Guidance, ideas and examples to support schools in developing their curriculum, pedagogy, enrichment and support for more able learners, within a whole-school context of cognitively challenging learning for all. Includes ideas to support curriculum development, and practical examples, resources and ideas to try in the classroom. Popular topics include: curriculum development, enrichment, independent learning, questioning, oracy, resilience, aspirations, assessment, feedback, metacognition, and critical thinking.
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Posted By Anjali Patel, Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE),
04 June 2025
Updated: 04 June 2025
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Anjali Patel, Lead Advisory Teacher, Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE)
The Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE) is an independent UK charity, and English Association, dedicated to raising the literacy achievement of children by putting quality literature at the heart of all learning.
It is a charity with a national and international reputation for providing excellent literacy training and resources for primary schools, based on extensive research and best practice.
CLPE’s core beliefs and mission align with those of NACE in that we believe it is every child’s right to achieve and to be given the opportunities and experiences necessary to thrive.

What is Power of Reading?
CLPE’s research around the importance of using quality texts as the basis for English planning and quality teaching, and to provide reflective professional development, is embodied in our flagship training programme: the Power of Reading.
Built on 50 years of CLPE’s research, the Power of Reading explores the impact high-quality literature has on children’s engagement and attainment as readers and the link between reading and children’s writing development, supported by creative teaching approaches to develop a whole-school curriculum, which fosters a love of reading and writing to raise achievement in literacy.
In short, we recommend the kinds of books that provide challenge and opportunity for sustained shared study in whole-class English lessons with detailed teaching sequences that enable teachers across all primary Key Stages to work in depth with the best children’s literature being published today.
When ‘broad and balanced’ became overloaded and surface-level
So why do we believe should Power of Reading be at the heart of any English curriculum?
At CLPE, our school members are integral to our work. We benefit from thousands of schools and teachers being part of that CLPE community and this means we can draw on our relationship with and research in these schools to design professional development programmes and teaching resources that remain relevant.
The Power of Reading programme is refined each year, informed by the evaluations of participants and to take into account new research or statutory guidance or developments from the DfE and Ofsted and to support our schools to interpret and implement policy and guidance with confidence and integrity to what we know works.
In recent years, the issues raised with us by teachers and leaders on our INSETs and training sessions has been overridingly related to concerns around understanding how to use language to communicate meaning and for effect, both orally and in writing; and in editing, refining and response to writing. Perhaps their views resonate with you?
“Children are not motivated to edit their work beyond proofreading for spelling or other ‘surface features’.”
“There is so much curriculum content, we are teaching too much at a surface level rather than teaching at depth, particularly in writing.”
“The EYFS curriculum is too constrained for periods of sustained shared thinking to happen. Reduced time is spent at play, with more carpet time ‘sitting and listening’.”
“Responses to texts don’t have depth, children aren’t able to go below the surface and be reflective and evaluative.”
“Some set structures and routines, e.g. ‘we have to do writing every day’, ‘we have to do grammar on a Wednesday’ are barriers to developing effective practice, particularly in writing.”
“Not enough time and expertise in how to respond to writing as readers (teachers and children) – text references are features-based, not drawing on language and composition for effect.”
Providing depth to close the disadvantage gap
It is interesting to explore these commonly shared views through the lens of inclusion and to make the connection between being ‘more able’ and the kinds of experiences that lead to this opportunity to thrive and become highly literate.
Children from privileged backgrounds are more likely to experience the kinds of book ownership and book sharing experiences that support them to deepen their reader response and understanding of the world so that – in school – they can begin to explore how authors, illustrators or poets can achieve this response and how they themselves can make meaning for a reader in their own writing.
Children from disadvantaged backgrounds are more reliant on classroom routines and resources to be able to access and make connections with high-quality, representative children’s literature; to engage in daily book sharing experiences; develop deeper reader response through sustained book talk; and, as Frank Smith (1982) put it, ‘join the literacy club’ (1).
If teachers are saying they are constrained by an overloaded curriculum or lack opportunity to develop subject knowledge through quality professional development (2), the English curriculum will become increasingly disjointed and ‘surface’ level with a disadvantage gap that grows ever wider. When what all teachers want is to give every child the opportunity to work at greater depth whatever their starting point.
