Embedding oracy skills across the curriculum

Oracy scaffolds to develop classroom talk

• Voice 21 classroom listening ladders: high-ability students can take on leadership roles in group discussions, facilitating peer learning and mentoring others, which not only reinforces their understanding but enhances their social and emotional skills.  
• Student age-related oracy frameworks from Voice 21: to encourage high-ability students to articulate their learning processes, reflect on their contributions, and assess their growth.   
• Sentence stems and talking roles: high-ability students thrive in environments that challenge their thinking. Oracy practices with sentence stems support argumentation, encourage deep analysis and critical reasoning. 
• Voice 21 good discussion guidelines: exposure to diverse perspectives can challenge high-ability students’ thinking and expand intellectual horizons. 
• Proof of listening guidelines from Voice 21: listening helps high-ability students build better relationships with their peers and teachers. When students feel heard, they are more likely to engage and participate in the learning process, creating a positive and inclusive classroom atmosphere. 
• Student talk tactics and sentence stems from Voice 21 for every discussion and debate: high-ability students thrive in environments that challenge their thinking, and these tactics stimulate intellectual curiosity and critical analysis. These improved whole-class discussions and have greatly impacted group work as the children are more focused, listen carefully to others, build on their ideas, embed learning and address misconceptions. Overall, it has helped students to become confident, eloquent individuals and created a more effective learning environment.

Public speaking practice

Dialogic learning communities 

A stronger voice within and beyond the classroom

• Voice 21
• Oracy Cambridge
• We need to talk, 2024 – Commission on the Future of Oracy Education in England
• Oracy: the why and the how – Chartered College
• Oracy Skills Framework – Oracy Cambridge and Voice 21 
• Oracy Benchmarks – Voice 21

NACE Associate Dr Jonathan Doherty outlines the focus of this year’s NACE R&D Hub on “oracy for high achievement” – exploring the impetus for this, challenges for schools, and approaches being trialled.

This year one of the NACE Research & Development Hubs is examining the theme of ‘oracy for high achievement’. The Hub is exploring the importance of rich and extended talk and cognitive discourse in the context of shared classroom practice. School leaders and teachers participating in the Hub are seeking to improve the value and effectiveness of speaking and listening. They are developing a body of knowledge about provision and pedagogy for more able learners, sharing ideas and practice and contributing to wider research evidence on oracy through their classroom-based enquiries.

Why focus on oracy?

Oracy is one of the most used and most important skills in schools. To be able to speak eloquently and with confidence, to articulate thinking and express an opinion are all essential for success both at school and beyond. Communication is a vital skill for the 21st century from the early years, through formal education, to employment. It embraces skills for relationship building, resolving conflict, thinking and learning, and social interaction. Oral language is the medium through which children communicate formally and informally in classroom contexts and the cornerstone of thinking and learning. The NACE publication Making Space for Able Learners found that “central to most classroom practice is the quality of communication and the use of talk and language to develop thinking, knowledge and understanding” (NACE, 2020, p.38). 

Oracy is very much at the heart of classroom practice: modern classroom environments resound to the sound of students talking: as a whole class, in group discussions and in partner conversations. Teachers explaining, demonstrating, instructing and coaching all involve the skills of oracy. Planned purposeful classroom talk supports learning in and across all subject areas, encouraging students to: 

• Analyse and solve problems
• Receive, act and build upon answers 
• Think critically
• Speculate and imagine
• Explore and evaluate ideas

Dialogic teaching’ is highly influential in oracy-rich classrooms (Alexander, 2004). It uses the power of classroom talk to challenge and stretch students. Through dialogue, teachers can gauge students’ perspectives, engage with their ideas and help them overcome misunderstandings. Exploratory talk is a powerful context for classroom talk, providing students with opportunities to share opinions and engage with peers (Mercer & Dawes, 2008). It is not just conversational talk, but talk for learning. Given the importance and prevalence of classroom talk, it would be easy to assume that oracy receives high status in the curriculum, but its promotion is not without obstacles to overcome. 

Challenges for schools in developing oracy skills

Covid-19 has impacted upon students’ oracy. A report from the children’s communication charity I CAN estimated that more than 1.5 million UK young people risk being left behind in their language development as a result of lost learning in the Covid-19 period (read more here). The Charity reported that the majority of teachers were worried about young people being able to catch up with their speaking and understanding as a result of the pandemic (I CAN, 2021). 

