Becoming an Outstanding English Teacher

Kate Sida-Nicholls

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138916975
• eBook ISBN: 9781317423768
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Becoming an Outstanding English Teacher supports all English teachers in offering a wide range of approaches to teaching and learning that will stimulate and engage students in studying English.

It offers practical strategies that can be used instantly in English lessons. The topics offer examples for questioning, differentiation and assessing progress. Some of the ideas have also been incorporated into lesson plans using texts from the revised English National Curriculum.

With a strong focus on creativity and engagement, this book covers:

• promoting thinking and independent learning skills in students
• methods to check learning rather than doing in the classroom
• techniques for personalising learning for students
• creating an environment for behaviour for learning.

Fully up to date with the National Curriculum guidelines and packed with practical strategies and activities that are easily accessible, this book will be an essential resource for all English teachers who are aiming to deliver outstanding teaching and learning continuously in their classrooms.

Chapter 1
Making connections

The job of an English teacher is one of the more high profile and accountable teaching roles in any school. Changes in the educational world are inevitable but what remains static is that English is always going to be the most important subject, along with Mathematics. On one level, it is because schools’ results and reputations rely on the outcomes of the two subjects but more importantly, being literate to a good level and all that entails is the key to success in any-one’s life.

Communication, whether reading, writing or speaking, is an essential skill that any young person needs to have in order to be successful in the ever changing twenty-first-century world. Employers state that young people need to be able to work collaboratively; make decisions based on evidence; assimilate a range of information in a short space of time; manage their time; present a clear point of view etc. The list goes on but all of these skills can be explicitly taught within the subject of English.

However, the unique feature of teaching English is that not only do we teach skills but we also teach about knowledge. We are able to give our students a rationale to their current world. We can give teenagers an insight into the cultural and social lives that existed in previous centuries. We do this in the hope that it will allow our students to understand the factors that underpin their current world but equally to understand that many of the issues they are grappling with have challenged others for centuries before them. By making these links from the past to the present we can show them how literature is still relevant to their world today. We can help them understand that by developing a love of reading they are engaging with a personal experience and an insight into a range of worlds that are much more compelling than any antics that might take place on Big Brother.

We can demonstrate to our students how language has changed and explain the reasons why they speak the words despite the incomprehensible spelling patterns. We can show teenagers that although they use text speak and emoticons as a tool to create their own language identity, it is not something new. Social groups have been creating their own language as a tool to exclude others for centuries. Teaching English is an opportunity to open minds to ideas and issues that can prick and sometimes penetrate the often self-centred world of the average teenager.

As English teachers, we repeatedly use the phrase ‘there is no wrong answer’ and our teaching needs to provide students with the tools and knowledge to enable them to create a case for whatever answer they decide is the right one.

What makes a lesson outstanding?

There is no easy answer to this question any more as the Ofsted advice is not to grade lessons individually and there is an increasing opinion within the profession that no one lesson should be assessed by itself.

Outstanding teaching is about ensuring students make progress in their thinking, learning, attitudes and outcomes over time. Students’ learning has to be developed by establishing what they already know; use appropriate strategies of scaffolding so that they can gain and retain the new knowledge. The Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky called this approach, the Zone of Proximal Development (www.simplypsychology.org/Zone-of-Proximal-Development.html). There should be a consistency to outstanding teaching and learning as a student’s Zone of Proximal Development should be extended on a continuous basis.

The progression of all students through their own individual Zone of Proximal Development may happen in one lesson but equally it might happen over a period of time. A variety of formative and summative strategies to assess the speed and depth of the learning can be used to ascertain the progress of students. However, what makes one lesson outstanding can be seen as a subjective judgment by an observer. Outstanding teaching and learning should be assessed over a period of time (could be one lesson or longer) but using information gained from a range of sources that might include learning outcomes, marking in books, exam results, students and other forms of quantitative data, e.g. photos of students’ work.

This book identifies a number of strategies that can help develop teaching and learning to become outstanding in the sense that all students make significant progress in gaining new knowledge or skills within a certain lesson or a specified period of time. Schools may have their own individual criteria for assessing outstanding teaching and Ofsted has a framework for assessing the quality of teaching and learning in a whole school.

So what might outstanding learning look like in an English classroom?

Students will be able to:

• create their own individual response about a topic or text supported by appropriate evidence
• make comparisons between ideas either verbally or in writing
• demonstrate a confidence with language and use it to create certain effects
• be imaginative and creative with ideas and language
• embrace challenge and be prepared to make mistakes
• recognise progress and be able to take the ‘next’ steps
• work independently and think for themselves.

What might outstanding teaching look like in an English classroom?

Teachers will:

• be passionate and enthusiastic about the subject of English and the relevance and importance of it
• demonstrate a high level of subject knowledge and be able to extend and challenge students in their thinking
• scaffold learning so all students make progress from an established starting point
• address misconceptions
• have high expectations of all students
• make links to the outside world and other subjects
• use a wide range of resources and methods to engage students
• ask a number of questions to probe depth of learning
• use a variety of formative assessment methods to gain feedback about the level of learning from all learners at any one point
• adapt teaching quickly to respond to the students’ feedback about their level of understanding
• encourage independence in students’ learning
• develop a culture of behaviour for learning.

The learning journey

It is now a common cliché to mention the ‘journey’ as it appears to be a concept that the media values and discusses in many contexts.

However, as teachers we have always been aware of the journey that we and our students are on within a school. We also know that any learning journey is not on a straight trajectory from start to finish. Learning takes place in a cyclical fashion. Ideas and concepts need to be revisited on a continuous basis in order to achieve retention and a depth of understanding.

At the time of writing, assessment without levels is the biggest issue facing education. Identifying and then documenting the learning journey of students has become even more essential at this time. English departments now have the opportunity to redefine the content but also the expectations of learning due to the new National Curriculum and GCSE exams.

