‘Making every English lesson count’: Review by Miss Unsworth (English teacher and Assistant SENCo)

In the summer term, the English teachers at Nova Hreod were gifted copies of Andy Tharby’s book ‘Making every English lesson count’ (MEELC). This is a follow-on from the equally excellent book, ‘Making every lesson count’ by Andy Tharby and Shaun Allison. As a recently qualified English teacher, I found MEELC incredibly helpful and can honestly say it’s the best teaching and learning book I’ve ever read.

According to MEELC, expert teaching includes the following key principles:

• Challenge
• Explanation
• Modelling
• Deliberate practice
• Questioning
• Feedback

As a school, we structure all our lessons around these guiding principles and it was great to read a book which follows the same pedagogical principles but also has lots of practical ideas which are specific to the subject of English.

I found the chapters related to teaching writing the most helpful and my review will focus on how I’ve adapted my teaching of writing in English lessons since reading MEELC.

Tharby advised that writing tasks should be easy to start, but hard to do well and he suggested a range of strategies, such as shared writing and student examples, to support students with writing tasks which they may perceive as ‘difficult’. As a result, I have introduced a ‘Modelling Excellence’ board in my classroom where I will display excellent examples of student work to use as models for others. I also use discussion and modelling within my writing lessons; this has been most helpful with my Y9 class as I have used the strategy of ‘joint planning’ before independent writing and I have already seen a huge improvement in their confidence with writing compared to last year.

Tharby also stated that students’ writing could be improved by combining this with their study of literature; for example, students could emulate the work of the great writers they are studying. An interesting example of this was Scrooge’s dwelling in Stave One of ‘A Christmas Carol’ and I’m looking forward to trying this approach out next term.

In terms of explaining writing, Tharby said that writing tasks need to have a clear and concise success criteria. I particularly liked his comment: ‘intelligent parameters can inspire creativity’. Tharby further implied that poorly designed or very open writing tasks can be counter-productive and students should be encouraged to be working in their ‘struggle zone’.

Following on from this, I have introduced a short ‘silent writing’ task to the start of all my Y11 lessons (see example below). This has been wonderful as I’ve been able to read the students’ writing twice a week and give them feedback. I am also building my students’ independent writing up over time. There are some incredibly talented writers in my Y11 class and I can’t wait for the day when I can buy their published work!

With Y11 I have also been modelling the key metacognitive processes of writing and we have spent time planning out their writing in detail. As this was an area that AQA highlighted as a weakness in their 2017 Examiners’ Report, I’m hoping that spending time teaching students how to properly plan and proof-read their writing will be helpful for them in the summer 2018 exams.

Finally, Tharby advised that the optimal conditions for writing include a sustained period of silence. Writing in silence is imperative to support working memory as it happens at the meeting point between many complex cognitive tasks. All my classes write in silence during extended writing tasks and I was pleased to see support for this in MEELC.

Thanks for writing such a great book, Andy. I can’t recommend it highly enough.