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Chris Curtis

Written by Chris Curtis, How to Teach: English: Novels, non-fiction and their artful navigation is jam-packed with enlivening ideas to help teachers make the subject of English more intellectually challenging for students - and to make it fun too!
Never underestimate your duty and power as a teacher of English. English teachers help students to think and feel. They prompt them to reflect on their actions. They hold a mirror to society and inspire students to see how they can make it better.
What other subject does that?
This insightful interpretation of what makes excellent secondary school English teaching is the work of a man whose humility fails to hide his brilliance and provides educators with a sophisticated yet simple framework upon which to hook their lessons. Covering poetry, grammar, Shakespeare and how to teach writing, Chris Curtis has furnished every page of this book with exciting ideas that can be put into practice immediately.
Each chapter presents a store of practical strategies to help students in key areas - providing apposite examples, teaching sequences and the rationale behind them - and has been accessibly laid out so that teachers can pinpoint the solutions they need without having to spend an age wading through academic theory and pontification.
The book explores the wealth of learning opportunities that can be derived from both classic and more contemporary literature and offers expert guidance on how teachers can exploit their own chosen texts to best effect with their students. Furthermore, it is replete with ready-to-use approaches that will help teachers upgrade their lesson planning, enhance their classroom practice and ensure that the content they cover sticks in their students' heads for months and years afterwards.
Suitable for all English teachers of students aged 11-18.

Independent Thinking Press

How to Teach

How to Teach: English

Kenny Pieper

In Reading for Pleasure, Kenny Pieper has gathered a range of tried-and-tested strategies to get kids reading, and enjoying it. We hear too often that kids don't read any more: Kenny thinks it should be every teacher's mission to prove this isn't true. In a squeezed curriculum it can be tempting to accept pupils' lack of reading and make excuses that there is not enough time to give to the 'luxury' of personal reading. Teachers do this at our peril. Reading is the essential building block of further literacy development as well as a skill, hobby and habit that we can take with us forever. Kenny Pieper takes the act of reading for granted, as many - but sadly not all - adults do. You're reading this right now. However, this isn't the case for everyone. Kenny teaches kids whose lives are terrifying obstacle courses of reading-related problems. They know they struggle with reading so they try to avoid reading at all costs. They leave school, not merely unaffected by this strange reading thing, but saddled with a great deal of emotional baggage about being an outsider, even more entrenched in a belief that reading is for others more intelligent than them. Then there are the children who can read perfectly well, but chose not to, unconvinced of the importance of reading in their lives. What difference does it make to them? We have to answer that question in school. We have a duty to put an end to illiteracy and aliteracy. Kids need reading role models and, as a teacher, that role model is you. You may be the only adult who that reluctant reader will ever see reading. Teachers are critical in giving all children the gift of being able to read well and to value reading. Topics covered include: the author's personal reading journey, how reading enabled him to become the first person in his family to go to university and convinced him that fostering a love of reading is his moral duty as an educator, illiteracy and aliteracy, reluctant readers, book reviews, prioritising personal reading by devoting ten minutes each lesson to it, habitual reading, the reading environment, interest inventories, technology, e-readers, Accelerated Reader programmes, recommended reading, building a class library, bookmarks, book tweets, book speed-dating, libraries, librarians, literacy and class inequality, parental involvement, podcasting, reading records, reading dialogue journals, the rights of the reader, reading aloud, silent reading and literacy and gender, amongst others. The benefits we can all reap when kids become confident readers who read for pleasure are obvious. Discover strategies which will: get kids talking about books, get them thinking about books, get them reading books, encourage independent reading, develop literacy skills and establish a classroom culture where reading is expected and celebrated. Suitable for primary and secondary teachers, leaders and SENCOs, or just anyone with an interest in or responsibility for getting kids to read.

