Category: opinion
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Schools are increasingly recognising that emotional regulation is not merely a pastoral concern but a prerequisite for meaningful disciplinary engagement. In English, where students must navigate complex texts, abstract ideas, and interpretive uncertainty, emotional stability is foundational. This framework introduces the concept of Emotional Touchstones: personal, meaningful physical objects that provide students with cues of…
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The England–Mexico 1am kick‑off has triggered a national debate: late nights, attendance fines, cultural capital, and ministerial statements. But beneath the headlines lies a structural truth: our curriculum is so fragile that a single missed lesson can damage progress. That’s not a parenting problem — it’s a design problem.
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As schools prepare for potential closures during extreme weather, English departments must reconsider their reliance on teacher‑led slide decks and instead adopt facilitative learning devices that enable genuine independence.
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Contemporary English classrooms often risk collapsing the discipline into the act of reading a set text. When the novel becomes the central experience rather than the material through which disciplinary thinking is developed, opportunities for explicit language instruction diminish. This article argues that English must be understood not as the passive consumption of literary works,…
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The dominant model of Literature curriculum preselects books on behalf of the student. Resources centre on this named text. And students are given no freedom to choose the book they are reading. But this isn’t the case in other subjects, so is it possible to give Literature students ownership of their exam texts? That is…
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The curriculum structure being used by Discipline Of English was established by Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl in their work on the Cognitive Domain. Their proposal is that cognitive domains require facts, concepts, procedures and metacognitions to fulfil their knowledge requirement. The facts (defining characteristics, measurable qualities, or stable attributes) and the concepts (terminology, patterns…
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Legacy Powerpoints have been modified, adapted, hybridized for the new era of ‘blended’ working. But this is just a hybrid car in an electric era; inefficient and not comparable to a ground up new start.
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Students become bored during lessons. They become bored of the lesson. They are bored by the lesson. And sometimes, no matter what we try to do as teachers, there seems to be no antidote to their boredom. But in trying to fix boredom we are actually contributing to greater difficulty accessing the lesson. Maybe teachers…
