8. THE TECHNIQUES
The English Block was a combination of techniques, none of them original (some of them are to be found in the works of the 17th century teacher and writer Commenus), which perhaps are not all usually employed together, at least at the level of an established secondary school. The details of the activities required of the students can be seen in Appendix 1.

The main features were:
1. Group work as the permanent mode of organisation.
2. Multi-purpose activities (newspaper and other group publications, discussions, debates, drama) rather than single-purpose (comprehension, composition, structural etc.) exercises.
3. Language used in a simulated community as communication.
4. Learning from original materials rather than from teachers.
5. Unscripted Drama
6. Debates and other speech work.
7. Comment and criticism by other students to replace or supplement teachers' marks as the sole measure of excellence or worth.

Some of these, such as debates and school newspaper, are sometimes (but not perhaps often enough) found in schools as extra-curricular clubs. Just as the 19th century founders of British team games took the schoolyard kick-abouts and turned them into the various kinds of formalised football, the English Block took these extra-curricular activities and made them the central mode of learning within "official" class time.

The most successful were probably those of publication. The writing activities generally produced a high standard of work with plenty of rewriting. The newspapers frequently produced interesting items about events in the town or school. A teacher with journalism experience encouraged interviewing and even brought to the school figures in the government to be interviewed by students.

One form one writer, reporting a fire in a bar in the town produced the interesting and memorable detail that the fire was caused by "one of the new prostitutes cooking fatcakes...".

The least successful of the aims was to get students to comment on each other's work. In retrospect it may be that this activity was too formalised in the way it was presented. It was probably enough to have students read each other's work. It may be that the rules of politeness are too strong to get people to be honest about such things. Almost certainly there were cultural reasons which made it difficult to get much of this done. However, the rule that teachers would not read a piece unless it had first been read by another student was maintained. The fact that they did read each other's work almost certainly affected the work done even if little formal criticism took place.
In teaching in a more conventional manner I have had brilliant students able to write at a much higher standard than their class fellows. But if this writing stays in the student's own exercise book and is seen only by the teacher it does not have any effect on the others. The practice of passing round writing for others to see may have the effect of improving the standard of the others.