Despite the challenges which are involved, some secondary schools show determination to get Classics onto the timetable and into their curricular provision. The following three case studies draw on interviews with the people directly involved in doing so: the Principals and the teachers themselves. These experiences were captured at the time when they were getting Classics into their schools. The first is derived from an interview with a qualified specialist Classics teacher, ‘Rachel’, working in London. Latin already had a presence there from when the school had employed a part-time teacher; the remit was the development of a full Classics department. The second is based on interviews with the school head teacher and a non-specialist Modern Languages teacher ‘Yvonne’ who had been employed to start a Classics department from scratch in a school in the Midlands. The third is based on an interview with the Principal of an academy which had decided to introduce Latin not only into her own school with a new teacher ‘George’, but also into one that was not yet built. The respondents’ real names have, of course, been changed.

If the past two years have proven anything, it is that students today hold a tremendous capacity to adapt to incredibly difficult learning environments. This paper explores student learning experiences in one such learning environment, the period of online learning that occurred between January and March 2021 due to COVID-19-related school closures. Investigating the effectiveness of the digital learning platform Padlet in terms of student engagement with the Latin curriculum and its cultivation of Latin comprehension skills, this case study of Year 8 students in a state-maintained girls’ grammar school demonstrates the value of collaborative, discussion-based approaches to remote teaching. The value of digital learning platforms in our post-pandemic educational environment is demonstrated in its potential to bridge the communicative gap felt by many students when taught online, simulating the lively classroom climate which so often generates exciting and effective learning opportunities for each student. As this paper demonstrates, digital learning platforms hold the potential not only to assist educators in coping with the challenges of remote learning, but also to extend student learning in ways once considered unimaginable beyond the realms of the physical classroom. As a result, this paper argues that the position of such platforms in the post-pandemic classroom must be advocated and supported further.

As a Latin teacher, I think a lot about reading. Without texts I would not have a subject to teach, and the goal of many Latin programs (including my own) is teaching students to read Latin texts. I began my Latin teaching career while teaching the language to myself as well. The goal (both for myself and my students) was to read Latin confidently and fluidly, from left to right, processing the meaning of the words as my eye scanned the pages. Yet my good intentions were soon frustrated, and I was baffled by a problem which I soon realised was not unique to my situation: despite years of training, neither I nor my students could read Latin in a natural, fluid way. Furthermore, textbooks and colleagues seemed resigned to the view that such a goal was unrealistic or unobtainable. Best to treat language as a puzzle to be solved, or linguistic knot to be untangled, rather than a language expressing a message. Only the most intellectually gifted students continued in my ‘puzzle-solving’ course; consequently, my enrolment dropped off steeply after the second year. Looking for more help, I even implemented various ‘rules for reading’ and ‘reading strategies’ advocated by others, yet rather than improve student reading ability, I felt my curriculum begin to feel increasingly cluttered with activities and processes that stole away from my students the valuable time needed to interact with the language itself. It was not until I began investigating the field of Second Language Acquisition (hereafter SLA) that I discovered some simple, yet fundamental principles about language that helped explain my students’ struggles and helped me rethink language teaching in general.

This case study was prompted by the identification, in observations and in discussion with the normal class teacher, of pupil demotivation and disaffection during Latin lessons, and the fact that this represented a considerable barrier to attainment and progress. My observation of this phenomenon coincided with Year 9 submitting their GCSE options. The combination of apparently ambiguous attitudes towards the subject and the fact that these attitudes were being brought to the fore explicitly because of the options choices drew my attention to pupil perceptions of the subject. It seemed to me that understanding the way in which pupils perceive the subject might be instructive for my own teaching practice, allowing me to better understand what pupils enjoy about the subject, what they find difficult, what enthuses them and what turns them off. Furthermore, the place of Latin within schools in general, and the particular school in which I conducted this study, is not something that should be taken for granted. It seemed to me, therefore, that this case study might provide some insight into whether Latin is a subject that young people feel is relevant and perhaps might offer some insight into what can allow Latin to have as inclusive an appeal as possible.

The ability to translate unseen passages is a skill tested in both Latin A-level and the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma. Higher IB candidates are expected to translate a passage of 105–125 words of Latin poetry (in this case, Ovid's Metamorphoses) as the first of their externally marked papers. The International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO) uses unseen passages to ‘measure the [students’] ability to understand and translate texts in the original language’ (2014, p. 25). The passages are marked according to two criteria: (a) meaning; (b) vocabulary and grammar. In order to access the highest grades, the students must provide a ‘logical translation [in which] errors do not impair the meaning’ and ‘render vocabulary appropriately and grammar accurately and effectively’ (IBO, 2014, pp. 28–9).

