Report on the 2023 English Meet
Last night we had the second English Meet at Whispering House in St Columba’s - a positive, sociable and friendly occasion during which 6 English teachers from Dublin shared enthusiasms and good practice. As in 2022, it was well received.
Below is the slide presentation from the evening (also available as a PDF download), followed by brief summaries of the presentations and relevant links.
The first speaker was Kate Smith, who spoke on ‘Enrichment Routines in English, with a focus on Word of the Day’. She has been doing this for 10 years. It provides a consistency in class as a recognised routine, and she finds it particularly effective in the one-hour lessons she now has. It makes her students more confident, and it is a reassuring feature for those with autism. She gave many examples, some entertaining (defenestration), which can be seen on her slides.
Dan Stynes was next, ‘Introducing Poetry Analysis to Weak Junior Cycle Students’. He said that 95% of the work done by his pupils is within the class, and took us through his steady approach to introducing poetic techniques, using Adrian Mitchell’s ‘Back in the Playground Blues’ and Seamus Heaney’s ‘The Early Purges’ as examples. More can come from a slow careful approach than taking on too much. His carefully thought-out process was impressive.
Evan Jameson then showed how he has encouraged reading among Junior pupils in his classes, with special class journals enabling a conversation between him and his students. This was prompted by Kenny Pieper’s book Reading for Pleasure. He strongly recommended the PDST’s WellRead National Award.
After a brief break, Holly McIndoe (who also spoke last year) gave ‘A quick overview of the problem of creating atmosphere’, showing the process by which she encourages her students to write more atmospherically. She uses a visualiser to annotate work with the class, which shows the layering of the writing (some slides show illustrations of this). She finds mini-whiteboards very helpful in the process. Her example text from The Hobbit can be downloaded here.
Niall Daly was the fifth speaker, strongly recommending the book The Writing Revolution: A Guide to Advancing Thinking Through Writing in All Subjects and Grades by Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler, which he said is one of the best books he has read about teaching. He chose a single small technique (‘because -’ ‘but-’ ‘so-’) and showed how powerful this can be in eliciting excellent writing from even-reluctant students. He showed it in operation with an extract from Malorie Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses. Such techniques can be used across subjects (he gave PE as an example).
My own short piece was on ‘Swiss Army Knife (exploding) quotations’, a revision technique which fruitfully focusses on a single simple statement in a text (the example I gave being Lady Macbeth’s ‘A little water clears of this deed’, but you could also use it on a line of poetry at Junior Cycle too). The quotation is written in the middle of the page, and pairs of students discuss it for 10-15 minutes, wringing as much out of the individual words as possible in connecting it to key ideas of the text, before sharing with the rest of the class. This sort of directed and intense discussion makes everyone think deeply about the wider text.
Finally, some recommended books for English teachers (see the slides) and then we all headed home, into the early-summer evening. Sincere thanks to all who presented, and who attended.
