Every Student Deserves to Be Known

The reason I cap my groups at six students isn’t arbitrary — it’s the number at which I can genuinely know every student in the room. I know their specific weaknesses, their particular strengths, the kind of feedback that lands for them and the kind that doesn’t, the topics they find engaging and the ones they find dry, and where they were two months ago compared to where they are now.

In a group of twelve or fifteen, this becomes impossible. You’re teaching to a room, pitching things at the middle, and hoping the students at each end of the ability range aren’t lost or bored. I’ve worked in those rooms, and I’ve watched students disappear into them. That’s not the kind of teaching I want to do.

Good Feedback Is Specific

“Good work, but try to develop your analysis” tells a student almost nothing. “In your third paragraph, you identify the metaphor correctly, but you stop at naming it — the marks come from explaining what that specific comparison implies about the character’s state of mind at that moment” tells a student exactly what to do differently.

Specific feedback takes longer to write. It requires genuinely reading what a student has written, understanding where their thinking went wrong or right, and finding the precise words to make the path forward clear. That’s what I do for every piece of written work my students submit. It’s not efficient. It’s what works.

Understanding Is More Valuable Than Technique

There’s a temptation in exam preparation — understandable, given the stakes — to reduce everything to technique. Use the PEEL paragraph structure. Remember to mention three techniques. Write a conclusion that links back to your opening. Follow this template.

Template-following produces consistent, predictable, and mediocre work. The students who score at the highest grades are almost always students who genuinely understand what a text is doing — who are actually curious about it, who have formed their own views, who are making genuine analytical choices rather than filling in slots on a form.

I teach technique — of course I do, it’s necessary — but I always teach it in the service of understanding. The point of a well-structured paragraph isn’t the structure itself. The point is that the structure clears a path for genuine thinking to reach the reader.

Students Learn When They Feel Safe to Not Know

The most important condition for learning in my classroom is this: it’s completely fine not to know something. It’s fine to get an answer wrong. It’s fine to say “I don’t understand.” It’s fine to have an interpretation that turns out to be unsupported. What’s not fine is pretending to understand when you don’t — because that way nothing gets fixed.

Creating a classroom where students feel genuinely safe to not know things is harder than it sounds. Students — particularly high-achieving students who are accustomed to being right — often find this deeply uncomfortable. Part of my job is making the experience of being wrong feel safe enough to be instructive rather than just humiliating.

The Exam Is a Starting Point, Not the Point

I know why most students come to me: they have an exam to pass. I take that seriously. All my teaching is anchored in the specific demands of the Cambridge IGCSE and A-Level mark schemes, and every student who works with me knows exactly what the examiners are looking for.

But I also know that students who develop a genuine relationship with language — who learn to read carefully and think analytically and write with precision not just as exam strategies but as habits of mind — do better in the exam than students who only ever prepared for the exam. The goal of an excellent English education is to make the exam easy, not to make the exam the whole of what the student knows.

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If this approach sounds right for your child, I’d love to meet you both in a free trial lesson.