Target setting!

At this time of the year, one always starts to think of targets for the period after Easter. How should one tighten up teaching practice with the PGCE student teachers? Here are some ideas that crop up every year.

Resist teaching pupils how to form Latin verbs, nouns and adjectives for production when the lesson goal is reading and comprehension.

🎯 Use time spent describing Latin for practising reading instead.

Resist spending 80% of the time on grammar and only 20% on vocabulary. 

🎯 Reverse the percentages.

Resist testing discrete vocabulary items, including detailed morphology questions on words seemingly chosen at random. 

🎯 Practise reading joined‑up vocabulary — phrases, sentences and paragraphs that consolidate meaning through exposure.

Resist getting pupils to learn complicated ideas that never get tested in the exam. 

🎯 Keep information salient and purposeful. Simple doesn't have to mean simplisitc.

Resist getting pupils to learn terminology that is of no real use just because it appears in the book. 

🎯 Filter the book’s overloaded information. Is all of it really necessary?

Stop going off task by discussing things pupils will never encounter. 

🎯 Stay focused on what matters.

Don't ignore visual cues such as speech marks, commas, question marks. 

🎯 Draw attention to how text is represented on the page — punctuation supports reading skills.

Think carefully before asking grammar questions students can’t answer without perfect recall of forms. 

🎯 If pupils don’t know the nominative or declension, they can’t identify other forms except by guessing. Often the real issue is vocabulary meaning — once that’s given (plus the nominative), they can work out the case by form or by role in the sentence.

Don't think all Latin exists only to be translated. 

🎯 Exams test translation, but learning can take many other — and better — forms.

Don't ignore how a pedagogical text is constructed and using it for something else. 

🎯 Different methods create different text types; use each according to its intention.

Be bothered about finishing a story you’ve started. 

🎯 Plan so everyone reaches the end — it often links to the next story, resolves a plot point, or delivers a joke or cliff‑hanger. The ending gives purpose.

Remember that pupils don't improve their understanding of how to read and comprehend Latin by reading lots of English. 

🎯 Get them reading at least 15 lines of Latin per lesson.

Don't forget that Latin isn’t English ‘in disguise’. 

🎯 Give Latin examples to work on, not English ones — English grammar is often more complicated to spot than Latin.

Don't waste time rewriting the Latin into ‘English’ word order to help (see also numbering the words).

🎯 It might hep comprehension of the meaning, but it will not help pupils learn how to read Latin. They have to struggle a little.

Try not to obsess over English derivations of random Latin words. 

🎯 These are often distractions. Spend more time on Latin–English meaning correspondence.