Quick teacher tips for Google Classroom. Stay in the know with Jo!

Key points and few strategies for teaching your students 4 types of setting. Setting is BOSS!

I’m sick of reading paragraphs with a cursory nod to ‘purpose’ tacked on as a final sentence.    Students aren’t thinking about the...

How you can improve students' writing with proofreading habits.

What’s everyone else doing?  Am I the only one still searching for that holy grail of planning systems? Am I the only one muddling...

The close reading of unfamiliar texts is my favourite part of English teaching. Here are 12 things I think it's important to remember....

Let me tell you how a tiny, traditional test can help all   students learn and see how academically amazing they are.  Yes, all ...

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel for each ability level in your class.  Here’s an easy way to break your lesson into three...

Curriculum changes like NZ's NCEA Review mean learning about new websites, new experts, new vocabulary, new assessments, new philosophies...

Here’s my road to teaching structure in my English classroom: First 10 years: Didn't know ‘structure’ was a thing I should be teaching. ...

Teach students how aspects of texts work together with this simple 'list and funnel' strategy.

Using texts by Māori creators is fantastic, but ignoring everyone else is going to limit students’ understanding of the world, robbing...

So many of us teachers hate graphing and analysing our data! It's one more job, NOT in that 'Urgent and Important' box, done just to...

I wasn't convinced my Year 13s (grade 12) were appreciating that there really was a person - an actual real-life person like us - who...

I’d rather clean the house, iron, grocery shop…anything other than clean my car. It’s too exhausting, there are too many tools to get...

Your students must be able to read their work aloud, paying attention to punctuation, before they can proofread it. This requires training!

This trick for teaching possessive apostrophes will save you and your students a lot of frustration.

Students often make two mistakes when writing about ideas in texts they study in English. Take this charming sentence for example: The...

Four ways to have students buy into the writing process to embrace style conventions and enhance their work.

In a hurry? Cut straight to the summary! Differentiation is a dumb word but a common-sense concept. It's about making things different ...