Tag: writing

CURATING THE LINE: the impact on trainee English teachers of belonging to a peer-run writing group

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How can you teach creative writing unless you’re a practising writer yourself? That sounds like a perfectly reasonable question to ask. But whilst most secondary school English teachers could probably tell you what book they’re currently reading for pleasure without a second’s hesitation, ask what they’re writing and in most cases the reaction will likely be very different.

There are lots of reasons for that, not least the huge weight of work that goes with the territory of being a classroom teacher – and especially a teacher of English. There’s also the fact that good English teaching is highly creative work – work that harnesses and then saps the very creative energy that in other circumstances teachers might be investing in their own writing.

And then there’s the insecurity about writing that, sadly, is sometimes instilled in English teachers through painfully memorable confidence-zapping encounters in their own education. And perhaps the inevitable feeling of humility about one’s own writing that comes with spending so much time exploring the brilliant writing of others.

The PGCE English course at the University of Cambridge places a high value on encouraging student teachers to practise their own writing, and, as they do so, to reflect on how this shapes their practice in the classroom. For many, and sometimes even for those who arrive at the course having done Creative Writing degrees, that’s a liberating, refreshing and surprisingly enjoyable experience. Our hope is to produce English teachers who will see themselves as teacher-writers, or writer-teachers, and that this will in turn enrich the writing of the students they work with in schools.

One recent cohort of trainee English teachers so valued the experience of writing together that they established their own peer-run writing group, which met several times throughout the PGCE year, which provided the opportunity for me to carry out some research into the impact on these student teachers of belonging to this group. This has just been published in an article in English in Education, the research journal for the National Association for the Teaching of English, which can be accessed here.

It was heartening to find that all of the participants in this research could articulate how belonging to a peer-run writing group had impacted their teaching of creative writing. But perhaps the most interesting and unexpected finding was about vulnerability. Several of the participants spoke movingly about times when their writing group had offered them a supportive space in which to share something of themselves than they might otherwise not have done, in a way that felt manageable. One described this as being an opportunity to ‘curate the line’ in terms of working out how to make themselves vulnerable to one another during a highly formative and demanding year. Curiously, they then discovered that having practised doing this in the writing group, they felt more skilful and confident in developing their own teaching personae in the potentially exposing setting of the classroom.

A follow-up study would be needed to explore the role played by writing in the lives of these beginning teachers a couple of years into their careers. But the discovery that writing together alongside other beginning teachers not only developed their confidence as writers but also as professional practitioners seemed to have a significant impact on these trainee teachers’ sense of autonomy and expertise.

Fathers, witches and things that fall out of books: The Verb, with Ian McMillan

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It was a dream come true to have the opportunity to read and talk about three poems from The Opposite of Swedish Death Cleaning on BBC Radio 4’s The Verb, hosted by Ian McMillan, and alongside guests Fiona Benson, Boo Hewerdine and Yvonne Lyon.

The show is available on BBC Sounds, and also as a podcast.

Although the focus of my segment was on writing about a parent with dementia – something that felt particularly poignant given that the programme was aired on Fathers’ Day – I was really glad that Ian had selected Muscle Memory for me to read and discuss, as it’s a reminder of the moments of joy that can still be found even amidst so much loss. Here’s a photo of the beautiful copper font in Norwich Cathedral ‘that stretched our faces like toffee’ – an allusion to the fact that it was donated when the Rowntree’s chocolate factory closed down, having previously been used to melt toffee.

I love Fiona Benson’s collection Midden Witch, so it was brilliant to hear her talking about the stories behind some of these poems, like The Witch of Easington and Jenny Greenteeth. Some of my favourite poems in this collection are those inspired by birds and animals, and it’s fascinating to see how placing them in a section entitled ‘Familiars’ curiously shifts the reader’s perspective on creatures such as bowerbirds and snails.

Boo Hewerdine and Yvonne Lyon’s songs about things that fall out of books tied the whole show together, and it was spine-tingling to hear their music up close in the studio. I was so touched that Boo set a line from Inside the House of Delirium to music: ‘The curtains sleep until midday’.

If we’d had more time, I would have shared this poppy petal that fell out of my great grandmother’s Bible, which she used as a flower press. It’s incredible to think that it must have been flowering in a Cornish hedgerow in the 1880s.