The last thing we want is for only privileged children to be afforded the benefits of challenge and so we must provide an equitable curriculum that enables all children to be motivated to make and create meaning with rich texts through non-reductive teaching approaches and with expert teachers.
And this is why we believe at CLPE that the Power of Reading is as necessary today as it was 20 years ago, if not more so.
The impact of a reading-rich English curriculum
The Power of Reading programme stems from CLPE’s seminal research publication The Reader in the Writer (3). This research aimed to investigate how children's writing might be influenced by studying challenging literary texts in the classroom.
The findings from that research serve as the backbone to CLPE’s training programme and they are at the heart of the Power of Reading teaching sequences that support our members to develop an evidence-led literacy curriculum in their own classrooms.
After 20 years, and with thousands of teachers trained across the UK and internationally, the programme continues to evidence impact on teachers and children whose schools have participated in the training. All the evidence we collect to measure impact continues to teach us how powerful reading can be for both children’s academic attainment and wider learning and development.
An independent evaluation by Leeds Trinity University reported on the impact of using Power of Reading in 11 Bradford schools from Autumn 2018 to Spring 2019 (4). The report shows that children in these schools made accelerated progress and the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged pupils was significantly narrowed.

More recently, in evaluating the impact of Power of Reading on children in the Early Years (5), the gap between disadvantaged children and their peers was smaller in research schools compared to all pupils within the local area. And when we compared the engagement and attainment of project children at the start and end of their Reception year, the findings were significant with double the number of children working at age-related expectations in Language and Literacy Areas of Learning.
Key recommendations for a challenging English curriculum
So what can we learn from this research to support classroom practice?
If we can create an English curriculum that is evidenced to close the disadvantage gap through exposure to and engagement in high-quality texts leading to increased world and vocabulary knowledge and writing outcomes in which children make deliberate choices for their own readers, we are creating a curriculum in which all children have access to experiences that increase their self-efficacy and the chance to be more able.
Our Associate Schools – in some of the most disadvantaged communities in England – observe children working at and achieving greater depth and this is articulated beautifully in a recent case study from the team at Miriam Lord Community Primary School in Bradford.
The Power of Reading practice and provision at Miriam Lord – and the outcomes observed – connect deeply with NACE’s core principles and can be framed as key recommendations for a challenging English curriculum:
- Ensure teachers have strong subject knowledge of high-quality children’s literature so they can give children access to a range of literary forms within and across all year groups.
“[The children] can talk with a greater depth of knowledge of authors… so their ability to compare themes, characters, likes, dislikes is so much better than it ever was and then that communicates into the writing.”
Find out more about our Power of Reading English curriculum maps.
- Choose books in which they see their own and other realities represented so that you can build authentic reader and writer identities in all children which allow them to develop and demonstrate their abilities.
“The children need to see themselves in books – or at least an element of their lives – in books. They need access to books that they can connect to and that will draw them in and I think the book choices we give them here give them a bigger hook, certainly than the book choices I had when I was growing up.”
Find out more about CLPE’s Reflecting Realities Research.
- Use a range of non-reductive, social and creative teaching approaches to deepen children’s understanding and broaden their experiences, including drama, artwork and storytelling.
“It provides lots of opportunities for immersion and exploration which is really important for a number of children that come to our school because they’ve got deprivation of experience so they don’t get to have those exciting days out or lots of real-world experiences so the books give them that and then they get to participate in role play and activities which enthuse them which then feeds into their writing process.”
Find out about CLPE’s recommended teaching approaches.
- Follow an authentic writing process in which children are making meaning from well-crafted written language, then engage in making conscious choices with their own writing. Focus not on the ‘what’ but the ‘why’ when making such choices, within a community of readers and writers.
“It puts children’s enjoyment at the centre of everything. It’s not focused solely on the final written output and the success criteria which was the case for a number of years and it made the whole writing process quite onerous and quite boring for children.”
Find out more about CLPE’s reader into writing research.
- Make explicit the connections children can make between growing literacy knowledge and skills and in wider curriculum work so that children have opportunity to thrive across a range of contexts and throughout the curriculum.
“It has wider themes threaded through it like geography, history, citizenship so it’s not just English as a stand-alone subject.”
Find out more about the Power of Reading books recommended for each Key Stage.