The Ashmolean Latin Inscriptions Project (AshLI) is a three-year collaboration between the universities of Warwick and Oxford, and the Ashmolean Museum. Its remit comprises, aside from photographing, cataloguing and translating the Museum's collection of more than 350 Latin-inscribed objects, a wide-ranging programme of public- and schools-engagement: as well as the epigraphers (inscriptions specialists), imaging experts and digital encoders, Professor Alison Cooley's team also includes a PGCE-qualified Classics teacher and blogger, and a trained podcast producer. Their aim is to tell stories of Roman life, using inscriptions as a starting point, through INSET days, free teaching resources, short films and regular podcasts made available through the project's blog ‘Reading, Writing, Romans’. In 2015, the team organised the first in a series of large-scale, direct public engagement events, when it staged a Roman funeral procession in the Ashmolean Museum.

The Classics department at my school has 32 Apple iPads. This allows for extensive individualised use of ICT in Classics lessons. Having access to tablets opens up many possibilities, not least the fact that students can stay in their usual classroom and pick up their tablet periodically to aid their learning. This facility lends itself perfectly to the Cambridge Latin Course (CLC) electronic resources. There are many online activities, games and exercises on the CLC website which were developed to support learning through supplementary activities based on the original print materials. However, it is only when students have frequent and individual access to these resources that they can reap the benefits. My school, equipped with iPads, has provided the perfect opportunity to conduct a case study on the experiences of students using a CLC online resource in Latin lessons. As a PGCE student who has recently completed an undergraduate degree in Classics, I have had a lot of experience using electronic tools to aid the translation of Latin texts, namely the programme ‘Diogenes’, and the website http://www.perseus.tufts.edu. For this reason I was particularly interested in the use of ICT as a tool to aid the reading of Latin and enhance language acquisition.

I guess the first issue that comes to mind when considering classical works in translation is ‘what is the actual purpose of the text?’ In the Classical Civilisation classroom, we are introducing students to ancient societies and ancient cultures that they will discuss in English. Apart from the fact that few, if any, of our own (state school) students will have any experience in Latin or ancient Greek, I have to question the validity of the argument some use that Classics must be studied in its original language in order fully to understand and appreciate the ancient authors.

I have always thought that teachers should not teach what to think but how to think, and I wanted to embody this attitude within my own practice of teaching Classics. It was also interesting to me to link this to the ongoing debates in history teaching surrounding the relationship between the acquisition of substantive knowledge (i.e. the facts of history: dates, battles, names, etc.) and the acquisition of second-order concepts (i.e. the framework within which such knowledge is understood: e.g. historical interpretations, ascribing significance to events, understanding causation). According to Ford, ‘the challenge of restoring the link between substantive knowledge and conceptual understanding is one which the whole profession needs to address’ (Ford, 2014, p.33). Having previously taught philosophy, causation seemed to me to be a topic I would be well-suited to tackle, and I was intrigued to discover that there were opportunities to teach causation as early as Key Stage 3 (KS3). In fact, enshrined in the current National Curriculum (NC) for KS3 history is the key aim ‘to understand historical concepts such as … cause and consequence’ (DfE, 2013, p.1). Given that Stanford professor Sam Wineburg (2001) refers to historical thinking, albeit archly, as an ‘unnatural act’, I wondered whether it was possible for 12 and 13-year old students to ‘understand’ the complex concept of causation. But I was also eager to test out some of the pedagogical theories floated at the beginning of the PGCE course, in particular, Bruner's hypothesis that ‘any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development’ (Bruner, 1960, p.33).

This article began as a blog post with the title ‘Grammar-Translation: Not Really A Method…’ (Piantaggini, 2020). Of course, that choice of title was intended to hook the reader rather than actually make such a claim. Without a doubt, Grammar-translation (GT) is a language teaching method recognised for its historical significance (Musumeci, 1997), its role amongst other emerging language teaching methods (Shrum & Glisan, 2005), as well as its shortcomings (Richards & Rodgers, 2014). This article investigates the method, and its effect on teachers and students.

While I was undertaking teacher training I noticed an emphasis on student-led learning and experimented with trying to make my own lessons less teacher-centred. Many other lessons in the school in which I was placed were largely student-led, as the students had easy access to resources that made this possible, such as iPads. As the school uses the Cambridge Latin Course (CLC), I decided to experiment with its accompanying Independent Learning Manual (ILM), which is designed to be used in conjunction with the CLC textbooks.

