English teaching deserves edtech too
Abi Ludlow, English teacher and Tassomai lead at Richard Lander School in Truro discusses her experience with Tassomai’s KS4 English literature content and her hopes for its future.
The Richard Lander School is a coeducational secondary school in Truro that fosters respect, hard work and ambition. The school’s science department has been regularly using Tassomai for a number of years now with great success, but I was always slightly envious that there wasn’t an equivalent offering for the English department. We were first in the queue when Tassomai released its English literature content for GCSE level and haven’t looked back since.
At the start of this year we rolled out Tassomai for the English department for all of KS4 from year 9-11. We had a smooth introduction and set up process as the students were already well acquainted with the app as the science department included Tassomai daily goals in its weekly homework.
Edtech and English
Edtech isn’t something that is traditionally associated with English teaching due to its heavy focus on analysis, but when students are struggling to cover a vast quantity of content in such a short period of time I think learning and revision tools can be invaluable in aiding knowledge retention.
We previously used Seneca for English literature but found that students became frustrated with long form answers and its rigid spelling restrictions. Tassomai’s multiple choice format keeps the momentum going and really helps to embed knowledge. Students are required to learn so much content for closed book assessments that getting the basics to stick, let alone any analysis, can be a real challenge.
Tassomai helps to reinforce their knowledge of the texts’ themes, plot and characters in a way that really builds their confidence. Learning and revisiting these elements with a ‘little and often’ approach is a massive help in terms of getting all of the content covered and remembered. Tassomai really helps with covering these core elements so that teaching time can be more productive and in-depth.
Encouraging competition
The pupils also enjoy the reward side of Tassomai and the healthy competition it encourages. I think the competitive element added in by the points system and its consistent practice approach has made Tassomai a lot more popular and effective than Seneca.
We are looking forward to using the new data drops to set up competitions across all sets in the school. I am hoping to really get these competitions going from next year onwards, especially now the points system has changed and daily goals are more focused on improvement than the number of correct answers students get. I think this will make competitions across all the different attainment sets much more possible and easy to run.
Accessible content
Many of our students use their bus time to complete their Tassomai daily goals so it really couldn’t be more accessible. I think having the ability to fit their homework in around their school life in this way makes them a lot more receptive to actually doing it, which is of course a bonus for us!
In my classes this year we used the Romeo and Juliet content as well as the AQA Power and Conflict poetry course, which both proved very useful in helping students to keep up with the curriculum. We look forward to Tassomai releasing a course on The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle, which is currently in the works with their content team, so that we will have a full set of Tassomai texts for the next academic year.
We are working towards making daily goals a compulsory part of the English homework curriculum but we were slightly derailed in our approach this year with remote learning getting in the way of fully implementing a new system. I’m looking forward to competing with the science department on who can encourage the best Tassomai usage in their classes!
I’m so pleased that we are finally able to offer an edtech tool in our department that we really believe in. Tassomai helps to build student confidence and break down the building blocks of texts in a way we haven’t been able to before. We can’t wait to see the new Tassomai English language and Unseen Poetry courses!
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