References
(1) Joining the Literacy Club. Further Essays into Education, Frank Smith (Heinemann, 1987)
(2) Independent review of teachers’ professional development in schools: phase 2 findings (Ofsted, May 2024)
(3) The Reader in the Writer, Myra Barrs and Valerie Cork (CLPE, 2000)
(4) Leeds Trinity University report on the impact of Power of Reading in the Exceed Academies Trust, Bradford (2019)
(5) The Power of Reading in the Early Years (CLPE, 2023)
Additional resources and support
Plus: save the date! On Friday 3rd October NACE and CLPE are collaborating on a “member meetup” event (free for staff at NACE member schools) exploring approaches to sustain pleasure and challenge in reading and literacy across Key Stages 2 and 3. Details coming soon to the NACE community calendar.
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Posted By Amanda Hubball,
11 November 2024
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Amanda Hubball, Deputy Head and More Able Lead at Alfreton Nursery School, explores the power of metacognition in empowering young people to overcome potential barriers to achievement.
Disadvantage presents itself in different ways and has varying levels of impact on learners. It is important to remember that disadvantage is wider than children who are in receipt of pupil premium or children who have a special educational need. Disadvantage can be based around family circumstances, for example bereavement, divorce, mental health… Disadvantages can be long-term or short-term and the fluidity of disadvantage needs to be acknowledged in order for educators to remain effective and vigilant for all children, including more able learners. If we accept that disadvantage can impact any child at any time, then it is essential that we provide all children with the tools they need to navigate challenge.
More able learners are as vulnerable to the impact of disadvantage as other learners and indeed research would suggest that outcomes for more able learners are more dramatically impacted by disadvantage than outcomes for other children. A cognitive toolbox that is familiar, understood and accessible at all times, can be a highly effective support for learners when there are barriers to progress. By ensuring that all learners are taught metacognition from the beginning of their educational journey and year on year new metacognition skills are integrated, a child is empowered to maintain a trajectory for success.
How can metacognition reduce barriers to learning?
Metacognition supports children to consciously access and manipulate thinking strategies, thus enabling them to solve problems. It can allow them to remain cognitively engaged for longer, becoming emotionally dysregulated less frequently. A common language around metacognition enables learners to share strategies and access a clear point of reference, in times of vulnerability. Some more able learners can find it hard to manage emotions related to underachievement. Metacognition can help children to address both these emotional and cognitive demands.
In order for children to impact their long-term memory and fully embed metacognitive strategies, educators need to teach in many different ways. Metacognition needs to be visually reflected in the learner’s environment, supporting teachers to teach and learners to learn.
How do we do this at Alfreton Nursery School?
At Alfreton Nursery School we ensure that discourse is littered with practical examples of how conscious thinking can result in deeper understanding. Spontaneous conversations are supported by visual aids around the classroom, enabling teachers and learners to plan and reflect on thinking strategies. Children are empowered to integrate the language of metacognition as they explain their learning and strive for greater understanding.
Adults in school use metacognitive terms when talking freely to each other, exposing children to their natural use. Missed opportunities are openly shared within the teaching team, supporting future developments.
Within enrichment groups, metacognition is a transparent process of learning. Children are given metacognitive strategies at the beginning of enhancement opportunities and encouraged to reflect and evaluate at the end. Whether working indoors or outdoors, with manipulatives or abstract concepts and individually or in a group, metacognition is a vehicle through which all learners can access lesson content.
We use the ‘Thinking Moves’ metacognition framework (you can read more about this here). Creative application of this framework supports the combination of metacognition words, to make strings of thinking strategies. For example, a puppet called FRED helps children to Formulate, Respond, Explain and Divide their learning experiences. A QUEST model helps children to follow a process of Questioning, Using, Explaining, Sizing and Testing.

Metacognition supports children of all abilities, ages and backgrounds, to overcome barriers to learning. Disadvantage is thus reduced.
Moving from intent to implementation
Systems and procedures at Alfreton Nursery School serve to scaffold day to day practice and provide a backdrop of expectations and standards. In order to best serve more able children who are experiencing disadvantage, these frameworks need to be explicit in their inclusivity and flexibility. Just as every policy, plan, assessment, etc will address the needs of all learners – including those who are more able – so all these documents explicitly address how metacognition will support all learners. To ensure that visions move beyond ‘intent’ and are fully implemented, systems need to guide provision through a metacognitive lens.
