ThingLink: a revolution in resource making!

Touch the circle images above to explore my new resource, created on the wonderful website called ThingLink.

What is ThingLink?

I was made aware of this website from #TMLondon, a fantastic evening full of teacher led CPD! I also was made aware of MANY other brilliant websites teachers can use to their advantage, but for this post I will just focus on thinglink.com.

What this creative website allows you, and your students, to do is create resources, like PowerPoints, but all on ONE slide, such as the example above. You just click to add links to your image which can be music, articles, texts- basically anything as all you need is the link! It is so simple and easy to use I managed to create this resource above in under five minutes.

I will be playing around with this website over the next few days so stay tuned for more creative explorations from yours truly!

Give it a go yourself, click here to get your FREE account and get started!

What Have I Learnt Post Teaching Shakespeare: Part 2!

Following on from my musings detailed on my previous post (What Have I Learnt Post Teaching Shakespeare), which can be found here, I decided to create a second post specifically pin-pointed at teaching Romeo and Juliet to a middle ability set.

Having read an excellent chapter on teaching Shakespeare from Trevor Wright (How To Be A Brilliant English Teacher) Wright states that you should by no means give away the ending of the play to students, as it allows them to engage with the plot and come back to lessons wanting to learn more, and find out what happens. However, with Romeo and Juliet this kind of goes out of the window as the first speech you read gives the game away, plus almost all students in the world know the ending from watching the film, or from previous study. This then begs us to ask the question: what can I do to engage them? 

Engagement Tips: 

Some things I found that helped me with a middle set year 9 are detailed below;

• Character comparisons: I found students really responded well comparing characters from the story with well-known celebrity figures around today. For example, the two star-crossed lovers could be compared to Justin Beiber and Selena Gomez, obviously not as gory but both young and torn apart by the issue of fame and constant media scrutiny. The list could go on. Comment on some you can think of below! 
• Drama, drama, drama: With very important scenes, for example Act 3 Scene 1, Tybalt's death, I took the students to the drama studio after reading and got them in groups to act it out! It really helped them engage with the material and feel the tension and conflict within the scene. 
• Contextual Clues: Information around status and power really worked well, such as characters of lower importance spoke in prose, and higher importance characters spoke in verse. Also, ideas around marriage and gender inequality got some really heated debates going on from the students, all of which contributed to their learning. 
• Critical Analysis: Offer students critical interpretations from scholars, this really widens their views on literature and helps them see where they could take their analysis. It also promotes a culture of excellence and adopts an ethos of high expectations from them. It can also boost their own self-esteem, I would just recommend you break it down into chunks that are understandable for them. 
• Non-Fiction Writing; Take the story of Romeo and Juliet, it has so many layers of events and meaning that can be transferred to non-fiction writing. For example, a newspaper article on the death of Tybalt, Spotted at Capulet's ball article to be written in the form of a report, diary entries, speeches and the list goes on! 

Hopefully you can use some of these strategies in your lessons, let me know how they work in the comments below! 

Design Your Teaching Top Tip

A handy tip I learnt last week:

 Finish a lesson by asking your students to list the 6 words they heard you say most during the lesson. 

I did this with my top set year 11 class only last week and it was excellent to see the words they recited to me in this plenary, were all linked to the poem's themes we had been looking at! 

What Have I Learnt Post Teaching Shakespeare?

As most English teachers will probably tell any one who asks, or does not, when opening a lesson with ''today we will be looking at Shakespeare'', reactions will (on most occasions include) groans, sighs of distress and a look of fear and loathing in the eyes of a group of teenage pupils. Now, of course this is not for all children, and of course there are students who relish the challenge of sifting through The Bard's words and coming up with their own inferences, however in my school there is a real lack of enthusiasm for one of the greatest writer's of all time and I have found this is because they feel it is out-dated and old fashioned, words from their own mouths. 

I have spent the last term, from January and March, teaching Shakespeare to both a lower ability year 10 and a higher ability year 9. This blog post will include ideas around how I managed to tackle student's prior objectives and hostile reactions, as well as notions on how to make the story come to life for our students to love both the characters and the themes created by William Shakespeare. 

First Things First....