With origins going back to the 1960s, the term oracy was introduced as a response to the high priority placed on literacy in the curriculum of the time. Rien ne change, with the current emphasis remaining exactly so. Literacy skills, i.e. reading and writing, continue to dominate the curriculum. Oracy extends vocabulary and directly helps with learning to read.  The educationalist James Nimmo Britton famously said that “good literacy floats on a sea of talk” and recognised that oracy is the foundation for literacy. 

Teachers do place value on oracy. In a 2016 survey by Millard and Menzies of 900 teachers across the sector, over 50% said they model the sorts of spoken language they expect of their students, they do set expectations high, and they initiate pair or group activities in many lessons. They also highlighted the social and emotional benefits of oracy and suggested it has untapped potential to support pupils’ employability – but reported that provision is often patchy and that CPD was sparse or even non-existent. 

Another challenge is that oracy is mentioned infrequently in inspection reports. An analysis of reports of over 3,000 schools on the Ofsted database, undertaken by the Centre for Education and Youth in 2021, found that when taken in the context of all school inspections taking place each year, oracy featured in only 8% of reports.

The issue of how oracy is assessed is a further challenge. Assessment profoundly influences student learning. Changes to assessment requirements now provide schools with new freedoms to ensure their assessment systems support pupils to achieve challenging outcomes. Despite useful frameworks to assess oracy such as the toolkit from the organisation Voice 21, there is no accepted system for the assessment of oracy.

What are NACE R&D Hub participants doing to develop oracy in their schools?

The challenges outlined above make the work of participants in the Hub of real importance. With a focus on ‘oracy for high achievement’, the Hub is supporting teachers and leaders to delve deeper into oracy practices in their classrooms. The Hub supports small-scale projects through which they can evidence the impact of change and evaluate their practice. Activities are trialled over a short period of time so that their true impact can be observed in school and even replicated in other schools. 

The participants are now engaged in a variety of enquiry-based projects in their classrooms and schools. These include:

• Use of the Harkness Discussion method to enable more able students to exhibit greater depth of understanding, complexity of response and analytical skills within cognitively challenging learning;
• Explicit teaching of oracy skills to improve independent discussion in science and history lessons;
• Introduction of hot-seating to improve students’ ability to ask valuable questions;  
• Choice in oral tasks to improve the quality of students’ analytical skills;
• Oracy structures in collaborative learning to challenge more able students’ deeper learning and analysis;
• Better reasoning using oracy skills in small group discussion activities; 
• Interventions in drama to improve the quality of classroom discussion.

Share your experience

We are seeking NACE member schools to share their experiences of effective oracy practices, including new initiatives and well-established practices. You may feel that some of the examples above are similar to practices in your own school, or you may have well-developed models of oracy teaching and learning that would be of interest to others. To share your experience, simply contact us, considering the following questions:

• How can we implement effective oracy strategies without dramatically increasing teacher workload?
• How can we best develop oracy for the most able in mixed ability classrooms?
• What approaches are most effective in promoting oracy in group work so that it is productive and benefits all learners? 
• How can we implicitly teach pupils to justify and expand their ideas and make clear opportunities to develop their understanding through talk and deepen their understanding?
• How do we evidence challenge for oracy within lessons?

Teachers should develop students’ spoken language, reading, writing and vocabulary as integral aspects of the teaching of every subject. Every teacher is a teacher of oracy. The report of the All-Party Parliamentary Group inquiry into oracy in schools concluded that there was an indisputable case for oracy as an integral aspect of education. This adds to a growing and now considerable body of evidence to celebrate the place that oracy has in our schools and in our society. Oracy is in a unique place to support the learning and development of more able pupils in schools and the time to give oracy its due is now. 

References

• Alexander, R. J. (2004) Towards dialogic teaching: Rethinking classroom talk. York, UK: Dialogos.
• Britton, J. (1970) Language and learning. London: Allen Lane. [2nd ed., 1992, Portsmouth NH:  Boynton/Cook, Heinemann].
• I CAN (2021) Speaking Up for the Covid Generation. London: I CAN Charity.
• Lowe, H. & McCarthy, A. (2020) Making Space for Able Learners. Didcot, Oxford: NACE.
• Mercer, N. &. Dawes., L. (2008) The Value of Exploratory Talk. In Exploring Talk in School, edited by N. Mercer and S. Hodgkinson, pp. 55–71. London: Sage.
• Millard, W. & Menzies, L. (2016) The State of Speaking in Our Schools. London: Voice 21/LKMco.
• Millard, W., Menzies, L. & Stewart, G. (2021) Oracy after the pandemic: what Ofsted, teachers and young people think about oracy. Centre for Education & Youth/University of Oxford. 
  