Metacognition is woven into all curriculum documents. A systematic and dynamic monitoring system, which tracks the progress and attainment of all learners, ensures that children have equal focus on cognition and emotion, breaking down barriers with conscious intent.
At Alfreton Nursery School, those children who are more able and experiencing disadvantage receive a carefully constructed meta-curriculum which scaffolds their journey towards success, in whatever context that may manifest itself. Children learn within an environment where teachers can articulate, demonstrate and inculcate the power of metacognition, enabling children to be the best that they can be.
How is your school empowering and supporting young people to break down potential barriers to learning and achievement? Read more about NACE’s research focus for this academic year, and contact us to share your experiences.
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Posted By Liza Timpson-Hughes,
11 November 2024
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Liza Timpson-Hughes, Assistant Headteacher at Samuel Ryder Academy, explains how the school and its Trust have embedded oracy education across the curriculum – empowering learners with skills to help them thrive both within and beyond the classroom.
Samuel Ryder Academy is an all-through school and has connected oracy to the development of activating “hard thinking” since 2021. The school is in its third year of working with both NACE and Voice 21, is using the NACE Challenge Framework and was accredited as a Voice 21 Oracy Centre of Excellence in January 2024. Oracy leads and champions are strategically developing talk across all key stages, many of which are now contributing to the implementation of oracy education across the Scholars Educational Trust – a diverse family of 11 schools covering all phases from nursery through to sixth-form.
The focus on developing oracy expertise has strengthened school culture, student experience and staff understanding of challenge in learning. Upon agreeing to focus on oracy, a strong curriculum intent was formed by a group of committed and experienced teachers:
Our oracy curriculum further enables children to speak with confidence, clarity and fluency. This provides them the opportunity to adapt their use of language for a range of different purposes and audiences. It emphasises the value of listening and the ability to interpret and respond appropriately to a range of listening activities. This will be supported by the four key strands of the oracy framework (physical, linguistic, cognitive and social and emotional).
For high-ability students, this focus on oracy matters, because it equips students with the tools they need to succeed academically while also fostering well-rounded individuals who can contribute positively to society. High-ability students often benefit from opportunities to articulate their thoughts and ideas clearly. Engaging in structured discussions and debates allows them to refine their communication skills. We do not only use language to interact, but we also use it to ‘interthink’ (Littleton & Mercer, 2013). Contrary to popular beliefs about ‘lone geniuses’, it is increasingly accepted that effective learning is through collaboration and communication in small groups.
Embedding oracy skills across the curriculum
A great oracy school not only prioritises the development of speaking and listening skills, but also creates a culture where these skills are essential to the learning process. We recognised as a Trust that skills of spoken language and communication do not need to be taught as part of a discrete “oracy lesson” and can be developed effectively as part of well-designed subject curricula. We strongly believed in connecting oracy to our academy development plan and in the value of departments having the autonomy to decide the most effective balance for their own context, ensuring a comprehensive approach to oracy without compartmentalising it into ad hoc basis.
All teachers were asked to plan for oracy episodes in their subject areas at a sequence point they felt worked. There are numerous ways oracy can be integrated into the curriculum. Millard and Menzies (2016) highlight the importance of demonstrating the connection between high-quality talk and academic rigour. Whole-school oracy scaffolds can be used across the curriculum, thus reducing workload for classroom teachers. Additionally, our trained teacher oracy champions offered wider pedagogical support on these oracy scaffolds. They modelled best practice in fortnightly teaching and learning briefings.
Oracy scaffolds to develop classroom talk
Using the Voice 21 Oracy Framework as a springboard, we agreed to focus on scaffolding oracy skills across every subject, building a learning environment in which students could clearly express their thoughts and effectively communicate ideas, whilst understanding what features constituted oracy.
In each subject, teachers prioritised the development of social and emotional skills; central to this was an emphasis on active listening, contributing to a deeper comprehension and retention of information. By actively engaging with peers and teachers, students can enhance their understanding of complex concepts and improve their critical thinking skills.
We first experimented with games and lesson starters using oracy formats and debating ideas from Voice 21. The following approaches have been valuable in every classroom and at every key stage in supporting the development of oracy skills as part of cognitively challenging learning experiences.
