Explicit English Teaching

by Tom Needham

"If you read this book early in your career, you won’t need to go on the ten year mission I did to find this all out for myself and work out how to apply it. You have a clear road map here - take it!" - Amazon review

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How can you take ideas from cognitive science and explicit instruction and use them to enhance teaching and learning in your secondary English lessons?

Based on contemporary research findings and supported by a range of classroom examples, this accessibly written book demonstrates how cognitive load theory, Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction, explicit instruction and broader cognitive science ideas can be applied to the teaching of English in secondary schools. 

Key topics   Tom Needham  has been teaching for over fifteen years and currently teaches English in South London.

224 pages, Paperback

Published May 23, 2023

About the author

Tom Needham is a former sports editor in Ohio who has written for Street & Smith's Specialty Publications, NFLHS.com, and American Football Monthly. He currently lives with his wife and daughter in North Carolina.

Reviews

[Lloyd · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recently completed my first year as a qualified secondary English teacher. At the beginning of the final lesson with a couple of my classes I posed a few questions with a view to generating some feedback on the year as a whole. One question was ‘what have you learned in your English lessons this year?’ It gleaned a range of responses but, both at the time and afterwards, I felt a bit silly for having asked it. Not because I was worried they’d say ‘nothing’ (although it wouldn’t have surprised me if a couple of them had - I’d set myself up for a fall, really!) but because I myself couldn’t pin down what, precisely, I’d necessary set out to teach them across the year.

That I was reading Tom Needham’s marvellous book at around the same time was no coincidence. Although its premise, that explicit / direct instruction belongs in the English classroom as much as it does in, say, physics or history, is a fairly straightforward and - to anyone acquainted with the literature - obvious one, its real value is in demonstrating how to put this theory into practice through an extensive range of examples. Measuring it against my own teaching, it’s helped me to realise that far too much of what I’ve been doing has been implicit and abstract rather than explicit and concrete and that this needn’t be the case.

The book is possibly a smidgeon stronger on analytical writing than it is on creative writing but one of its red threads is that many of the sentence constructions that are used in one form of writing can and should be transferred to the other.

Alongside Making Every Lesson Count, this has been the most transformative for my practice - I’m really looking forward to putting its ideas to the test in my second year.

[Alice Wagstaff-Sherwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

A comprehensive and accessible guide to direct instruction principles when teaching English. ♥️ it.

[Matt Mcgorry · Rating 2 out of 5]

Had to read it for work. The Great Gatsby it ain’t!!

[Avril · Rating 3 out of 5]

Super thorough. The stand out chapter for me was on retrieval practice - great to have so many examples of what this looks like in English!