A lesson to guide an understanding of Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy in Act 1 Scene 5 of Macbeth, working step by step through “the raven himself is hoarse…” This lesson begins by checking understanding of a soliloquy, before picking apart the details. Analysis is structured as a series of questions on particular words or lines in the text, rather than simply telling pupils what to write. I find that this helps to spark conversation and engages pupils better, rather than having them desperately trying to copy everything down! There are some sentence starters for a paragraph exploring her plot towards the end, as well as links to different film versions of this speech. A forewarning - the Kate Fleetwood version of this scene gets a bit racy when Macbeth arrives!! I also pair this with the 1971 Polanski version of the scene, which I can’t find anywhere on Youtube, but I think most English departments have a DVD copy somewhere. With the film versions, pupils are encouraged to consider which lines stand out, and how the actress has presented Lady Macbeth’s character.

Two lecture-style lessons for A Level on the context of Brave New World, with the first looking at life at the time, and the second moving onto life since. Across these two lessons, designed for when pupils have already read the book, a range of ideas about historical context are considered. The first looks at what was going on at the time when Huxley was writing, considering mass production, eugenics, and conditioning, whereas the second moves into considering how we have started to move towards that world in the 90 years since Huxley wrote the novel: changes in technology and what it means to be human. Knowledge of context (both when the text was written and has been received) is imperative at A Level and I’ve found both of these lessons have really helped my pupils to get a good grounding in what they need to know.

A series of three lessons which work well as an opening on A Christmas Carol, exploring what life was like in Victorian Britain, and Dicken’s writing style. The first two lessons here focus on Victorian lifestyles, with one lesson offering pupils the chance to carry out their own research (guidance is given in the form of suggested websites for each topic, looking at Victorian childhood, fashions and etiquette, Charles Dickens, and the Industrial Revolution); the second lesson takes more of a lecture style, with images on the slides matching the images on the pupil sheet to help practise concise note-taking. The third lesson in this pack uses extracts from other Dickens novels to start to explore what his views of poor people and society were. While these texts are quite challenging, the comprehension questions on the bottom help pupils to develop their understanding, and groups can be arranged to support those who will find this more challenging. Personally I teach A Christmas Carol at KS3, but these would make a good introduction to the GCSE course too.

A full scheme of work designed for Year 7 on First World War Poetry. We start by looking at propaganda poetry, before moving into reality poetry. Children explore the persuasive techniques used in propaganda poems and poetry by writers like Jessie Pope, and then are introduced to the reality of what life was like in the trenches and poetry by writers like Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. The scheme aims to develop their analytical writing, with a focus on identifying language techniques and key vocabulary in quotations. I’ve had enormous success with this at Year 7 this term, and have found that my pupils’ writing about poetry has really improved.

A full scheme of work for KS3 on Reginal Rose’s play Twelve Angry Men. This scheme focuses on the characters, and builds up analytical writing skills. This fourteen-lesson SOW gradually builds up writing skills, helping pupils to structure analytical paragraphs and pick out high-value quotations about the characters. One activity to help this is ‘paragraph speed-dating’, in which pupils are given either a point or a quotation, and they need to find their partner: I’ve found this really helps with classes who pluck quotations from the text at random without considering whether they actually evidence the point they’ve made. I’d suggest creating a ‘guilty/not guilty’ scale somewhere in the classroom, and then you can write each juror number on a post-it note and move them around as they change their minds about the boy on trial. This scheme of work builds up to writing two complete essays: one comparing jurors 3 and 8, and another considering whether juror 8 can be considered a hero.