- 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
Student anxiety around speaking in front of others can deter teachers from incorporating oracy-based activities into lessons. Oracy education has given us a consistent language and a structure to help students as they approach presentational work.
Students were supported to deliver presentations or take part in debates by using bespoke/ age-related versions of the Voice 21 framework. Oracy champions asked students to suggest topics they felt most confident and comfortable with to start their practice. We have ‘Talk Tuesdays’ where all form time and lessons start with a talk-based task.
By establishing clear expectations for classroom talk, students felt more confident to present. These ‘ground rules’ were co-constructed with the students and regularly reviewed. The creation of safe and supportive classrooms was greatly valued by students and necessary before presentational talk. Gradual low-stakes oracy allowed confidence to evolve. Students were then invited to co-present assemblies, address different stakeholders, facilitate student cabinets and student leadership panels, and by sixth form they mastered the skills to deliver TEDx talks.
In geography, for example, students understand that there are different elements to a successfully delivered presentation, whether this was a news report on wildfires filmed on their iPad or a formal presentation to the class on a sustainable city they have designed. Students focused not just on the content (cognitive), but also on their physical and linguistic abilities. Students are delivering much higher-quality work, with much greater confidence, because they understand and consider all the different features. They are also engaging much more with peer feedback, as again we have given them a consistent language to help them evaluate each other’s work.
Teachers discussed the different types of talk that are engaged in group discussions and started to consider ways in which we could encourage more exploratory talk. We wanted to build the students’ skills in employing exploratory talk, and to ‘give permission’ for teachers and students to employ it.
Dialogic learning communities
Increased confidence in exploratory and presentational talk has allowed teachers to consider dialogic learning. Dialogue means being able to articulate ideas seen from someone else’s perspective; it is characterised by chains of (primarily open) questions and answers; it may be sustained over the course of a single lesson or across lessons; and it builds on the idea of ‘exploratory talk’, where learners construct shared knowledge and are willing to change their minds and critique their own ideas (Prof. Neil Mercer, 2000). Our teachers are being encouraged to consider where this fits in their pedagogy, classrooms and curriculum.
Noticeably in maths and RS lessons, the resources provided by Voice 21 have been crucial to create and develop a dialogic culture. We have shared with all students discussion guidelines, talk like a mathematician/philosopher sentence starters, as well as student talking tactics. These resources are displayed in classrooms and have been uploaded digitally onto students’ devices. There is deliberativeness of the dialogue between teachers and students. Seeing rich mathematical or philosophical talk in action surfaced several practices that we believe deepen thinking and strengthen subject content. Linking language to the creativity of mathematical thinking and practices encourages students to use talk as a tool for generating new ways of approaching problems, rather than simply to internalise existing methods and just being compliant passengers.
A stronger voice within and beyond the classroom
Senior leaders play a key role in supporting teachers to develop this oracy knowledge. We provided oracy-specific training for all teaching and support staff. Space was identified for colleagues to share and evaluate the best tools over time. We were particularly interested in understanding how oracy skills promoted greater depth of subject knowledge. The development of oracy skills is most effective when it is integrated into a whole-school approach, endorsed and prioritised by the senior leadership team. But identification of early shifters and adopters was crucial in forming a strong of teacher oracy champions.
For teachers, the shift is noticeable in the modelling of talk they expect from students, scaffolding their responses and interactions and providing timely and specific feedback. It was vital to consider how to approach the teaching of ‘active listening’ in classrooms. We recognised that an oracy-centred approach can be of great value in all subjects but may need adapting to suit the subject area and age of learners.
Since prioritising oracy there is nothing forced or artificial about the classroom conversation; students engage positively with explicit strategies for talk. Students talk about how oracy education has given them increased confidence, a voice for learning and beyond the classroom, and supports their wellbeing. They know this will help them throughout educational transitions and ultimately in the wider world. It is empowering. The impact is evident, not only on high-achieving students but across the entire school culture.
References and further reading
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Posted By Jonathan Doherty,
13 March 2023
Updated: 07 March 2023
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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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Posted By Zoe Enser,
15 November 2022
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Zoe Enser, author of the new book Bringing Forth the Bard, shares eight key steps to help your students get to grips with (and enjoy!) the symbolic, allusive, musical, motif-packed language of Shakespeare.
