Lightbulbs from Team English National Conference - July 2019

The second iteration of Team English's grass-roots national conference - this time in Peterborough - was another triumph of subject specific CPD.

I was thrilled to be part of it and deliver a workshop on Tier 2 Vocabulary: Teaching it, Remembering it, Working it Out during session 4, I'll share those resources in a separate post.

Here I want to jot down a few of the "lightbulbs" from the sessions I attended.

Jennifer Webb's Key Note: Cultural Capital

Lightbulb #1: Jennifer showed us a bunch of literature themed memes, and oh how the hall of English teachers laughed! Jennifer used this to make the point that it feels good to laugh with others, and good to "get it" to be "in on it." We are privileged with insider knowledge. She asked us to ponder how many of our pupils and parents would "get it?" and argued that literature can make people feel small and inadequate.

Lightbulb #2: There is some horrible space management decisions made in our community: Having "local authority spaces" where in one part of the building families might suffer humiliating and challenging experiences re: their beneftis etc and then also be expected to take their kids to the library is counter productive.

Simon Smith: Reading for Pleasure and Purpose

Lightbulb #3: If you're going to embed a real reading culture and have a school that "is swimming in books" (my PM target for 2019-2020?!) then your teachers need to be excited and knowledgeable about books. A good place to start is to take your teachers to a bookshop for them to pick the texts that they'll commit to reading during the 30 min a day reading slot.

Lightbulb #4: Linked to Jennifer's point about cultural capital, at Simon's school they have a series of twenty "pledges" which are experiences they commit to providing to their pupils before they leave primary school: going to the beach, theatre etc. I liked this a lot. My school has a very active Learning Outside the Curriculum team and curriculum and I think pledges could be a way to develop this further.

Lightbulb #5: We need to encourage teachers and pupils to truly examine the pictures in picture books; see illustrators as authors.

Louisa Enstone: Rigorous Fun

Lightbulb #6: "Fun" is a word that people feel uncomfortable with, especially at the moment; we are in a research driven era in education but there is scarcity of research that examines the impact "fun" might have on attainment.

Lightbulb #7: Structured 'Learning Stations' are not the same as a shallow, mad-dash, 5 minute per station "carousel." Instead, with structured questions (that would echo those delivered by the teacher in a more D.I delivery) and decent amounts of time they can provide pupils with the opportunity to prove to themselves that they can tackle texts without teacher guidance.

Lightbulb #8: I particularly loved the Character Autopsy template; this scaffolded approach to analysis will certainly help my pupils produce more nuanced character analysis.

Karen Dunn: Live Modelling

Lightbulb #9: Metacognition: thinking out loud, asking the right questions, knowing the process, having the flexibility to make own decisions - we need to give pupils permission to be flexible and make their own decisions.

Lightbulb #10: When you're in the "we" stage of the (I-We-You process of modelling) then the pupils gain from seeing how you take their ideas and re-shape into more academic language or into a more fluent sentence structure. As this dialogue is so valuable, recording the live modelling process (on your visualiser/ipad etc.) and saving it alongside the annotated/modelled text creates even more useful materials for the pupils.