Defining the start and end point of the learning journey for specific groups of students within your school will be essential to ensuring success. A chance to provide a breadth of opportunities and relevance to material taught to students especially at Key Stage 3 has been given to English departments. Research suggests that teaching skills and knowledge through integrated schemes of work will be more successful than teaching specific units of work on grammar or poetry. A document called ‘The Science of Learning’ summarises current research on cognitive science about how students learn. This document suggests that ‘interleaving’ ideas and concepts into learning is a more effective method (www.deansforimpact.org/pdfs/The_Science_of_Learning.pdf; Deans for Impact (2015). The Science of Learning. Austin, TX: Deans for Impact).

At KS3 this could mean creating a scheme of work with the topic Fantasy that incorporates reading of literature, prose and poetry. Learning is demonstrated in the creation of various writing styles, e.g. sonnets, diary entries, newspaper articles, descriptive writing. Teaching of grammatical features such as superlative adjectives and compound sentences is initiated from the texts studied within the Fantasy unit. This would be in contrast to studying a unit of work that has the one focus of sonnets or descriptive writing.

A scheme of work provides the content of a learning journey for a student but the successful outcome of the journey can be defined by the ideas now known as developing a growth mindset with students. It is the concept originally introduced by the psychologist Dr Carol Dweck about defining the differences in attainment and behaviour between people who believe that hard work and effort can change attainment and those who believe that their intelligence is fixed. In an English context, it would be those students who always say that they are bad at spelling so use that as an excuse to hand in work with lots of misspelt words in it. They don’t believe that memorising formation and shapes of words will help them to improve their spelling so they fall into the mindset that they will always underachieve as their spelling will never be good enough.

Carol Dweck has based her theory of growth mindsets on significant research. Adopting some of Dweck’s findings and applying a growth mindset would help the students overcome their negative mindset about their spelling by providing praise about their effort to improve their knowledge of how words are constructed rather than only providing praise when they did better than expected in a spelling test. Carol Dweck’s book Mindset: How You Can Fulfill Your Potential (2012) explains her theory and research about why employing a growth mindset approach in your classroom can help a student adopt a positive approach to their learning journey.

A learning journey is not just one that is restricted to students. What about your own learning journey? Observing other colleagues (not necessarily in your subject area) is essential to developing and improving your own practice once you have qualified. Teaching can be very a lonely job as very few other adults enter your classroom and give you feedback about the teaching and learning that is taking place in your classroom.

However, if you are able to observe another colleague then approach the observation with questions to help you improve your practice. Some suggestions could be:

• How is progress ascertained during the lesson?
• How are questions directed to students and which ones?
• How is the accountability of students in group activities established?
• How has a culture of equality between achievement and failure been developed?
• How is the behaviour of learning established?
• How do students give feedback about their quality and pace of learning?
• How does the teacher convey their passion and knowledge about their subject?
• How does the teacher convey to the students the relevance of what they are learning?

Another strategy is to observe the students in either an English teacher’s lesson or a group of students from your class but in another subject. Try and ignore how the teacher is teaching and just focus on three or four students and observe how they make progress during a lesson.

Some kinds of questions to think about when doing this type of observation are:

• What kind of dialogue takes place between the students? How much time do they spend engaging in learning? How much off-task talk is there?
• Do the students engage positively with the activities?
• Do they learn anything new from the activities? How do you know?
• Do they demonstrate a positive or negative growth mindset in their approach to learning?
• Are there activities that clearly motivate students more or less?

Observing students in this way will enable you to see the impact that teachers’ behaviours have on their students. Teachers can fall into the trap of thinking that just because words have come out of their mouths or they have asked students to complete an activity then learning has taken place. Observations of students will allow you to ascertain how learning is taking place and why it is happening which will help you to improve the quality of learning in your own lessons.

What’s in it for me?

There is no doubt that teenagers appear to be more motivated when they understand the reasons for their learning. The excuse of ‘it might come up in your Literature exam’ is likely to wear thin after the students are faced with learning about poems in eight consecutive lessons. As discussed earlier in this chapter, the study of English and its many components allow us to make links to the world that the students live in. Being able to make topical links to events and issues is key to bringing English alive for many students. Being able to link ideas in Shakespeare plays to soap operas; discussing the behaviour of a celebrity with a similar theme in a novel or making links to rap music and poetry is just one of the many skills that English teachers need to have ‘up their sleeves’.

Sharing ideas or dilemmas from your own writing or reading can also be a tool to engage students with the need for learning a specific skill or gaining knowledge. Teachers who share their reading or writing interests are all helping to share their passion and love of the subject, which helps the students to understand the impact of their learning outside the classroom.

Sharing stories of famous people and their struggles can also help students to develop the right growth mindset as discussed earlier in this chapter. Discuss the skills that the famous person now exhibits and summarise how they might have acquired those skills. Creating scenarios or giving a context for a task can also help with motivation. For example, asking students to write the script for a presentation for a new business idea. Could they relate it to ones that they might have seen on The Apprentice?

Never underestimate the impact of a prop in a lesson. Something as simple as a hat or a balloon can help the students to buy into the imaginative content of a lesson. For example, a small vase which can be used as bottle of poison to put at the end of a Conscience Alley activity about whether Juliet should take the poison or not can be very effective.

In the following chapters we will look at strategies that you might wish to try and then transfer into your teaching repertoire if you find them to be ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Making connections
• 2 How does it all begin?
• 3 Learning in the main
• 4 So how does it all end?
• 5 What’s in a question?
• 6 How do I know?
• 7 Thirty different minds in the classroom
• 8 The classroom environment
• 9 Putting it all together
• Conclusion
• Index