The heart of this article is an account written by a PGCE student at the end of the course. In this account Jeremy charts his changing views about teaching literature. Influenced by the work of Jerome Bruner () and others, he argues for greater ‘flexibility’ in the ways we conceptualise ‘critical response’ to a literary text. The work his Year 9 produce as they read Great Expectations emerges from Jeremy's attempts to encourage uncertainty, experiment and multiple perspectives in the students’ responses to a text. His approach to teaching the novel and the students’ richly varied readings capture something of the complexity of the meaning‐making practices that go on in an English classroom. Jeremy's writing is framed by a rationale for the value of writing in a course of initial teacher education and for a level of reflexive engagement with policy and practice.