Pathway to Progress: Empowering Educators for Today’s Classrooms

Are you interested in using and making comics in the classroom, but don’t know where to start? Based on research into children’s comics making, this workshop aimed at KS2 teachers (ages 7-11) will introduce you to creative and engaging ways of making, thinking and learning through comics. Through hands-on activities we will explore how ‘the medium we think in defines what we can see’ (Sousanis, 2015). Each part of this workshop will involve you thinking about the medium of comics through making comics. The language of comics will be explored, and we will look at how the medium of comics work. Through practical drawing activities, participants will have the chance to develop their understanding of how to simplify drawings and use symbols to communicate emotions. We will explore the panel and gutter through drawing and working collaboratively to make a comic strip. Participants will discover the power of drawing and writing for enjoyment and what is unique about comics as an art form.

Limerick, villanelle, pantoum, sestina. Some forms of poetry come with rules about the subject or theme (odes, elegy) and some come with strict rules about the number of lines, stanzas, rhyme, refrain etc. Choosing a poetic form to explore can be a ‘way in’ for students to begin to understand how important it is to choose words with care. This workshop will look at certain forms in order to ‘have a go’ at producing original poetry that follows well established rules. The aim is for students to develop a more disciplined approach to writing through imitation or pastiche before branching out and developing their own style of writing.

Reading Fluency: The missing link in Secondary? (11-18)
Since the pandemic, reading scores have been falling and this is having a significant impact on students' ability to access the secondary curriculum (11-18). Lots of work is done in the primary key stages, however much of this work to help students read falls away as they begin secondary school. Fluency (the bridge between word recognition and language comprehension) is a crucial element of the reading curriculum and can do a lot to catch up struggling older readers.

Aimed at 11-18

Reducing the writing block
This workshop will focus on increasing student experience of independent practice to enable them to write with more purpose, building stamina through the Key Stages to support better outcomes for all pupils in the classroom. For KS3 students, crafting sentences is key to excellent extended writing. This session will focus on slow writing and modelled sentence writing in KS3 in developing more imaginative and original work whilst developing students ability to edit their work to improve it. At KS4 we will consider a more structured approach to analytical writing and essay planning, supporting students to develop their own arguments.
Age range: KS3/4 (11-16) 

The Art of the Sentence: Essay Writing through Micro Preparation
Novelist John Banville once described the sentence as the ‘greatest invention of civilization’. In this workshop, we’ll explore the powerful role that sentences play in our ability to construct and explore ideas, specifically in the context of essay writing. We’ll consider a variety of high impact sentence stems, grammatical rules, syntactic structures and phrases that, almost tweezer-like, students can pick up and place in a variety of their responses. When their use is honed through frequent practice and exposure, such stems and syntactic formulations can easily be transferred across multiple texts and age-ranges and, with repeated use, their deployment becomes almost automatic, a kind of stylistic flex that students apply almost without thinking. The workshop will cover a variety of specific examples as well as ideas for teaching and modelling them.

Secondary Ages (11-18) with a focus on 14-16

A Vision for English Literature: What Matters in the English Classroom

As much philosophical as it is practical, this workshop will attempt to answer one of the most fundamental questions an English teacher can pose: what matters – really matters – in the teaching of literature. Working through a series of assertions, designed to provoke and generate discussion, the workshop will consider what makes the discipline of English distinctly and uniquely English-y. Having explore this question together, the workshop will conclude by considering its practical implication: what does it actually look like to teach in accordance with these proposed disciplinary assumptions?

Secondary Ages (11-18) with a focus on 14-16

Comics are a fantastic way to get young children engaged in reading and writing. Based on research into children’s comics making, this workshop aimed at KS1 teachers (ages 5-7) will introduce you to creative and engaging ways of making and learning about comics. We will look the relationship between picturebooks and comics and consider how to develop children’s visual literacy. Through practical drawing activities, participants will have the chance to develop their understanding of how to simplify drawings and use symbols to communicate emotions. Participants will learn to fold and make a ‘zine’ (small DIY booklets), and through words and pictures get a chance to create their own mini-comic, an activity they can replicate back in their own classrooms across all subject areas.

Until being faced with writing challenges during a recent MA in Creative Writing, I had forgotten just how terrifying writing for someone else to evaluate can be. This workshop will hopefully make the process a little less daunting for students through useful and enjoyable strategies designed to prompt thoughtful written responses. The strategies will remain simple with the aim of reducing the pressure students may feel to produce obscure or totally original content. The purpose is to think about how best to use language to convey what is thought, felt and imagined in clearly expressed and carefully structured compositions.

Vocabulary for Reading (11-18)
The vocabulary gap has a passive impact on student performance at school. Research shows that a student needs to understand 95-98% of the words in a text for unassisted comprehension, but often, students arrive with little understanding of Tier 2 and 3 vocabulary. This workshop will address ways to address the vocabulary gap. 

Ages: 11-18

Disciplinary Literacy and reading in the KS3 curriculum
This workshop will explore Disciplinary Literacy approaches in the classroom and KS3 curriculum, focusing on reciprocal reading techniques, echo reading and oracy. Explicit teaching of vocabulary is key is exposing students to a wider range of more challenging words, to close the word deficit gap and enable students to tackle more complex texts independently. We will explore whole text reading and the benefits of cold reads, including how intonation, prosody and tone can develop deeper understanding.
Age range: KS3 (11-14)

It is perhaps apposite to remember that authors do not usually write in order for students and teachers to unpack their words. The wonderful writer Claire Keegan articulated this in a recent interview: “I can’t explain my work. I just write stories. I’ve never thought about a theme. I never once have. I just think about the text.” As all English teachers are asked time and time again “but how do we know that’s what the author meant? How do we know that word was chosen on purpose?” Of course these questions are valid but nevertheless our job remains: to deliver lessons that help students to “think about the text” in a clear and focused manner through engaging active reading strategies. We need to take time to encourage the skills needed across the curriculum and for future assessments. This workshop will concentrate on how to enable students to understand explicit and implicit meaning and attitudes, select and evaluate what is relevant to specific purposes and how effects are created through authorial choice (whether intentional or not!).  

Target audience: Secondary English

Thinking Through Writing: Using Generative Writing in the English Classroom
Students often see writing as the terminus of thinking rather than its starting point. Writing is something that happens after thinking; it is the solidification of something that has already been considered and deliberated. This workshop offers a different way of thinking about and framing student writing. Rather than a record of thinking, writing is the thinking. Focussing specifically on the English classroom, the workshop will explore a series of practical strategies that teachers can deploy in their own practice, all designed to get students thinking hard through writing.

Secondary Ages (11-18) with a focus on 14-16

This workshop will explore how to develop a community of comics readers to support children’s engagement with reading for pleasure. Based on research into the setting up and running of a comics library, this workshop examines how comics can develop a positive reading culture in schools. We will consider some of the myths around comics and look at their potential. We will explore what comics ‘are’ and the many different types of comics that are available to readers. The language of comics will be explored, and we will look at how to ‘read’ comics. Finally the workshop will offer practical suggestions for developing your own knowledge of children’s comics and creating your own comics libraries.