The language of Shakespeare is perhaps one of the greatest barriers to most readers unfamiliar with its style, allusions and patterns. Shakespeare’s language can be something of a leveller as it doesn’t necessarily matter how proficient you are at reading generally; all students (and indeed many adults) will stumble across his words and need to deploy a different approach to reading than they are used to.
With so many finding the language problematic, there is a temptation to strip some of the complexity away; to focus instead on summaries or modern adaptations. There is, though, much to be gained by examining his words as they appear, much as you would when exploring a poem with your class.
Getting it can be really satisfying, and a key light-bulb moment for me at school was seeing how unpicking meaning could be looked at like a problem to be solved, much like solving equations in maths or finding the intricate pieces of a jigsaw. Most importantly perhaps is that his use of poetry, imagery and musicality frequently stays with us, and lines from Shakespeare that linger in our mind and our everyday language remain due to their crafting. We want to allow students to have that opportunity too.
Here are eight steps to bring Shakespeare’s language to life in your own classroom:
1. Begin by giving students an overview of the plot, characters and themes. Good quality performance, coupled with summary and questioning, will mean students arrive at language analysis ready to see how it relates to these bigger ideas. Audio readings of the plays can also be useful here to allow them to hear the language spoken and to model fluency.
2. Reassure students they won’t get it all immediately. Explain that the joy in studying Shakespeare’s language comes from the gradual understanding we gain and how it enriches our understanding, which is a process: one which even those familiar with his work will continue to go through. It is a process where we layer understanding, deepening each time we revisit it. If students have been used to exploring simpler texts this might be a challenge at first to consider this different approach, but model this for them, demonstrating how you can return to the same quote or extract again and again to delve deeper each time.
3. Look at short extracts and quotes from across a play or a range of texts to examine patterns and connections. Linger on individual words and then trace them as they are used elsewhere so students can notice where these links are and hypothesise as to why.
4. Use freely available searches to explore the frequency and location of key words and phrases. For example, a search on Open-Source Shakespeare reveals there are 41 direct references to ‘blood’ or ‘bloody’ in the play Macbeth, some of which are clustered within a few lines. This provides an opportunity to explore why this is the case and what Shakespeare was doing with these language choices. Equally, looking for references to the sun in Romeo and Juliet reveals 17 instances, and if then cross-referenced with light it brings forth a further 34 references, suggesting that there is a motif running through the text which demands further attention. Allowing students to explore this trail in their discussions and consider the prevalence of some words over others can reveal much about the themes Shakespeare was trying to convey too. For example, simply looking at the light and dark references in Romeo and Juliet enables students to see the binaries he has woven into the play to mirror the idea of conflict.
5. Discuss the imagery Shakespeare is trying to create with his language via pictures, selecting those which are most appropriate to convey his choices at different points. Thinking about how different audiences may respond to these is also a useful way to examine alternative interpretations of a single word, line or idea. This can also support learners with different needs as they have visual images to link to ideas, especially abstract ones, repeated throughout the text. This will provide them with something more concrete to link to the text and, as images are repeated throughout the narrative, can act as support for the working memory and enhance fluency of retrieval as they recognise the recurring images visually. This can be particularly useful for EAL students, supporting them to follow the plot and explore the patterns that emerge.
6. Teach aspects of metre (such as iambic and trochaic pentameter), ensuring students have lots of opportunities to hear the language spoken aloud so they can appreciate the musicality of the language and choice of form. Using methods such as walking the text, whereby students physically walk around the room whilst reading the text and responding to the punctuation, can be a powerful way to convey how a character feels at any given point. Lots of phrases, short clauses, or single syllable words can change the pace of the reading and we should model this and give students the opportunity to examine how this may then impact on performance. Long, languid sentences can create a different performance, and where the punctuation has finally landed in his work can reveal a lot about how a character or scene has been read. Try different ways of reading a single line to illustrate why we place emphasis on certain words and pauses at different points.
7. Read the text aloud together. As well as modelling reading for students, employing practices such as choral reading (where the class all read the text aloud together with you) or echo reading (where they repeat lines back) can be another way in which we remove the barriers the language can create. Students build confidence over time as the language becomes more familiar but also they do not feel so exposed as they are reading with the group, and not alone.
