You're my favourite class, too

I so absolutely love teaching English. I love that I can (try to) inspire students to appreciate literature and film - the words, characters, feelings, meanings. I love that I can use that literature to show them something new about the world... how we treat each other, how we learn from each other, how we can change the world. That I can show them the impact of change, of being true to who we are, of standing up for what we believe in, of our rights as human beings. Of what it means to be human. All through the texts that I choose. I love I can give my students an avenue for expressing their creativity and ideas. That they can find something that they are passionate about and tell the world about it in their own words. That I can nurture the 'writer within'. And because visual language is a part of our curriculum, the artist within. I love it. I might forget that from time to time because I get tired, have four classes of marking submitted at once, or have to write 1...

I'm having the most entertaining time with my Year 12 class at the moment. Well, more accurately, I'm having an entertaining time watching my Year 12 class. In theory, students have finished reading John Green's Paper Towns (theory because they had very little class time assigned to it reading it and were expected to complete it at home). Instead of guiding them through the novel, as I would usually, I have set the class up with a reading journal and task, and am pretty much sitting back and letting them discover the deeper aspects of the novel on their own. Their end product is to be a study guide which must be made accessible for all other students in the class. I have left it up to them how they do it. We have groups are using Tumblr, Google sites and docs and a wiki. Their reading journal focuses them on the development of character, themes, symbols and relationships in each chapter, on the big questions about identity and interconnectedness, and how the main two...

I'm not really a blogger - I tend to use this for reflections and then only sporadically. I guess the reason why I do choose to do my reflections online, rather than in a private document, is that there does feel that there is a degree of accountability. What I say has to be literate, to have a real purpose, and to stand up to scrutiny. Just as I am drawn to blogging, I've found that my students also like the idea of their work being published for a potential international audience. I've trialled a little bit of blogging with different classes and for different reasons. The most obvious reason to use blogs links to achievement and engagement. There are lots of websites touting the benefits of student blogging, backed by research (see here , here and here ). These benefits include that students like it, helps with reading and writing skills, gives students a voice - not only in writing their blogs but giving feedback to others, and provides them with a genuine audience ...

As our school becomes more focused on catering to the individual needs of our students - such as 'Ready to Work' options for non-academic students (in line with Vocational Pathways ) and an endorsement programme for our high achievers - this is approach is also filtering into my classroom I'm noticing this in particular with my Year 12 and 13 classes. In my Year 12 class, for example, I have two international students whose English excludes them from success in a number of the standards the course offers. The solution is to provide some Level 1 unit standards for one student and ESOL support for the other. I have a student who is in the class but struggles, and in discussion with him, I have offered him an alternative course which is a mix of the achievement standards the rest of the class are doing, and some unit standards. This will enable him to have some success in English this year, so I'm chuffed, and he's chuffed. Then there is the rest of the class. I'...