I have small old-fashioned desks with little grooves in them where kids put their pencils and so forth, so I have them set up in groups of six where they face each other. The desks are set on a diagonal axis so that the students only have to turn slightly and they can see the board and they can see me. Basically the primary interaction is with one another, but I can see every kid at least side on all the time. I can kind of get a feel for what’s happening in their minds most of the time, I hope! I like to be able to see whether they’re switched on to what they’re doing or not, but basically the purpose of this style of classroom arrangement is that they’re interacting with one another. I want them to be sharing their ideas and to easily be able to swap work across the table. More teachers at this school are doing this. Most have arranged their tables in groups so that kids can talk and share, which is good. I’m constantly moving kids around, mixing and remixing groups so that they don’t get over-comfortable and kind of complacent just being able to give each other pats on the back. They are working in different sorts of groups in those situations so that they hear what somebody else has to say. They learn to work with different people and reshape some of their ideas and hear what other people have to say. I constantly dip in to Barrie Bennett’s cooperative learning strategies. I don’t use cooperative learning strategies exclusively but the principles inform my general philosophy of teaching. I use strategies like Think Pair Share, Jigsaw and Teams Games Tournaments quite a lot to get students supporting each other. There is a poster up in my classroom that displays the five Basic Elements of Cooperative Learning in a wheel, suggesting that for cooperative learning to roll along and be successful, all five elements have to be working together. It serves as a reminder for me as well as a teaching tool for the students.

In terms of displays, I guess my classroom is very idiosyncratic in that I’ve got quite a few posters of things I like doing myself, like cycling and climbing but also things about the weather. I try to have some of the students’ work up too. I keep intending to put more things up in the classroom about language. For example I’ve got a quote from Redgum’s song "I was only 19" that emphasises alliteration. I really want kids to look at the rich and varied way that language is used to express thought and emotion. In terms of resources in the class, I like to have stuff like cartridge paper on hand. I’ve also got a bookshelf with a lot of my own books and books that I’ve bought (a mixture of picture books, novels and some short stories and poetry) so that they’re always there. There’s quite a range. I try to have classic texts that I can turn kids towards, although it’s a bit hard to do that these days I find, because there’s so much emphasis on what’s new and what’s contemporary and little valuing of what’s old. I think there are a lot more fantastic picture books and children’s novels around now than when I was at school but some of the classics are well worth reading and directing kids to. I’ve got a set of dog-eared dictionaries and a thesaurus so kids can go and grab hold of them and look things up. When students ask me what a word means, I’ll direct them to the dictionary first and foremost, and the same with spelling.

In terms of organising for writing, I try at certain times to make sure that everybody is quiet, focused and absorbed in his or her writing. I want them to be quiet, reflective, inside their mind and to really have some sort of affinity with what they’re writing about and how they’re writing about it. Sometimes it’s a bit of a hard road but I think it’s really important for continuity of thought to just sit quietly and focus on writing. I’ve been thinking about this word ‘work’ just lately. ‘Just get on with your work,’ you might say to a kid, but it would be nice to be able to say, ‘Get on with your thinking.

’Mostly I try to get students to start the writing process by making notes, trying to get some sense of where they are going. Many students would like to plunge right in and that’s the best way for some of them to start, but I want them to know there is another way which might just be more effective, depending on the task and the individual student. I try to get students to share their work, to offer constructive criticism to one another. Often, the bulk of written work is done in class but finished off at home away from the distraction of others.

Right away it looks much better than if they laboriously wrote it out, so their self-esteem is significantly higher. It’s part of being a boy, I think, that you like gadgets, you like playing around with things. So to get onto the computers and be able to put work on there, even if it’s just word processing to start with, makes you more positive about actually writing. They say, ‘I can fix that sentence,’ rather than having to go through the labour of rewriting.

I think it’s always good to get a print-out to preview. I get my students to do a "preview copy" and we talk about the way it’s structured. It’s so easy to cut and paste something. I was never taught how to write essays as a kid and even up to university my essays would be whole long sections of sticky tape bits put together where I’d cut and paste them. Now cutting and pasting is just so wonderfully easy, so looking at logical sequencing of ideas is really terrific using those machines. We don’t call ours a computer lab. The main rationale is that groups and individuals can go in there to do their work. I teach students how to use a program like ‘Mind Man’ or the basics of ‘PowerPoint’, then we’ll book them in if we’re doing a common task, or they can drop in for individual tasks. If there is a particular web site that I want them to visit then I’ll take them in there or if I want them to do a particular search on something like Australian children’s literature then we’ll go as a group. I think it’s good having a big area that can be dual purpose in this way. It would be so good to have three or four computers actually in the classroom that kids could just go to when they’re doing something right there and then.

For a long time I was really resistant to technology because that took the focus away from engaging with literature. Eventually I decided that computers were coming in and there wasn’t really much we could do about it. I got a computer and I started playing around - looking at the Internet and so forth - and I got interested in it. Earlier I talked about the influence of Barrie Bennett’s work on cooperative learning. (I feel fortunate in that I was involved in really terrific professional development programs through TECL.) Another influence was being involved in Julia Atkins’ whole-brain learning program - it was just brilliant. That’s what really switched me on to mind-mapping. I got a little taste of it there, and when we got the Internet at home I started playing and downloaded a few different mind-mapping trial programs from the Web. We ended up applying for a program called MindMan, which we’ve gone on to purchase at our school. It’s really fantastic in the way it allows kids to be able to put ideas down in a form that isn’t linear, that is quite expressive and can allow certain ideas to stand out.