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Read more: 

• Speaking up: developing oracy for high achievement
• 7 steps to establishing a whole-school oracy culture
• 6 ideas to develop oracy in your school
• Four ways Covid restrictions have affected learning and development

Bob Cox, author of the Opening Doors books, shares some key principles and strategies for a challenging primary English curriculum – based on the latest addition to the series.

Every school’s intent is to be ambitious for its pupils. In the privileged role I have as educationist, consultant and writer, I so often admire displays, website quotes, inspirational messages and exhortations to pitch high and achieve dreams; yet I also realise how complex this can be to apply in the classroom on a day-to-day basis.

Primary teachers are expected to be experts in many subjects, so detailed support is needed in specific domains. Along with my team of ‘opening doors’ consultants, and with case studies being explored constantly with the schools in our network, we have been able to condense and express into a new publication some of the key principles and strategies needed to develop high-quality, ambitious primary English from which every pupil can benefit. This means that pupils who are already advanced and need regular immersion in literature, language and ideas are provided for in rich and creative ways: not by discrete divisions from others or by labelling, but through a challenge culture which encourages and enables all pupils to aspire and reach further. 

It's not just a question of talking about risk-taking, the unexpected, the wonder of top-class thinking skills, philosophy and quirky writing; it’s using the resources and strategies to make this all happen. How many keynote speeches have I attended over the years receiving deserved rounds of applause for charisma and style and social justice – but giving little indication for teachers who are not subject experts of where to actually begin.

I’ve seen schools hugely idealistic, wonderfully caring and totally committed, wandering in the dark for pathways to subject-specific depth. It’s all too easy then to adopt a package, a linear routeway, a stepped process which often tends to leave high performance learners revisiting concepts previously mastered. This can leave teachers de-skilled in the longer term too, as the delivery stages can dominate thinking and planning more than creative ideas. The latter needs the constant fuel of new challenging texts, quirky possibilities and curiosity. That starts with the teacher’s autonomy and nurturing of ambition. I am seeing this happen across our network and it’s very exciting!

In short, personalising approaches in any way can becomes harder if teaching to the middle rather than beyond the top takes a cultural grip. If models of excellence and ambition start to be squeezed, teachers themselves may lose sight of their own potential and ‘age-related’ notions become a goal rather than a starting point.

Our new book ‘Opening Doors to Ambitious Primary English’ provides the guide that schools have been asking for to confront that key issue of HOW ambition expresses itself in English, with a mixture of research, case studies, ideas and examples of pupils’ writing.

Essentially, high performance learners will benefit from being in a school where challenge for everyone is a priority! 

Five key principles for achieving this:

1. Pitch lessons beyond the level of the most advanced pupil.
2. Scaffold and intervene as appropriate for others.
3. Link quality texts from the past to the present and across the globe.
4. Exploit the potential of literature, including poetry, to give scope for new learning and deep knowledge acquisition as well as general knowledge.
5. Plan for sequencing and progression of knowledge via concepts in English.

Five key strategies for successful implementation:

1. Access support is needed continually, even for advanced pupils; this could include chunking stages; visual literacy; music; drama; questioning as a culture.
2. Productive group work and structured classroom talk provides the explorations of style and language needed for in-depth comprehension of quality texts.
3. Diversify the question layout to meet the needs of the pupils.
4. Develop quality writing via taster drafts which can link into sustained writing.
5. Zoom in to teach the specifics of English; zoom out to offer linked-in whole-text reading.

This is just a snapshot of the exciting work which we facilitate and activate. It’s very fulfilling. Our work is particularly in tune with attempts to inject high aspiration by matching intent to resources and approaches which will lift pupils’ standards and confidence.

Visit our website to read more about the five resource books in the series and the new book which will become the lead one, as it puts into words what schools have already been achieving to inspire so many more to follow. It’s time to make your primary English that much more exciting! 

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“Opening Doors to Ambitious Primary English: Pitching high and including all” is available to order now from Amazon or Crown House Publishing.

NACE members can benefit from a 20% discount from all purchases from the Crown House Publishing website. Log in to our member offers page for details.

More from Bob Cox:

• Opening doors to challenging English for every pupil: quality text to quality writing
• Recorded webinar: Developing an ambitious English curriculum for all (login required)

Bob Cox, author of the Opening Doors books, reflects on the importance of high-quality, challenging texts for all pupils, and key factors for the successful implementation of a challenging English curriculum.