Before even reading the text, or getting stuck into the story, bring your own passion to your classroom. This is the best tip I can give, students will not respond to anything you give them with Shakespeare unless you make it sound as exciting as humanly possible! I have taught Macbeth for a term  now as to a low ability group, as soon as I begun telling them this is a story of murder, betrayal and power; a man seeking to become King and crushing any one who stands in his way, you have them hooked. Their eyes open slightly wider and you can hear the groaning come to a halt. The same with Romeo and Juliet, which is the other play I taught, as soon as you put the story into something they themselves can understand 'how would you feel if your dad told you that you had to marry someone you did not know' an immediate up roar of chatter comes across and the lesson goes from zero to a hundred with one question. This idea of contextualization I gained from the wonderful book by Trevor Wright called How To Be A Brilliant English Teacher, which you can find here. 

The idea is simple, but really effective and can bring a sense of curiosity and intrigue from students who once considered the words of the bard so far removed from their own lives, when really they are embedded within them. 

 Stage, Not Page!

I found myself constantly mentioning this sentence to my students, who I believed helped them in their understanding of the play: 

''Shakespeare is meant to be performed, not read! They are plays to be seen on stage, you have to imagine actors performing these words on a stage''. 

I noticed as soon as I mentioned this, it was like a light bulb appeared above thirty heads at the same time. For students, as soon as they see language which is unfamiliar it will create a lack of self-esteem, and a block, as they will think automatically I can not read this and therefore I am stupid. It is very important you stress to them this mantra, stage not page. It makes them realise in a way that of course it is inaccessible, it is a performance: let us make it a performance! There is no better way to learn a story then to immerse yourself in it. Get your students in a drama studio, make them feel the passion of the words; show them actors performances; even better take them to see one! Continue with this mantra and you are sure to win them over! 

Finally,

Before, this blog post turns into a full blown essay (which I am sure you are all sick of reading), the last nugget of advice I can offer from my experience is summarise before you read- for lower ability this is a necessity. As soon as they hear the lines from Shakespeare begin to flow, without a given context, they will switch off. If you prefer, instead of summaries, give them key words which link to the scene. They can then find these words in the text, or write their own summaries as to how the words on the board relate to the text they are reading. The later is more successful with higher ability students, but can be used with lower if scaffolded properly. I found that providing students with a break down of ''thee, thy, thine'' also helped, and a common words glossary to have next to them when reading was useful too. 

I will continue this blog post in part 2, but for now thank you for reading! More to come soon! 

#PoundlandPedagogy, The Rise of a Phenomenon!

Having been lucky enough to attend the Bexley and Greenwich Teach Meet, ran by two amazing secondary teachers (@RachelSwinburne and @Sazwighead), I became introduced to the wonder that is #PoundlandPedagogy!

The essence of this concept is simple. Head into your nearest Poundland, scour the aisles for random bits and bobs, then bring them into school and create wonder within your lessons. These items can be anything from coloured paper to gardening tools! A few items I recently picked up from this amazing, bargain-filled place were;

• 20 character cut out shaped figures 
• One pack of 2 massive glasses
• 20 colourful, Easter eggs which open
• 3 spiky coloured balls, orange, red and blue.
• A first aid kit 

Ideas for these objects were plentiful when I shared them at a Teaching and Learning breakfast at my school. For the character cut out shaped figures ideas centered around using them in the classroom to create character profiles from novels, plays or poetry; creating revision resources for famous historical figures; mathematicians could use them for problem solving and PE for labeling different parts of the human body. The glasses could be used to view a topic through different eyes: change your perspective on something. Students will love the novelty of wearing them in a lesson, and will relish the idea of thinking about something in a different way to what they already do. The eggs were particularly popular with teachers as there were different colours in the pack. These could be used for differentiation, place questions inside these eggs and just throw them to the students once finished with a task with high order thinking questions on the slips inside for them to answer. The first aid kit can be a useful pack to provide students with support subtly around the classroom, if they need it. Lastly, the spiky balls were also coloured differently and can be used for bouncing questions around the room, learning about cell division within Science and planetary alignment. 

These were just a mere few ideas that I came up with, and I am sure there are many more things that could be done with these items. I hope I have inspired you to grab a couple of quid and make some fantastic teaching and learning within your classroom! As teacher and educators, we need to encourage students to become more independent within lessons, to take charge of their own learning, once we provide them with the right tools and allow time for our methods to work, independence is only a fraction away.