Notes for Teachers

Creating the Site

While teaching English I often find myself wishing I had a resource I could point to and say "There! Go and read that and it should clear things up."

In the good old days this was the textbook, but my school no longer uses them in English. Plus, the changing media landscape makes it increasingly difficult to keep physical resources relevant.

There are, of course, many resources available online that we can point students towards. However, such sites often require registration or payment and are then filled with pop ups and advertising links. In addition, a link that worked last year may now be broken when a student tries to follow it this year.

So, while living in Finland during a year off teaching in 2022 (where my wife was working at the University of Helsinki) I decided to make my own resource containing need-to-know-guides for English classes and students.

Spending a year off teaching creating teaching resources is a questionable use of one's time, but I needed something to keep me out of trouble and hopefully this investment will pay dividends when it comes to preparing future courses and classes. 

Using the Site

Although students and teachers are welcome to use the various guides across the site as needed, I did have particular use cases in mind for each section.

Studying Texts

Guides in the Studying Texts section are written for whole classes as preparation for a new course or unit of study.

At the beginning of each year I give time during class for students to read the Interpreting Texts guide. Here, students learn what it means to approach a text in English, and the metalanguage they encounter will remain relevant for the remainder of the year. Because it is the first time students have used the site, I also spend time clarifying key concepts and confirming understanding once they have finished reading. 

Following this, I set the Textual Elements guide as homework. Here, students learn additional meta language needed to interpret a text of any type. An email home to parents helps to ensure this guide is read in full, and I follow this up with another debriefing session in the next class.

Hopefully, this emphasis on reading at the beginning of the year reinforces two things: that the guides are simple and straightforward to read, and that the information they contain is valuable for classroom study.

Beyond these two starting points, guides within the Studying Texts section can be introduced as needed. If a class is about to study a short story or novel the Narrative Elements guide can be set as pre-reading, while the Poetic Techniques guide can be used before studying a poem or song. 

One thing worth noting about this section is that the Cinematic Techniques guide works best if introduced after the Visual Techniques guide because the former draws so much from the latter. I thought about replicating much of the information across both guides, but ultimately decided that a small disclaimer was sufficient. 

Communication

The Communication section is designed to help individual students who are having specific issues with their studies. 

In particular, entries in the Grammar and Punctuation guides can be shared with students who are making repeated errors in their work. For example, if Timmy keeps using semicolons without an independent clause on either side, Timmy can be directed towards the semicolon guide to help see the error of his ways.

One exception to this is the Rhetoric guide which was originally nestled under the Studying Texts section and labelled Persuasive Techniques. I changed this because the three modes of persuasion (ethos, logos and pathos) and the entries on language (Diction, Objective Language and Subjective Language) are not really techniques—plus the Communication section was looking a bit empty. In any case, this is a good guide to give to classes before studying a speech or TED talk, which leads nicely into a Presentation task. 

Using Evidence

The Using Evidence section is intended to help students find, integrate and reference sources correctly. 

The order of these guides is arguably out of sequence because I normally have students read about Integrating Evidence early in the year to help them incorporate textual examples into their writing. Later, when a research task approaches, I have them read the Conducting Research and Referencing Sources guides as needed. 

I thought about changing the order of the guides to match this sequence, but I think the more logical progression of Conducting Research, Integrating Evidence and Referencing Sources makes more sense for new users.

Assessments

The Assessments section is an interesting one. 

While the Managing Tasks guide is designed for students completing any task type (even non-English tasks), the decision to focus on Essays, Short Stories and Presentations (at the expense of other assessment tasks) is perhaps a little controversial, especially given that concepts such as UDL are increasingly raised during discussions about student assessment. However, I don't think the classic trio offered here is going anywhere soon, so I wanted to provide students with specific guides for these task types. 

Creating each of these guides was also a useful opportunity to sit down and reflect upon what exactly we are asking students to do when they complete each of these tasks. I spent quite a lot of time breaking down the essay, short story and presentation forms into their constituent parts, and then reconstructing each into its most elemental form (without any of the trimmings, so to speak). 

I actually came away from the experience believing quite strongly in the value of each of these forms, and recommend a similar process for any teacher grappling with how to teach a particular assessment type.

Finally, the information that is presented in each guide will obviously differ from what is taught in individual classrooms, hence the "Golden Rule" disclaimer at the beginning of each guide. 

Guiding Principles

Because there are two audiences for The English Inventory (my own "captive" students plus anyone else who comes across the site), I came up with the following principles to guide development:

Feedback

Is there anything you particularly liked or disliked about the website? Please let me know! Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

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