8. Let students play with and manipulate the language so they are familiar with it, and it doesn’t become a block to their interaction with the plays. Pre-teach the vocabulary, letting students consider words in isolation and explore quotes so that they don’t become overwhelmed at trying to interpret them. Even translating short phrases and passages can provide a useful coding activity which can support later analysis.
Zoe Enser was a classroom teacher for 20 years, during which time she was also a head of English and a senior leader with a responsibility for staff development and school improvement. This blog post is an excerpt from her latest book, Bringing Forth the Bard (Crown House Publishing). NACE members can benefit from a 20% discount on this and all purchases from the Crown House Publishing website; for details log in to our member offers page.
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Posted By NACE team,
15 November 2022
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This term’s NACE member meetup brought together colleagues from across our network to explore the theme “developing oracy for high achievement”. Following a morning of CPD presentations, the afternoon session was dedicated to sharing examples of effective approaches to developing oracy skills, to support cognitively challenging learning and high achievement.
Here are some of the approaches shared:
1. Get all staff members on board
One common theme from the event was the importance of getting all staff members on board, through a shared vision and whole-school approach. Salusbury Primary School has approached this using the Voice 21 oracy benchmarks, and developed specific inset sessions based on priorities identified through a staff and student survey.
A similar approach – again starting with staff and student surveys – was adopted at Maiden Erlegh School, and you can read more about this here.
Alongside a shared vision and framework, members highlighted the importance of opportunities for flexibility, innovation, collaboration, feedback, and sharing what’s working across the school.
2. Set and model high expectations for spoken responses
Another recurrent theme was the setting and modelling of high expectations for spoken responses. This could include insisting on the use of full sentences, accurate grammar, and appropriate tier 2 and 3 vocabulary.
To support students with this, approaches include sharing sentence starters with learners, using a “bounce it on” model to collaboratively build discussions, and the use of ethics debates to help learners develop confidence in expressing opinions.
There was consensus that such techniques have led to students becoming more confident and accurate in both spoken and written communication.
3. Word(s) of the day
At Haybridge High School, a dedicated section of the board is used to share key terms relevant to the lesson – including challenging vocabulary and discourse markers to structure talk. The meaning of the words is taught explicitly, with call-and-response vocalisation to aid pronunciation. Learners are then challenged to use these words during discussions within the lesson.
Similarly, Harris Academy Beckenham uses a “word of the day”. Students start by vocalising the word together, then using it in a sentence. The word is then revisited throughout the lesson, so all students use the word multiple times in different contexts.
Again, members reported increased retention, confidence and accuracy. In addition, the additional vocabulary can open doors for learners to think abstractly or conceptually about a topic.
4. Vocabulary bullseye
Another approach to developing vocabulary was shared by Brook Field Primary School, where learners play “vocabulary bullseye”. In this game, key words are shown within a bullseye diagram. Children are challenged to use the words to explain a concept – gaining one point for words in the outer ring, two for the middle, and three for the inner circle. Points can be deducted for “umms” and other filler words.
This game can be played either with the bullseye diagram visible or hidden, depending on the stage in the teaching sequence. It has led to learners using higher-tier vocabulary more confidently and effectively, in both spoken and written communication.
5. Public speaking clubs and competitions
Several schools shared the use of public speaking clubs and competitions, providing further opportunities for learners to develop oracy skills. At Pangbourne College, this has been approached in several ways, including public speaking workshops as part of leadership training for sixth-form students, as well as integration within the Year 9 English curriculum.
As part of the latter initiative, learners are taught rhetorical devices, and have the opportunity to plan and delivery speeches, culminating in “The Declamations Cup” competition – complete with prizes and a trophy for the winner.
6. Be consistent (but not “perfect”)
Finally, members agreed on the importance of consistency across the school, and ensuring oracy is embedded into everyday routines so that staff and students alike have ample opportunities for practice.
Alongside this, several emphasised the importance of ensuring students know they don’t need to be “perfect” when speaking – and that in fact, the more opportunities they have to practice, the more comfortable they become with taking risks and making mistakes. Practice doesn’t make perfect!
Read more:
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Posted By Chloe Bateman,
07 October 2022
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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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Posted By Howell's School, Llandaff,
20 June 2022
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Sue Jenkins, Head of Years 10 and 11, and Hannah Wilcox, Deputy Head of Years 10 and 11, share five reasons they’ve found The Day an invaluable resource for tutor time activities.
