Chloe Bateman is a Teacher of History at Maiden Erlegh School, a NACE Challenge Award-accredited school. Chloe has recently led the development of a whole-school oracy strategy. In this blog post, she shares some of the ways in which Maiden Erlegh has established and embedded a culture of oracy across the school to benefit all students, including the more able.
Oracy is ‘both everywhere and nowhere in a school’. At Maiden Erlegh, we realised that although plenty of classroom talk was taking place, opportunities for this could be ad hoc and students did not always recognise these as opportunities to develop oracy skills. At the same time, a significant number of students lacked the confidence to speak in front of larger groups and in more formal contexts, hindering their ability to engage with oracy-related elements of the taught curriculum and extracurricular activities. The national picture indicates that many schools experience similar challenges to developing student oracy and an oracy culture within the school.
Drawing on our experience, here are seven steps to establish a whole-school oracy culture:
1. Investigate your context to determine your priorities
Every school is different. Whilst the national trend shows a decline in oracy as a result of the Covid-19 lockdowns, every school will have different areas of strength and development in terms of the current oracy level of their students and their staff confidence in teaching to enhance oracy. Oracy too is itself a complex skill, made up not just of the verbal ability, but multiple components such as the physical and cognitive elements. To design a strategy which really works for your context, it is beneficial to gather student and staff voice to inform the precise nature of this. At Maiden Erlegh, we conducted quantitative and qualitative staff and student surveys, asking students to rate their level of confidence when communicating and why they may feel less confident in some areas than others. Staff were asked to share feedback on levels of student oracy and what support they would need to feel confident in developing an oracy culture in their own classrooms. From this data, we could easily identify clear priorities to be addressed through our strategy.
2. Secure buy-in from staff to secure buy-in from students
A strategy is only as effective as those who make it a reality on a day-to-day basis: the teaching staff. Our oracy work was launched via a training session to staff which centred on communicating the rationale for our new oracy focus. Here the student and staff voice surveys came into their own, enabling us to explain why we needed to develop oracy using the words of students and staff themselves and showing the overwhelming statistics. We also took time to share the wide-ranging holistic benefits of enhanced oracy for students, including for mental health, academic progress, and career opportunities. For maximum exposure, include students in the launch too and keep them as informed as you would do staff. We delivered assembles to all students sharing very similar messages to those shared during the staff launch, ensuring students were aware and engaged with our upcoming work.
3. Get staff and students on board with ‘quick wins’
It can be tempting to try to launch all strands of a strategy at once. However, this is unlikely to succeed in the long run as it risks overwhelming the very people you are attempting to get on board. Instead, generate enthusiasm and interest in oracy by sharing ‘quick wins’: low-preparation, high-impact activities to integrate more oracy opportunities into lessons. Staff and students loved our ‘no filler’ game in which students were challenged to answer questions or speak about a relevant topic without using filler words such as ‘erm’, ‘like’, and ‘basically’. As staff become more confident in creating their own oracy-based activities, encourage colleagues to share their own ‘quick wins’ via staff briefings and bulletins to build a culture of enthusiasm.
4. Give oracy an identity
Too often strategies and initiatives can be become lost in the organisational noise of a school and the day-to-day challenges and immediate priorities. Borrow from the world of marketing and promotions to create a clear identity for oracy by designing a logo and branding for your strategy using a simple graphic design website such as Canva. A catchy slogan can also help to build a ‘brand’ around the strategy and increase staff and student familiarity with the overall vision. At Maiden Erlegh School (MES), we use the slogan ‘MES Speaks Up!’ – a motto that has become synonymous with our vision for a culture of oracy across the school.
5. Establish and reinforce consistent high expectations for oracy
Most schools have shared and consistent high expectations for students’ literacy and numeracy, but how many have the same for oracy? Whilst many teachers will have high standards for communication in their classrooms, these will not have the same impact on students as if they are school-wide. At Maiden Erlegh, we established a set of ‘Guidelines for Great Oracy’, a clear list of five expectations including the use of formal vocabulary and projecting loudly and clearly. These expectations were launched to both staff and students and all classrooms now display a poster to promote them. The key to their success has been clearly communicating how easily these can be embedded into lessons, for example as success criteria for self- and peer-assessment during oracy-based activities such as paired or group discussions.
6. Create a shared understanding that oracy will enhance the existing curriculum
With so many competing demands on a classroom teacher’s time, it is easy to see why strategies and initiatives which feel like ‘add-ons’ can miss the mark and fail to become embedded in a school’s culture. Central to the success of our oracy strategy has been raising staff, student, and parent awareness that a focus on oracy will enhance our existing curriculum, rather than distract from it. From the very beginning, staff have been encouraged to return to existing lesson activities which cover existing content and adapt these with oracy in mind. In History, for example, an essay was preceded by a parliamentary debate to help students to construct convincing arguments, whilst in Maths students developed complex verbal explanations for the processes they were performing rather than simply completing calculations. Not only do such activities support oracy skills, but they demonstrate the inherent importance of oracy across the curriculum and allow departments to better meet their own curricular aims.
7. Keep the momentum going with high-profile events
As with any new strategy or initiative, we realised that after the initial enthusiasm there was a potential for staff and students to lose interest as the year wore on. To combat this, we developed high-profile events to return oracy to centre stage and engage students and staff alike. In May, we held MES Speaks Up! Oracy Month – a month of activities focused on celebrating oracy and its importance across all aspects of school life. In form time, students were challenged to discuss a topical ‘Question of the Day’ from our ‘Discussion Calendar’ to get them communicating from the moment they arrived in school. Every subject dedicated at least one lesson during the month to an activity designed to develop and celebrate oracy skills, including public speaking, debating, and presenting. Outside of lessons, students from each year group participated in a range of extracurricular parliamentary debates on issues relevant to their age group. All of these activities were widely promoted via our school social media to generate a buzz around oracy with our parents and guardians.
References
Interested in developing oracy within your own school?
• Join our free member meetup on this theme (18 October 2022)
• Join this year’s NACE R&D Hub with a focus on oracy for high achievement (first meeting 20 October 2022)
• Explore more content about oracy
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