Three and a half years into my journey of using Comprehensible Input and leaving the textbook behind, I started doing research on Free Voluntary Reading. As a child, I had greatly enjoyed reading and it was something my students had a hard time grasping. Similarly, my own brother nearly stopped reading all together when his school adopted the Accelerated Reader program, which assigns points for reading and testing on books. His love for reading was later reignited when, as a family, we started reading the Harry Potter series. I want my own students to have a similar experience and enjoy reading.

We are grateful to the editor of JCT for offering us the opportunity of outlining our views on the need for a new Greek reference grammar, to discuss our methodological principles, and to offer some thoughts on how the book may be useful as a teaching resource.

This action research project investigates the effects of the use of ‘free composition’ in the teaching of Latin to a group of Year 10 pupils. By ‘free composition’ I mean pupils were not given English sentences to translate into Latin, as is the case in many Latin course books (see, for example, Cullen and Taylor's Latin to GCSE (2016)), but were told to use simple Latin sentences to tell a story of their own devising. The focus of the study will be on analysing pupils’ perceptions of the value of free prose composition and how free prose composition can be used to analyse pupils’ understanding of grammatical features by investigating the types of errors which they made.

This article, written at the start of April 2021, is a personal reflection on what has and hasn't worked in remote/online education. I have drawn on my own experience of teaching over the course of the past year, observations of classroom practice I have undertaken as a mentor and middle leader with responsibility for teaching and learning in my school, and conversations I have had with colleagues in my school and elsewhere; it is, therefore, highly anecdotal, and the reader is asked to bear in mind the fact that, like many others, my journey into online teaching was enforced by the closure of schools during the first nationwide lockdown in March 2020. My core aim during both lockdowns was to provide for my students the best experience possible until such a time as we could all return to the physical classroom. As it became clear towards the end of 2020 and the start of 2021 that we were going to need to return to remote education, I began to think more deeply about the strategies I was employing in my online teaching, how effective they were for my students, and what I might do to maximise their learning experience and outcomes.

An article by Jerome Moran entitled ‘Spoken Latin in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance’ was published in the Journal of Classics Teaching in the autumn of 2019 (Moran, 2019). The author of the article contends that ‘actual real-life conversations in Latin about everyday matters’ never, or almost never took place among educated people in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. A long-standing familiarity with quite a few primary sources for the Latin culture of Renaissance and early modern period leads us to a rather different conclusion. The present essay, therefore, revisits the main topics treated by Moran.

The educational value of play has long been acknowledged. During recent decades, much attention has been paid to video games and the multifarious ways in which they can promote and enhance learning. My main objective in this study is to weave game principles, learning and the notion of playfulness into assessment principles, in an attempt to investigate how what I call ‘Game-Informed Playful Assessment’ (GIPA) can affect student learning and particularly students’ experience of learning. The GIPA was designed with a view to promoting students’ agency, autonomy, collaboration and playfulness, and was introduced in an undergraduate course on archaic Greek lyric poetry at a Greek-speaking university. My data was generated through in-depth interviews with ten of the students that attended the course. While the GIPA was favourably and even enthusiastically received by students, the research also brought to the fore several other issues that call for attention, such as the stress that innovative assessment may provoke in students and the readiness of students to be playful within an academic framework that typically contrasts serious work with playfulness and play in general.

In this paper, I explore the use of long-term, hands-on learning activities for Classics courses. I will show that a carefully designed project can complement classroom lectures on Greek and Roman culture and contribute towards the development of students’ critical thinking and group work skills. As an example, I describe a successful hands-on learning project that I designed for my Ancient Greek Cities course at Monmouth College (USA). The students were tasked with researching and building an historically faithful, ancient Greek mudbrick building for the college's annual Classics Day event. With the success of this project in my class, I will show that Classics instructors can pursue similar long-term, hands-on learning activities for engaging students in ancient Greek and Roman culture and teaching essential skills.

The Classics in Communities project (http://classicsincommunities.org/) is a partnership between members of the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge and the Iris Project. It was set up in response to the primary curriculum reforms which were implemented in England from September 2014. In the Key Stage 2 (KS2) Languages curriculum policy, for the first time, Classical Greek and Latin can be chosen for study by pupils aged 6-11 in place of a modern language. The project particularly targets schools where Classical languages have not previously featured on the curriculum. It has twin aims: to equip teachers in primary schools with the skills and knowledge necessary to teach these languages; and to conduct parallel research to determine the impact of Classical language learning on children's cognitive development.