Looking for clues about the digital future of education...

... and trying to keep an open mind!

Saturday 23 June 2012

Teaching #betterEnglish

As the Summer holidays approach I usually feel in the mood for a bit of a revamp of my teaching strategy. I know that once the children have gone home my brain will stay in gear for a week or two before retuning to its more normal holiday snooze mode, and this Summer I'm going to use that time to take a look at something which has been bugging me for a while now: teaching #betterEnglish.
I think that the sensible first step will be to look at how successful jurisdictions across the globe manage to teach English better than we do in England. Once I've done that I'll see if I can distill any best practice and put that into some sort of programme that I'll be able to try out next year. If I can accompany the programme with some useful, trackable data then all the better.
As one example, in the USA they regularly use 'Sentence Combining' to stretch pupils' sentence construction techniques. Not rocket science, I know, but a good idea that I'll find easy to slip into my own planning.
So, there it is. My new project. Should be fun while it lasts. Oh, and if anyone wants to help me along on my journey you are more than welcome. Just comment this post or follow me on Twitter - @chezallen.
English is my native tongue. I must be able to teach it better!