How to teach: English - Chris Curtis 2019
Learn from the greats
How to teach essay writing
How many times have students read an academic essay in your classroom? The majority of students read quasi-academic essays. The teacher probably wrote one in their planning, preparation and assessment (PPA) time and based it on what the GCSE exam board expects a 9 will look like. That’s why we have had point, evidence, explanation (PEE) reinforced and repeated again and again. It gives the impression of structured thought, but it doesn’t replicate genuine academic essays. In truth, they don’t use it, nor do I recall university lecturers telling me that I needed to PEE more in my essays. Find and print off superb essays. Read them in class. Take sentences from them. Use them. Talk about them. Return to them again and again.
I have used the following quotes from Mark Van Doren about Macbeth.
✵ ’Concerned wholly with sensation and catastrophe … terror rather than pity.’5
✵ ’It is furthermore a world in which nothing is certain to keep its shape.’6
✵ ’Shakespeare again has enclosed his evil within a universe of good, his storm centre within wide areas of peace.’7
The great thing about these lines, displayed around the classroom, is the level of understanding they elicit. We answered the following questions:
✵ What does it mean?
✵ Where do we see it in the play?
✵ Do we agree with the statement?
The level of discussion was raised. We spent a good lesson exploring the idea that Macbeth was about ’terror and not pity’ and had a debate about whether we pity Macbeth and whether you can experience terror and pity at the same time. Aim high and pull students up with you!
1 Dickens, A Christmas Carol, p. 12.
2 Some possible metaphors to use: smashing through the glass ceiling, a bomb waiting to explode, a mirror, a painting, a lighthouse, a steam train, a wrecking ball, a torch, a magnifying glass and a microscope.
3 C. Spalding, Teaching ideas: what has worked for me recently?, Teacher’s Notes [blog] (1 May 2017). Available at: http://mrscspalding.blogspot.com/2017/05/teaching-ideas-what-has-worked-for-me.html.
4 That’s why I keep mentioning it.
5 M. Van Doren, Macbeth. In L. F. Dean (ed.), Shakespeare: Modern Essays in Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 346—360 at p. 346.
6 Ibid, p. 348.
7 Ibid, p. 360.