The Dead Hand of the Exam: The impact of the NEAB anthology on poetry teaching at GCSE

This paper considers the impact of the NEAB GCSE anthology on the poetry teaching of a small sample group of practitioners in a range of 11-18 schools in one LEA over a two-year period. While some teachers in the sample embraced the opportunities they believe the anthology offered them, others appeared more resistant, perceiving the anthology as reductive and an imposition on their established poetry teaching practices. The process of adjustment, which occurred as teachers began to make the poetry element of the GCSE syllabus their own, is illustrated, with the implications of these findings for classroom practice.     

Poetry is an Unfamiliar Text: Locating Poetry in Secondary English Classrooms in New Zealand and England during a Period of Curriculum Change

Undertaken during a period when changes in the assessment of English in public examinations at 16+ were becoming embedded in classroom practice, this comparative research explores where poetry is located within the newly aligned examination assessment frameworks of New Zealand and England. It comments on how these frameworks are locally interpreted by a sample group of English teachers in two culturally diverse cities. It identifies the challenges for assessment of poetry writing and retention of poetry study at examination level that are instantiated within these contexts. In investigating poetry’s location, key issues are highlighted about teachers’ perceptions of poetry, confidence and the support needed for examination level teaching of a genre that is in danger of becoming increasingly unfamiliar to many students.     

Wireless keyboards and mice: could they enhance teaching and learning in the secondary English classroom?

This paper reports on the first year of a pilot study on the use of wireless keyboards and mice by student teachers with small groups of pupils across the 11–16 age range in the secondary English classroom. It investigates the equipment's suitability for use with a range of teaching and learning strategies including collaborative writing and textual analysis and considers the affordances which may be offered to the learning context through use of the technology. Provisional findings reveal some technical difficulties with the equipment but suggest that it has the potential, particularly when used as a motivational tool, to develop pupils' creative engagement with composition processes during small group collaborative writing.