Training to be English teacher

[absolutelyflawed]

Hi - I’m going to be training to be a secondary school English teacher but my degree isn’t in English ( I have English A level)
What questions am I likely to be asked at interview?

What would be good reasons for saying I want to teach English?

Any other ways to prepare?

What do you enjoy about teaching English?

Thank you.

My suspicion is that the defining characteristic of SLT is not subject dependent!

Unless it's PE. . I joke but somewhere I used to work SLT and wider SLT (yes read into that as you wish) were dominated by PE teachers who always seemed to have time to generate a range of new initiatives for the classroom.
People used to joke that if you wanted promotion, just swap to PE.

I think that one reason for the proliferation of PE teachers in SLT is that they know from early on that they won't be able to continue teaching PE past a certain age. All of the PE staff I have worked with have had a 'plan' for their next steps - several moved into SEND, others into a second subject and, of course, a fair few into Leadership.

Our current mix is RE, 2 x Science, Maths, Drama and 2 x English. Recent departures were Art, PE and Food Tech.

Quite rare to find MFL on Leadership team. Or Music.

Our last Head was MFL. Our current is physics.

DS's head is music but the rest of SLT are scientists. At he sixth form it's a geographer with science/maths/PE SLT.

Actually, thinking about it, I’ve only ever had English HTs. SLT generally more mixed.

My HT when I was at school myself was Latin and classics and he taught one half hour lesson per week to Yr9. He was a little out of touch to put it mildly!

We’d love a scientist on slt. Ours is English heavy and the teaching and learning model reflects that.
We just had cpd on the whole school literacy focus. I barely understood a word. When we gave the dh samples of our gcse exam questions he had to admit that he couldn’t see how the techniques he’d taught us could apply. Yes we know. Thanks for wasting our time. (He’s not a nob I just think he knows very little about teaching science and should leave it to the experts)

All the literacy training I deliver is about science... honest! It shouldn't be about teaching generic literacy. It should be about what is literacy I your subject. Sorry, this is my thing! Science and PE have the highest reading ages at GCSE.

@Piggywaspushed is right. And recent research suggests struggling readers have most difficulty with the science GCSEs.

I think it's shocking that teachers teach without a degree. It shows as how can you possibly have the subject knowledge.
I have a masters in my subject.

I don't have a degree in two of the subjects I teach, to be fair.

I don't have a Maths degree but am a qualified secondary maths teacher.

Degrees in most subjects won't cover what you teach, eg History might cover different periods, Chemistry degrees teach all Sciences, Maths degrees specialise in stats etc.

Good subject knowledge is important and something I've invested heavily in. But having a degree isn't vital.

Likewise, my English degree swerved Shakespeare and Victorian Lit.

You don’t need to tell me about literacy in science! This was the issue - the English teacher dh couldn’t believe how hard it was. At my school there always on about skimming and scanning which is exactly what we tell our students not to do. Maybe you should come and do some science specific literacy with us piggy
(The maths is fuckin hard too)
As for teaching without a degree - I teach chemistry at ks4 but don’t have a degree in it. It’s not ideal because I do have gaps in my subject knowledge and wouldn’t be able to stretch the brightest year 11s but there aren’t chemistry specialists to deliver it so the poor kids are stuck with me.

I would very much like to. One of the big issues is that so many school leaders think Literacy is solely an English issue and deputise English teachers to attempt to teach others how to teach it. This is very very old hat.

I have put down the lack of interest in literacy in my school down to having a science heavy SLT who themselves do not think literacy is an issue in their subject. But as we know, they couldn't be more wrong!

The weakest teachers of English in my school, ironically, have English degrees just not very good ones

In my experience the majority of English teachers (and indeed English graduates) have literature degrees, or at least chose as many literature modules as they possibly could. It is also pretty unusual to find English teachers who themselves hold English Language A level, so I'm afraid this generally means that there are an awful lot of fully qualified English teachers who have not studied English language or grammar in any significant formal sense since their own GCSEs.

Ah, and incidentally that reminds me - a few years ago I was involved in hiring an NQT who had English Language A Level and a degree in English Language and Linguistics, meaning that she had not formally studied English Literature since her GCSEs.

She has turned out to be a great teacher, but by her qualifications is she more or less qualified to teach secondary English than a psychology / history / MFL graduate with A Level English Lit?

Depends on the suite of subjects offered at her school but that's a tough one. My colleague with an Eng Lang type degree does struggle with subject knowledge a fair bit.

It is tricky, but it’s interesting that her qualifications were questioned quite heavily when in the inverse situation it’s very common for English teachers to have huge gaps in their knowledge of English language and grammar, but this is rarely discussed or challenged.

Chemistry degrees teach all Sciences No they don't! I have a chemistry degree and I very definitely only studied chemistry.

I think nearly all teachers are teaching stuff they didn’t study to degree level and the onus is on the teacher to fill any gaps.
This is much easier if you have access to good, experienced teachers.
In many (most) schools the skills to teach subjects well and pass on that expertise just isn’t there and subject-specific cpd is practically unheard of.

On that note piggy can you recommend some reading on literacy in science please?

Alex Quigley mind The Vocabulary Gap is the go to book. Not specific to science but a general book and very useful. I know AQA produced some stuff about reading for science.

The stuff about skimming and scanning is coming from a rather old hat Geoff Barton book, I suspect.

Alex Quigley ahs just written a new one : Mind The Reading Gap. Not quite out yet.

He is the government literacy adviser and wrote all the recent EEF reports.

Chemistry degrees teach all Sciences

I meant teachers with chemistry degrees have to teach all three sciences, apologies my meaning wasn't clear.

esteban that is because we teach a very small amount of the type of English language that comes from a degree, though (unless the school offers Language A Level). I think an Eng Lang degree might be useful, In parts, at KS2 more than KS3 and up.

Thanks piggy