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Teaching Literature at Key Stage 3 and 4
Introduction
Assessing student teachers' learning about literature
The work student teachers undertake as part of their ITE assessment almost always includes literature teaching somewhere within it. Two examples are given here.
Writing a short story for pupils: formative assessment
One assignment which works well specifically requires student teachers to be writers themselves. The work is formatively assessed. Student teachers are asked:
Find out about the reading preferences of pupils in one of your classes. Drawing on what you learn from their responses and any other knowledge you have gained from the pupils, write a short story to read to them. Afterwards, write a brief report explaining your rationale for the story and an evaluation in the light of pupils' responses. Your assignment should refer explicitly to, and be informed by, relevant critical literature about reading and research.
The assignment helps student teachers to reflect critically on their developing understanding of key issues in pupils' reading. Crucially, however, it involves student teachers writing creatively themselves, something many of them have not done for a long while.
For more detail about how the assignment works, see Cliff Hodges (2005). |
Researching and teaching literature: summative assessment
Many course assignments require student teachers to demonstrate their developing understanding of teaching and learning literature. Often, these assignments are assessed at M level and therefore involve student teachers in considerable depth of reading, research and reflection on their own classroom experience.
One example of what student teachers are asked to do is a piece of writing of 5,000 words, submitted at the end of the course. It is produced in direct response to teaching the subject, and is rooted in evidence of practice with pupils and the student teacher's individual development. There are three essential aspects to the assignment: sustained, critical reflection on some aspect of the student teacher's teaching; substantial reading to underpin the assignment and to enable the student teacher to put their own experiences into wider contexts; pupils, and some moments of their learning.
The focus of the assignment, negotiated between the student teacher and the tutor, emerges out of the student teacher's interests and the point at which these interests intersect with both their practice and their engagement in critical reading. Topics have included: teaching the class novel in a mixed ability class; gendered reading; teaching Shakespeare in the multilingual classroom; teaching Shakespeare dramatically; teaching poetry from the English heritage to EAL learners; developing independent reading; using paintings in the teaching of literature published pre-1900; 'problems' with poetry; teaching multicultural literature.
One such assignment is published as a journal article by Fiona Richards-Kamal (2008) and gives an idea of the depth of analysis expected of student teachers of literature. |  
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