Explicit English Teaching

This book is indispensable for English teachers looking to use the insights of cognitive science in their practice. I keep it on my desk at work and consult it often. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

This is the book I have been waiting for, as so much of the research and writing about cognitive science and explicit instruction applies to maths or science Tom Needham is an experienced English teacher and highly knowledgable about the principles he applies in his classroom. He has done a brilliant job of breaking down the essentials of explicit teaching and - the bit that has been missing - applied them in practice to the English classroom. 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!

This is a great book with key ideas on how to break down tasks to allows students to get the best out of their lessons. I just wish there was access to lesson plans (a shared Dropbox). There were such great ideas presented here but the writer doesn’t share resources so you would need to create everything from scratch. Of course this is not the writer’s problem - just a personal wish.

The depth of research and the wealth of practical advice makes this book a real gem for English teachers

This is the book I wish I had read when I started as an English teacher. It features a brilliant overview of the evidence base on learning from cognitive psychology and really practical ways of using evidence. Highly recommended.

We can be experts in teaching English, however there will be some aspect of the subject that we are more expert in than others. It’s this detailed level of thinking throughout the book, which makes it so informative. Tom expertly looks at the benefits of explicit teaching in English, looking firstly in detail of what learning actually is, before considering how novices think differently to experts, before offering models of explicit instruction we can use in our classrooms. Considering how this knowledge is then built upon and how to choose which knowledge to teach our students, Tom’s book offers a comprehensive look at how to teach English really, really well! We highly recommend it!