They can see relationships between ideas and use all sorts of things like colour and shape and size and images to really emphasise and express ideas in something other than just black and white lock-step thinking. That’s been a lot of fun. Kids often want to go now and do a mind-map and it’s been really helpful for some kids learning to structure writing in essays.Mind mapping helps students organise their thinking. It’s much more all brain, without getting too technical on the way the brain works (and I couldn’t get too technical anyway!). Mind mapping uses radial thinking and uses colour, shape, and images and makes links between ideas. I mean if you look at an essay or a page of written text there’s no way you can easily see the connection between ideas. Students who have different preferred learning styles - the majority! - are given another way to organise and present their thoughts and feelings. Mind mapping’s been really good and quite an exciting and enjoyable thing for me, rejuvenating in a lot of ways.

Most English teachers at Clarence are using computers. We have students e-mailing, which has great possibilities, but we need to get our act together better on that one. I’ve had kids e-mail me their work in some cases so that they just write me a covering note and then send me their work as an attachment in e-mail. When it is up and running the Web-based e-mail that is part of Windows NT is very good.

I think that ‘chat’ has great possibilities and there are some English sites where the chats are scheduled on books (see Book Raps for a similar idea), there are issues forums and that sort of thing. The one worry about the Net is that if students aren’t directed by knowledgeable teachers there is enormous potential for time-wasting.

A good example of mind mapping I have used has been with a Nadia Wheatley novel called The Blooding which we had sitting in our book room for quite a while. I read it a couple of years ago and thought that it was a really fantastic book. I’d say to people if they want to look at a book that deals with issues, complex relationships, a person discovering who they are and so forth, this book, which is set in Tasmania, is excellent. It kind of revolves around environmental issues and small town politics and issues like sexuality. They should look at that instead of Lord of the Flies. It’s contemporary and kids relate to it strongly. One of the options I gave to the students was to mind map the book to show how character, setting and themes were explored. Some students were also given the option to do PowerPoint presentations. One of the TCE criteria is to use technology so we’ve been looking at how they could do that and some students used PowerPoint. Unfortunately we haven’t got multimedia computers at our school so they couldn’t build in sound as a feature, but they downloaded pictures from the Web of rainforest in Tasmania and used them. They typed in quotes from the book; another person found a site on Nadia Wheatley and actually downloaded a picture of her and stuck that on the PowerPoint presentation they were doing. It made the presentations just so much more alive. Quotes from the author about the writing of the book really brought that to life. They presented those PowerPoint presentations to other kids in the class and really got them switched on so other kids wanted to do PowerPoint straight after that.

I really love poetry and I make sure I do a fair bit of poetry every year with students, every year group. I’m pretty old-fashioned in that I like to hear poetry, I don’t like to just to see it written down. With Grades 7 and 8 usually what I do is I have a whole lot of books there and I’ll say "OK grab a couple of books, find a poem you like and then let’s hear it". And I’ll be doing the same thing, I’ll find a poem. Sometimes my poems are the sorts of ones they’ll choose but often they’re ones that I think maybe will be a bit different. I’ll talk about why I like them and then I’ll increasingly try and get kids to say a little bit about why they like a particular poem. Is it just the sound of it, is it the sound of the words, or is it the way it made you feel about something, what do they see, that sort of thing.

With grade 9 and 10, usually I start talking about music. I’ll ask them about the songs they listen to: what are some of the lyrics, what about the lyrics of a commercial on TV or a jingle on the radio? Gradually then things will start coming out. I tend to mix music in with poetry in the older grades. There are some good books around that tend to mix poetry and music. One called Nobody But Yourself, for example has got a nice mixture. I try to make them see the link so they don’t think poetry is something dead that only old fogies like me are interested in. But I also try to have a big range of poetry styles, from Shakespeare to Geoff Goodfellow, from stuff that’s really up front and challenging and raw to stuff that’s more quiet and refined but expressive. We even go back to the occasional bit of John Donne with the year 9s and 10s. Every once in a while I’ll play for a class a wonderful Ralph Richardson recording of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" so they can hear the power of the words, you know, the rain coming down. So a big range! I require students to memorise and recite poetry because I think it somehow becomes a part of them that way; they are able to identify with the poet’s voice more once they are prepared to do that.

This year I did a unit with my Grade 9 looking at popular or contemporary television texts. We’re trying to basically have a good look at how a program is ‘built’, so students start by looking at how many different scenes there are, how many storylines are running through each episode and what’s the point of each one - what disaster is it this week, that sort of thing. It’s quite good because they’ve become a bit more critical and reflective about the soapies.

Usually with that it’s quite easy to get kids to do a bit of homework because of course they have to watch some episodes of Home and Away so they’ve got excuses for their parents.

That’s part of the way I organise for viewing. Every year I’ll want to show at least one feature film but then with some classes we’ll do viewing through popular drama as well as examining the advertisements are constructed both on TV and in magazines and occasionally newspapers. We look at use of colour, composition, imagery and symbolism, written text style, that sort of thing.

It’s a challenge to try and make sure that you’re getting a full range of texts in. It’s a big balancing act. I’m constantly trying to fight against my tendency to go deeper and deeper into a film, a novel or even a documentary on flood victims to not just pull it all apart and look at the pieces but not just to pull it all apart but to try to give the kids a real affinity with it. I have just finished reading Odo Hirsch’s Antonio S and the Mystery of Theodore Gutzman, which was a warm, funny, sad kids’ book that I got my teeth right into, but I don’t want to return it to the library yet. I want to hang onto it, it’s just so wonderful. I like kids to feel that way about their books but I would like them to give them back to the library before too much time passes! Texts should help kids empathise with the human condition of others, like Shane in Way Home or Tish in When She Hollers or Grommit in The Wrong Trousers!