Lesson planning

Thinking about teaching English, but don’t know where to start?

Pick up a copy of The Ultimate ESL Teaching Manual and discover a skill that will serve you for the rest of your life.

What people are saying about The Ultimate ESL Manual on the Amazon.

‘What a great book! Andromeda’s knowledge and experience shines through. She gets straight to the point, gives very clear grammar explanations and loads of practical help,’ Sheila Longden.

‘This is a one-stop shop for preparing powerful classes that throws out the need for costly and confusing text books. Priceless!’ Amazon Customer.

‘Great book, saved me hours of prep! Each grammar point comes with its own speaking activity so you won’t run out of ideas about what to teach your students,’ TeacherA24.

The Ultimate Teaching ESL Manual is a complete English teaching system designed so that any native speaker (with TEFL experience or not) can pick up the book and start teaching.

With this book you will have the power to:

o Start teaching English online or in the classroom now with a step-by-step guide on how to teach every grammar point in the English language.
o Teach vocabulary with over 60 lexical sets covering beginner, intermediate, advanced to super-advanced levels.
o Keep your students engaged with follow-on activities for every lesson including role plays, games and problem solving activities.
o Cut down on preparation time with lesson plans for all language points.
o Add interest to your classes with an appendix full of illustrated worksheets which manual owners can download in high resolution from the book’s website.
o Travel light and save money on expensive textbooks with everything you need to teach English in one book.
o Provide students with fantastic lessons they want with a methodology focused on language learning through speaking practice.

The Manual teaches a methodology whereby students learn through speaking activities (rather than traditional textbooks) mimicking how we learnt our native language as children.

Students make rapid progress with the constant speaking practice, while for the teacher, lessons are creative and rewarding, giving you the power to decide what to teach and how.

Classes are simple, effective and take less time to prepare as there are no handouts to worry about, exercises to mark or any of the other work that comes with traditional ESL teaching.

The Manual includes lesson plans, drills and speaking activities for every grammar point as well as methodology, games, vocabulary sets and a whole host of other stuff to make your classes special.

Dive in and discover a skill for life.

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There’s plenty to do when planning the curriculum in primary schools. If it feels daunting, then one of the most helpful things is to talk to other people about how they have developed the curriculum for their particular subject or key stage.

This is what John Tomsett and Mary Myatt have done. After the secondary ‘Huh: Curriculum conversations between subject and senior leaders’ was published, they were flooded with requests to produce a primary version.

They enlisted the help of renowned primary specialists, Rachel Higginson, Lekha Sharma and Emma Turner to have conversations with primary teachers and key stage co-ordinators who are doing great curriculum development work.

Each chapter provides insights into the importance of individual subjects and the unique contribution each makes to pupils’ cognitive and personal development.

The subject chapters discuss the steps colleagues take to ensure that there is a coherent thread across the year groups, as the discrete subjects deliver, collectively, the primary curriculum.

These conversations show how the craft of creating a rich, challenging curriculum for every subject is not a quick fix. This is a nuanced piece of work, and there are many ways of approaching it. Each chapter also contains links to subject associations and helpful resources.

Primary Huh has been written for subject leaders and key stage co-ordinators; it has also been written for senior leaders, as they prepare to have supportive conversations with their colleagues who are responsible for curriculum development.

Primary Huh is offered as a prompt rather than the last word. Informed debate is, as they say, the fuel of curriculum development.

And why have John and Mary called it ‘Huh’? Well, John discovered that Huh is the Egyptian god of endlessness, creativity, fertility and regeneration, and they thought that was a pretty good metaphor for their work on the curriculum!

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This book is for new or aspiring computer science teachers wishing to improve their subject knowledge and gain confidence in the classroom. And it’s for experienced computer science teachers who wish to hone their practice, in particular in the areas of explicit instruction, tackling misconceptions and exploring pedagogical content knowledge.

You will read some of the backstory to our subject – the “hinterland” – those fascinating journeys into history that make the subject come alive and place it in historical context. These stories will help you to enrich your lessons, cement core knowledge, develop cultural capital and help you excite a life-long love for the subject. We will go beyond the mark scheme to explore the subject knowledge behind the answers, giving you the confidence to discuss the field in greater depth, enabling you to use explicit instruction methods: presenting skills and concepts clearly and directly enabling student mastery.

We will explore misconceptions that arise when teaching our subject, so you can “head them off at the pass”. And we will look at teaching ideas – the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) – exploring the helpful analogies, questions and activities that work for each topic: practices that can be lifted and dropped straight into the classroom to immediately enhance your teaching.

Trainee or pre-service teachers, NQTs and early-career teachers will find this book invaluable, experienced teachers will find it inspiring, and all will benefit from a fresh look at the hinterland and subject pedagogy that makes computer science a fascinating subject to teach.

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Reading and writing float on a sea of talk declared James Britton and yet in our current education system, where the pressure is on for students to pass written exams, it is all too easily left adrift. How then, as teachers and educators, can we turn the tide and harness the power of talk in our classrooms?

This is not just an educational choice but rather, given students vastly different experiences of language, a moral imperative.

Amy Gaunt and Alice Stott s must-read book serves as a detailed and engaging guide to get talking in class. It blends the academic research and evidence, with first-hand classroom experiences and practical strategies to enable you to unlock the power of oracy in your classroom and equip your students with the speaking skills they need to thrive in the twenty first century. 

Transform Teaching and Learning Through Talk describes how to: 

• Identify and teach good talk (and listening!)
• Build a classroom culture which values talk
• Create meaningful and authentic contexts for oracy
• Support your quietest students to speak up too!

