Anthony Cockerill - Director of the National Association for the Teaching of English (NATE) - York

The Leading, Language and Literature Podcast

In this episode I’m speaking to Anthony Cockerill. Anthony is the new director of NATE, which is the National Association for the Teaching of English. NATE is an independent, non-funded, not-for-profit educational charity that provides publications and training for English teachers at all key stages that has helping English teachers from around the world since 1963.

I wanted to talk to Anthony following a flashback I had to reading one of his articles 5 of so years ago about constructing a thematic based curriculum. Since then, we’ve seen the rise of a concept based curriculum gain traction and I wanted his take on how such a development factored into his planning.

We discuss:

- The original themes Anthony chose for his curriculum, the reason behind them and who was involved in the decision

- Whether themes always need to be closely tied to common ideas in literature

- If a set selection of disciplinary concepts was chosen for every unit in his school’s curriculum too

- How texts are selected, taught and how assessment is done in this setup

- And finally, from its inception to when he left the post, what were the main changes Anthony made to the thematic curriculum approach

Thanks again to Anthony for giving up his time to speak to me and good luck to him in his new post at NATE. If you’re interested in gaining a NATE membership I can attest that it is more than worth it and will only cost you a couple of pounds per month for some outstanding ongoing CPD.

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Links:

Anthony’s original blog post

NATE official website

Anthony’s subsequent blogs about the curriculum