As the author of the Opening Doors series of books for English at KS1, 2 and 3, I’ve had the pleasure of developing a UK-wide network of schools and organisations committed to providing an enriched diet of English where every pupil has the opportunity to relish new challenges. This is particularly pertinent for those advanced pupils whose whole morale can be threatened by revisiting concepts they have already mastered; but it is just as vital for pupils whose reading scores may be low.

We are seeing the high-pitch approaches, encouraged by so many educationists, being turned into reality in the day-to-day classroom by teachers using top-quality texts, poetry, quirky short extracts and contemporary children’s literature with a ‘meaty’ depth. The sheer scope of the language and style is a springboard to genuine comprehension journeys with the teacher’s questioning, knowledge transmission and fascinating oracy being delivered through an inspiring range of methodology. Such is the scope for learning in challenging texts, that the knowledge acquired in the reading can then be applied to the writing.

For example, just read a few lines of Dionne Brand’s Wind: 

I pulled a hummingbird out of the sky one day
  but let it go
I heard a song and carried it with me
 On my cotton streamers
I dropped it on an ocean and lifted up a wave
 With my bare hands…

Now see what Faith Gorman, a pupil at Red Barn Primary, has written:

I came in the night,
Luminous black,
Dashing, darting,
I made the street lamps flicker and jerk as I swept by,
I saw the foxes and owls capture their prey…
 
You can well imagine the range of teaching methodology, word power building and drafting that will have gone on in the process, but without Dionne Brand’s image-making and without overtly exploring the language and techniques, the crafting of the writing would have been less imaginative. There would also have been less knowledge about language acquired: personification, rhythm and meaning; specific vocabulary choices.

Using complex texts and developing the teaching strategies to go with them is key: “start kids out with complex texts that they cannot read successfully; then teach them to read those texts well.” – Timothy Shanahan, February 2017

In my work many years ago as an LA consultant and a freelance deliverer of provision for able pupils – then called ‘gifted and talented’ – there was huge interest from schools in the potential behind the devising of a top-class curriculum; but there were huge concerns about pupils with low reading scores being left behind. That made a lot of sense. In addition, there were concerns that pupils with high learning potential actually disliked risk-taking so much that moving them on to high-level texts and questions was not easy. Schools still report that pupils with very high potential can get upset about an incorrect answer, whereas other pupils can be so used to difficulties that they find it normal to ask their way out of them. [For more on this, take a look at NACE’s work on perfectionism in partnership with York St John University.]

Clearly, challenge for every pupil must become a habit, a norm, an expectation – and then the pupils demand it themselves instead of being wary! I’ve seen this happen in many schools. Resilience grows and healthy ambition prospers. Getting unstuck becomes fascinating, not threatening.

So, when I came to write books for English, pitched high, often asking more of pupils in terms of depth of thinking and breadth of quality reading, I was determined to ensure inclusive routes to excellence which would support equality of opportunity and social justice, and recognising the entitlement to high-class literature – from past to present and across the globe – for all learners, but pitched beyond where the most advanced pupil might be.

These are some key ways in which we have supported schools which are following the Opening Doors approach, and schools have fed back to us as a community growing in knowledge together.

So, what allows those doors to open?

• A whole-school action plan is needed to design an English curriculum which progresses from challenge to challenge, concept to concept, and through transition into KS3.
• Access strategies should flow through the curriculum: scaffolding, responding to need, clarifying, exemplifying and adapting. Pitch high but offer support when needed.
• See the sample units under free resources on my website for examples of our radial questioning layouts, which end the notion of very able pupils treading water on easy questions. We move them straight to high-level challenges if they are ready.
• Opening Doors schools build in whole-text reading in rich and immersive ways, with plenty of choice. Alongside this, extracts provide a focus for language study, depth and comprehension explorations; link reading provides range and diversity in an ethos of skilled facilitation and expectation.
• Teachers develop their own reading and expertise, offering that to pupils as the most wonderful opening of doors to general knowledge, increased confidence and articulation of ideas that there can be. 

So, the quality of the text explored deepens learning immeasurably, and that new learning is applied in ambitious writing – but it’s the teacher who makes the difference! Without you, it’s much harder for this to happen.

Reference

Brand, Dionne (2006; originally published 1979), Earth Magic. Toronto: Kids Can Press Ltd.
Full unit features in: Cox, Bob (2019), Opening Doors to a Richer English Curriculum, ages 6-9. Carmarthenshire: Crown House.

