils can peer assess each other’s work and so improve what they have done.

Testing English was written before teachers actually started doing the new GCSE controlled conditions assignments but it does examine the way in which pupils can no longer draft and redraft their work or peer assess their colleagues’. It looks to at how controlled conditions assignments are multiple mini exams. In so doing the examiners, and by default the government, are yet again making hard for pupils to say what they want to say and refine it.

John Dewey, wrote in 1899, ‘There is all the difference in the world between having to say something and having something to say’. It has always been the desire of English to embrace the latter. And that is what Testing English is really about.

Twilight at Cambridge Controversy

The University of Cambridge's announcement that their new Research and Teaching Centre for Children's Literature will encompass study of a wide range of texts including films and video-game adaptations as well as print books has of course raised one or two eyebrows, including the BBC's Cambridge to study computer games, Ker-pow! Cambridge literature centre is to study comics and blogs (The Times)and Chris Woodhead for Times Online - Shot down for taking computer games seriously.  The new centre, run jointly by Homerton and the Faculty of Education, brings together Cambridge's existing research and teaching on children's literature and its members offer 'a unique expertise in poetry, film and multimedial texts, including picturebooks, as well as in teaching and promoting writing for children'.  It seems to make sense to me that research should focus on a broad range of texts, including examples from popular culture - but what do you think? Is this an example of cutting-edge scholarship or further evidence of the 'dumbing-down of society'?

Anna Fleming
Publisher