As a coda to last week's episode about the harm AI is doing to boys' learning in English classes, today Bags and Chris offer some discrete and specific examples of what actually happens in their English classrooms. Bags talks about the analysis of the Denis Glover...
Bags explores how she creates rich discussion in her English classroom.
Bags relays an experience she had recently with a student who was struggling to speak in front of the class and then Chris grabs the microphone and talks for too long in order to attempt to explain how Grammar for Writing actually works in the context of a Year 9...
8 Years ago, Bagley's daughter Scarlett died, age 7. We take some time in this episode to examine how this deep loss strengthens her work in the classroom. Rarely does anyone gain an insight like this into the privacy of another person's grief. As a listener to this...
23 years ago Chris wrote an entry in his online journal that described his time at Otago Boys' High School. This was subsequently published in a history of Otago Boys' High School that was published for its 150th. We'd been searching around for a text to analyse on...
Bags and Chris come out of their respective closets for Pride week and we discuss how setting up patterns in the classroom accelerates boys' learning.
This week we start looking inside (and as it happens, outside) the doors of our classrooms with an exploration of the routines we operate in our classes to support safe healthy relationships and to keep the focus on the learning. Today's routines are the macro ones,...
This week we get to hear what advice Bags gave the delegates during her conference presentation and we reflect on how to get the culture right in the teaching of boys. There are some new boys' voices too.
So we succeeded at putting on a conference that focussed our attention on Teaching Boys English, and by all accounts it was a real success. Gena and Chris chat about the messages of the event - including a few reasonably contentious points of view - until we were...
In late 2019 I was anonymously nominated for a National Excellence in Teaching award, and after submitting my application - the content of which I publish here - I found myself in the beehive at a pretty flash luncheon receiving two of the awards, one for excellence...