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Find out more…

To learn more about the Opening Doors approach, explore Bob Cox’s website. Plus: Bob online on 13 October 2022 for an exclusive live webinar for NACE members – register here.

If you would like to buy the Opening Doors books for your school, remember that NACE members can currently benefit from a 20% discount on all purchases from the Crown House Publishing website. For details of this and all current member discounts, visit our member offers page (login required).

Dr Kirstin Mulholland, Content Specialist for Mathematics at the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), shares a metacognitive strategy she’s found particularly helpful in supporting – and challenging – the thinking of higher-attaining pupils: “the debrief”.

Why is metacognition important?

Research tells us that metacognition and self-regulated learning have the potential to significantly benefit pupils’ academic outcomes. The updated EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit has compiled well over 200 school-based studies that reveal a positive average impact of around seven months progress. But it also recognises that "it can be difficult to realise this impact in practice as such methods require pupils to take greater responsibility for their learning and develop their understanding of what is required to succeed”  .

Approaches to metacognition are often designed to give pupils a repertoire of strategies to choose from, and the skills to select the most suitable strategy for a given learning task. For high prior attaining pupils, this offers constructive and creative opportunities to further develop their knowledge and skills.

How can we develop metacognition in the classroom?

In my own classroom, a metacognitive strategy which I’ve found particularly helpful in supporting – and, crucially, challenging – the thinking of higher-attaining pupils is “the debrief”. The debrief as an effective learning strategy links to Recommendation 1 of the EEF’s Metacognition and Self-regulated Learning Guidance Report (2018), which highlights the importance of encouraging pupils to plan, monitor and evaluate their learning. 

In a debrief, the role of the teacher is to support pupils to engage in “structured reflection”, using questioning to prompt learners to articulate their thinking, and to explicitly identify and evaluate the approaches used. These questions support and encourage pupils to reflect on the success of the strategies they used, consider how these could be used more effectively, and to identify other scenarios in which these could be useful. 

Why does this matter for higher-attaining pupils?

When working in my own primary classroom, I found that encouraging higher-attaining pupils to explicitly consider their learning strategies in this way provides an additional challenge. Initially, many of the pupils I’ve worked with have been reluctant to slow down to consider the strategies they’ve used or “how they know”. Some have been overly focused on speed or always “getting things right” as an indication of success in learning. 

When I first introduced the debrief into my own classroom, common responses from higher-attaining pupils were “I just knew” or “It was in my head”. However, what I also experienced was that, for some of these pupils, because they were used to quickly grasping new concepts as they were introduced, they didn’t always develop the strategies they needed for when learning was more challenging. This meant that, when faced with a task where they didn’t “just know”, some children lacked resilience or the strategies they needed to break into a problem and identify the steps needed to work through this. 

As I incorporated the debrief more and more frequently into my lessons, I saw a significant shift. Through my questioning, I prompted children to reflect on the rationale underpinning the strategies they used. They were also able to hear the explanations given by others, developing their understanding of the range of options available to them. This helped to broaden their repertoire of knowledge and skills about how to be an effective learner.  

How does the debrief work in practice?

Many of the questions we can use during the debrief prompt learners to reflect on the “what” and the “why” of the strategies they employed during a given task. For example, 

• What exactly did you do? Why?
• What worked well? Why?
• What was challenging? Why?
• Is there a better way to…?
• What changes would you make to…? Why?

However, I also love asking pupils much more open questions such as “What have you learned about yourself and your learning?” The responses of the learners I work with have often astounded me! They have encompassed not just their understanding of the specific learning objectives identified for a given lesson, but also demonstrating pupils’ ability to make links across subjects and to prior learning. This has led to wider reflections about their metacognition – strengths or weaknesses specific to them, the tasks they encountered, or the strategies they had used – or their ability to effectively collaborate with others. 

For me, the debrief provides an opportunity for pupils’ learning to really take flight. This is where reflections about learning move beyond the boundaries and limitations of a single lesson, and instead empower learners to consider the implications of this for their future learning. 

For our higher-attaining pupils, this means enabling them to take increasing ownership over their learning, including how to do this ever more effectively. This independence and control is a vital step in becoming resilient, motivated and autonomous learners, which sets them up for even greater success in the future. 

References

• EEF (2021). Metacognition and Self-regulation, Teaching and Learning Toolkit.
• Education Endowment Foundation (2018). Metacognition and Self-regulation: Guidance Report.

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