This book is a rich resource for teachers, drawing upon key academic research and outlining what this could look like in your classroom. Throughout, the authors share personal insights, engaging anecdotes and tried-and-tested approaches drawn from their experience teaching in primary and secondary classrooms. Whether you teach college-age students or those just starting their journey through school, this book will challenge you to think deeply about what you can do integrate oracy into your practice.  

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Smashing Glass Ceilings is the book to help elevate and excite women across the education sector to become confident, successful and fulfilled in their careers. Empowerment can look and feel different for everyone, and this book is designed to show every woman how you can succeed in the education sector.

In addition to providing a wealth of advice about leadership progression, bestselling author and presenter Kate Jones shares guidance on alternative options to leadership for women in education. Have you ever thought about launching and hosting your own podcast about teaching and learning? Are you keen to lead professional development training internally and/or externally? Are you a keen writer but not sure how to set up a website to blog or how to get published? Helpful tips and suggestions for these routes and more are presented alongside a wide range of diverse case studies and interviews that shine a spotlight on innovative women, from school leaders to entrepreneurs in education. The book also contains advice for male colleagues so that they too can help empower women in education.

This book will provide advice, guidance and inspiration for all women in education regardless of age, role or experience.

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A powerful school culture can unite staff in a common vision, shape positive behaviours and attitudes, and create the conditions for the staff body to work as one. As the recruitment and retention crisis deepens, staff culture is more important than ever. This book explores how schools can develop a culture where individuals take pride in their work and actively seek and embrace development and challenge, seeing the big picture of the school and cherishing their role in it.

Drawing on key ideas from systems theory, psychology, anthropology, business and philosophy, this book explores the key ideas we need in order to understand culture and the concrete steps we can take in order to intentionally develop our staff culture in a positive direction. Each chapter features powerful input to strengthen our understanding alongside probing reflections to guide our own development.

Written by a leading practitioner and designed to support reflections and planning for concrete actions, this is essential reading for school leaders and head teachers wanting to develop an authentic, powerful and positive school staff culture.

School Staff Culture benefits from a completely free school development package, with session plans, slides and resources to structure a programme of sessions for leadership and specialist culture teams. The package supports the input, reflection, discussion, evaluation and contextualised application and review that will really bring the ideas in School Staff Culture to life in a school, and can be downloaded from www.routledge.com/9781032121963.

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‘It’s a tough gig to write a book that is both academic and accessible. And yet Stuart and Amy have pulled this off. It is a brilliant boon to the English teaching community.’ – Mary Myatt

Ready to Teach: A Christmas Carol brings together the deep subject knowledge, resources and classroom strategies needed to teach Dickens’s most famous Christmas story, as well as the pedagogical theory behind why these ideas work, helping teachers to deliver a knowledge-rich curriculum with impact.

With fresh approaches building on the success of Ready to Teach: Macbeth, each chapter contains lesson-by-lesson essays and commentaries that enhance subject knowledge on key areas of the text alongside fully resourced lessons reflecting current and dynamic best practice.

The book also offers an introduction to the key pedagogical concepts which underpin the lessons and why they are proven to help students develop powerful knowledge and key skills.

Whether you are new to teaching or looking for different ways into the text, Ready to Teach: A Christmas Carol is the ideal companion to the study of this 19th century classic.

With a foreword by Mary Myatt.

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Exam Board: Pearson BTEC
Academic Level: BTEC National
Subject: Sport and Exercise Science
First teaching: September 2016
First Exams: Summer 2017

• The Revision Guide is accompanied by an ActiveBook (eBook) so that learners have the choice and flexibility to access materials anytime or anywhere.
• The visually engaging format breaks the content down into easily-digestible sections for students and provides hassle-free instant-access revision for learners.
• Clear specification fit, with revision activities and annotated sample responses for each unit to show students how to tackle the assessed tasks.
• Written with students in mind – in an informal voice that talks directly to them.
• Designed to be used alongside the Workbook with clear unit-by-unit correspondence to make it easy to use the books together.

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Ace your Edexcel A-level Politics exams with our Component 1 and 2 UK Revision Practice Guide. Includes 130+ essay questions, 3 sample sources for each topic from which to revise, and over 123 pages of detailed essay plans with up-to-date contemporary examples.

This is a bumper revision practice guide – 176 Pages.

Praise for the author from students:

The resources have lots of contemporary evidence, which is helpful when writing essays that would be in the top band. The resources were also simple and contained the right amount of knowledge needed, and they really helped me improve my grade in time for the exams. Angelica

I had been predicted no higher than a grade D and E for politics since year 12. After getting the essay plans and listening to his streams, I got an A*!!! I truly recommend Mr Patel. Zara

No one has ever made politics easier to understand than Mr Patel. His webinars, videos and essay plans are the most useful resources for A-level politics. After using his resources, politics finally makes more sense to me, and I feel so confident in my knowledge. Thank you so much for all your help! I highly recommend these resources as they are better than any textbook or revision guide that I have read. Hafsa

“Literally, the only reason I got an A*”. Jane A

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Exam Board: Pearson BTEC
Academic Level: BTEC National
Subject: Computing
First teaching: September 2016
First Exams: Summer 2017

• The Revision Guide is accompanied by an ActiveBook (eBook) so that learners have the choice and flexibility to access materials anytime or anywhere.
• The visually engaging format breaks the content down into easily-digestible sections for students and provides hassle-free instant-access revision for learners.
• Clear specification fit, with revision activities and annotated sample responses for each unit to show students how to tackle the assessed tasks.
• Written with students in mind – in an informal voice that talks directly to them.
• Designed to be used alongside the Workbook with clear unit-by-unit correspondence to make it easy to use the books together.

Read more