Knowledge hub
Reads for English teachers on questions that come up in every department, with the evidence linked so you can check it.
Do students need to read the whole text?
There is no formal consensus, but the exam rules, the main UK study and most of the people quoted in recent coverage point the same way. Students need to know the whole text, read at a good pace, and the slow, detailed work goes on a smaller set of extracts.
What–How–Why paragraphs, and when to take the frame away
A shared paragraph frame gets every student writing analysis from the first lesson. The harder part is removing it again, which is what AQA’s examiners have asked for in report after report.
One question, three levels of support
In every lesson, every student answers the same question about the same text. The three levels change the support around the task and leave the task alone. Here is the thinking behind that, and how to decide who starts where.
Whole-class feedback without raw marks
Read the answers, write one sheet for the class and spend the next lesson acting on it. Here is what the evidence supports, where it runs out, and how the Feedback Loop kits in our schemes run it.