Welcome to English
I am Mrs Steele and I have been teaching English for the past 24 years. I joined the Teaching Staff at The Maharishi Free School in 2016. I have thoroughly enjoyed teaching at The Maharishi School as it is such a calm environment, with meditation enhancing the pupils’ learning. Small class sizes mean I can tailor lessons to the needs of individual pupils and I can monitor and assess progression in more detail, allowing pupils to thrive in this environment. I believe in engaging pupils from the outset; setting realistic but ambitious targets; building a good rapport with pupils; using a variety of teaching and learning tasks tailored to the class and individuals and creating lessons that are fun!
Within the classroom we vary the learning styles to engage and to appeal to every child – one lesson might be a Drama activity working outside in groups, whilst another might be a close analysis of language within an advertisement. English skills are built upon year on year with more difficult and challenging texts being introduced as pupils progress. I believe that all children should be exposed to a plethora of literature in its original form and therefore we study whole texts for GCSE and support this with visits to the theatre.
It goes without saying that support from home underpins the work we do in school and, as a mother of two children now at the secondary phase of Maharishi School, I am fully aware of how hard that can be with regards to homework and time management. In order for the pupils to achieve good GCSE results in English and English Literature they will have to complete homework tasks to a high standard and read regularly. I aim for all of the children I teach to love reading and to have a curious and questioning attitude to language. I encourage pupils to constantly add to their vocabulary and to use the” word of the week” wherever they can. Language has the ability to make people laugh or cry, anger them and rally them – it is so important that our pupils leave school with the confidence to use language to communicate effectively and to understand the ways in which it can be used to manipulate an audience. Language is powerful.