Reading for Pleasure: A passport to everywhere

Catrin Green

Part of Phil Beadle's How to Teach Series

So, you have passion for your subject and you get to work with some of the funniest, most surprising and exceptional students. But teaching science isn't always a walk in the park. How do you get students to think scientifically, remember all of those key words and not get acid in their eyes? Secondary Science is chockfull of workable ideas for the secondary science classroom. Ditch the stereotypical view of a science teacher: white coat, slides, teaching the limewater test to the same class for the fifth year in a row, and discover new and creative ways to inspire the next generation to use science.

Areas covered include: the big ideas in science, scientific skills and knowledge, curriculum, practical work, difficult topics, differentiation, assessment, feedback and the science of memory and learning, including the spacing effect and interleaving.

The book is packed with: advice about teacher talk, fun science games, ideas for developing scientific literacy, ideas for embedding mathematical skill in science, advice for extended writing in science, advice to make practical work safe, meaningful and worthwhile, and top tips for teaching the difficult topics that students tend to dislike! Catrin offers tips for teaching areas of the science curriculum including electricity, evolution and balancing equations.

Suitable for all teachers, including NQTs and experienced teachers who are looking for new ideas. If you are looking for quick and easy ideas to make science fun and relevant, while ensuring that all students are successful and confident in your lessons, and not overloaded with facts, then this book is for you.

Secondary Science: Respiration is not breathing!

Nick Tiley-Nunn

Primary maths is stereotypically loved by a few hairy oddballs, tolerated by most sane primary practitioners; loathed by many. With the right approach, however; the right mindset and sense of the impossible being achievable, maths can be moulded into the diamond in the rough of the primary curriculum. Enter Nick Tiley-Nunn: Britain's most imaginative, most exciting primary maths specialist. Over years of practice he has generated ideas about the teaching of maths that are so distinct, so far out and so utterly brilliant that any primary teacher struggling to grasp the nettle of teaching long division will emerge from communing with his ideas not just with some cliched sense that 'maths can be fun', but that it can be brilliant, life-enhancing and truly hilarious. This book presents ideas for primary maths teaching so wildly creative and so full of the joy of life that any classroom of kids will be grateful you read it.

Primary Maths: Anyone can feed sweets to the sharks...

Phil Beadle

Literacy is important. This book is about getting it right. Its author is an expert in teaching children how to speak and write well, and has transformed the oral and written communication skills of many thousands of students. In How to Teach: Literacy he shares how he does it and what he knows about this most important of all skills and reveals what every teacher needs to know in order to radically transform literacy standards across the curriculum. The stories, anecdotes and insights into the many practical activities in this book are, in turn, and often in the same sentence, heart breaking, inspiring, shocking and, as ever, funnier and more readable than those in an education book have any right to be. Contains everything teachers need to know to teach literacy effectively, regardless of their subject specialism or phase. If you want to make sure that every child leaves your class knowing the rules and how to use them, this is the book for you. If you think that literacy is difficult, or boring, or not your responsibility, be ready to be proved wrong. Discover practical activities, spelling strategies, tips for teaching punctuation and grammar guides that are anything but didactic and dull.

Literacy: Commas, colons, connectives and conjunctions

You paint an outside wall. It rains. What happens to the paint? It runs off, of course! So it is with our students. We teach them something. We can't be bothered to do the recap, the plenary, as we don't have any ideas. They leave the lesson. They promptly forget what you have taught them. There was no point their being in the lesson in the first place. The world continues turning. This practical little book of plenaries does what it says. It delivers a series of simple ideas for how to make your lesson endings - or mid-lesson recaps - interesting, engaging and cognitively challenging. Apply the ideas in this book and your students will leave the lesson with the information you have taught them still in their heads.

The Book of Plenary: here endeth the lesson...

How to Teach is the most exciting, most readable, and most useful teaching manual ever written. It is not the work of a dry theorist. Its author has spent half a lifetime working with inner city kids and has helped them to discover an entirely new view of themselves. This book lets you into the tricks of the trade that will help you to do the same, from the minutiae of how to manage difficult classes through to exactly what you should be looking for when you mark their work. How to Teachcovers everything you need to know in order to be the best teacher you can possibly be.

How to Teach - The book series

How to Teach - The book series

How to Teach books in order

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