Cut-out poetry – reclaiming analogue teaching

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Sometimes you read an article or blog post by another teacher and think, ‘Yes! Thank goodness somebody else thinks that too!’ That was the case this week when I read a post by Emma Turner called ‘Powerpoint and IWBs – It’s time to reclaim analogue teaching’.

Turner, a highly experienced teacher, school leader and education consultant, makes a passionate and well-argued case for a return to ‘the beauty and effectiveness of analogue teaching’, in an era when the default seems to be for students to spend large chunks of lesson time passively watching pre-prepared slides on a giant screen, which has, she argues, ‘assumed a shrine-like status in our classrooms’. It’s well worth reading the whole post, but my favourite paragraph is this one:

Teaching is about responding to the emerging thinking in front of us. It is not about producing neat, sanitised sequences for passive recipients to be presented with. Teaching is alive, it is interrogative, it is dynamic; it is fizzing with variables and influences, so the very idea that a route through a challenging concept with 30 individuals all with unique schema and experience can be predicted and planned for with any degree of invariability is bordering on farcical.

Turner’s case for ‘analogue teaching’ is applicable to all subjects and all ages, but as an English teacher that phrase ‘fizzing with variables and influences’ particularly resonates with me.

It’s been lovely to see the response to Emma Turner’s blog post, with other teachers chipping in with their lists of tried and tested classroom ideas which don’t involve screens and slides, and which, instead, call for pipe-cleaners, plasticine, shoe-boxes, crayons, sugar paper, props, costumes, sock puppets, old rolls of wallpaper and so on. Or which, in English lessons, simply involve reading aloud, without recourse to pre-prepared notes on slides, and then getting students to write creatively in response.

One of the lessons I most enjoyed teaching last term came at the end of a Year 8 unit on poetry. It was the last week before Easter and I’d taught all the poems in the scheme of work, plus a couple of extras. I was looking for something to sum up our sense of the range of poems we’d been exploring together, and also to leave my students with a memory of poetry as being something playful, and, above all, something that they could access and enjoy with confidence.

Like many of the best lessons, this one was easy to set up, and involved very little input from me during the lesson itself. All I did was to copy and paste four of the poems we’d studied, without their line breaks, into a Word document, leaving 1.5 spacing between the lines. I printed one sheet for each student in the class. And then I gathered all the scrap paper and cardboard I could find: the lids of old boxes lying around in the English office; the sheets of cardboard that often come in packs of A4 lined paper; flaps of old document folders that had been used many times; scraps of sugar paper; offcuts of coloured card.I brought all of this to the lesson, together with as many glue sticks and pairs of scissors as I could find. The lesson wasn’t entirely Powerpoint-free: I had one slide with an example of a cut-out poem on, just to give students an idea of what sort of thing they would be creating.

That was it. For a whole hour, on a Wednesday afternoon, my students were busily, happily and, best of all, creatively engaged in selecting, snipping, placing, rearranging, hunting, editing, adapting, illustrating, explaining as they created their own cut-out poems, using words from the poems we had been studying in our previous lessons. It was one of those lessons when, for much of the time, I really needn’t have been in the room at all. That freed me up to circulate and chat to students as they worked, hearing about the creative challenges they were encountering and how they were solving them. For example, what to do if you really needed a particular word and it wasn’t there? One student painstakingly snipped out every letter to spell the word he needed. Another did the same, and then realised that this meant she could be playful about the spacing between the letters, deliberately stretching the word out. She was able to articulate with great confidence why she had decided to do this and what impact she intended it to have on the reader.

At a time when there is so much concern about the amount of time young people are spending online, it was so heartening to see how satisfying these Year 8 students found the physicality of cutting, arranging and sticking, and how proud they were of what they produced.

In a lesson like this it’s amazing to see how everyone starts with exactly the same text – the words from four of the poems that we’d studied – but by the end of the lesson no two poems are alike. Cut-out poetry is an approach that supports those who lack confidence in writing: no one need worry about staring at a blank page, because the starting-point is always a page full of words. But it allows for huge flexibility in response. To return to that quotation from Emma Turner’s blog, it’s an approach that is ‘alive, it is interrogative, it is dynamic; it is fizzing with variables and influences’.

I welcome the sharing of approaches that celebrate what happens in classrooms when students are given the space, resources and inspiration to be active creators, rather than passive recipients.