Howell’s School, Llandaff, is an independent school in Cardiff which educates girls aged 3-18 and boys aged 16-18. It is part of the Girls’ Day School Trust (GDST).
The Day publishes daily news articles and resources with the aim of help teachers inspire students to become critical thinkers and better citizens by engaging their natural curiosity in real-world problems. We first came across it as a library resource and recognised its potential for pastoral activities when the length of our tutor time sessions was extended to allow more discussion time and flexibility in their use.
Post-Covid, it has never been more important to promote peer collaboration, discussion and debate in schools. There is an ever-increasing need for students to select, question and apply their knowledge when researching; it has never been more important for students to have well-developed thinking and analytical skills. We find The Day invaluable in helping us to prompt students to discuss and understand current affairs, and to enable those who are already aware to extend and debate their understanding.
Here are five key pastoral reasons why we would recommend subscribing to The Day:
1. Timely, relevant topics throughout the year
You will always find a timely discussion topic on The Day website. The most recent topics feature prominently on the homepage, and a Weekly Features section allows you to narrow down the most relevant discussion topic for the session you are planning. Assembly themes, such as Ocean Day in June, are mapped across the academic year for ease of forward planning. We particularly enjoyed discussing the breakaway success of Emma Raducanu in the context of risk-taking, and have researched new developments in science, such as NASA’s James Webb telescope, in the week they have been launched.
2. Supporting resources to engage and challenge students
The need to involve and interest students, make sessions straightforward for busy form tutors, and cover tricky topics, combine to make it daunting to plan tutor time sessions – but resources linked to The Day’s articles make it manageable. Regular features such as The Daily Poster allow teachers to appeal to all abilities and learning styles with accessible and interesting infographics. These can also be printed and downloaded for displays, making life much easier for academic departments too. One of the best features we’ve found for languages is the ability to read and translate articles in target languages such as French and Spanish. Reading levels can be set on the website for literacy differentiation, and key words are defined for students to aid their understanding of each article.
3. Quick PSHE links for busy teachers
Asked to cover a class at the last minute? We’ve all been there! With The Day, you are sure to find a relevant subject story to discuss within seconds, and, best of all, be certain that the resources are appropriate for your students. With our Year 10 and 11 students, we have covered topics such as body image with the help of The Day by prompting discussion of Kate Winslet’s rejection of screen airbrushing. Using articles is particularly useful with potentially difficult or emotive issues where students may be more able to discuss the benefits and drawbacks of certain attitudes by looking at news events, detaching themselves from but also gaining insight about the personal situations they may be experiencing. The PSHE programme is vast; it is great to use The Day to plan tutor time sessions and gives us the opportunity to touch on a wide range of issues relatively easily.
4. Motivational themes brought to life through real stories
We have also found The Day’s articles useful for providing examples of motivational themes for our year groups. The Themes Calendar is particularly useful here; for example, tutor groups discussed the themes of resilience and diversity using the article on Preet Chandi’s trek to the South Pole. If you’re looking for assembly inspiration, The Day is a great starting point.
5. Develop oracy, thinking and research skills through meaningful debate
Each article has suggested tasks and discussion questions which we have found very useful for planning tutor time activities which develop students’ oracy, thinking and research skills. The Day promotes high-level debates about environmental, societal and political issues which students are keen to explore. One recent example is the discussion of privacy laws and press freedom prompted by the article about Rebel Wilson’s forced outing by an Australian newspaper. Activities can be easily adapted or combined to promote effective discussion. ‘Connections’ articles contain links to similar areas of study, helping teachers to plan and students to see the relevance of current affairs.
Find out more…
NACE is partnering with The Day on a free live webinar on Thursday 30 June, providing an opportunity to explore this resource, and its role within cognitively challenging learning, in more detail. You can sign up here, or catch up with the recording afterwards in our webinars library (member login required).
Plus: NACE members can benefit from a 20% discount on annual subscriptions to The Day. For details of this and all current member offers, take a look at our member offers page (login required).
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Posted By Kate Hosey,
17 June 2022
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Kate Hosey, Assistant Headteacher at Ferndown Upper School, shares lessons learned from an intervention to develop students’ metacognitive skills in the classroom – emphasising the importance of focusing on process, not task, when modelling.
Metacognition is not new; many of us use it without realising in our classrooms every day. Those questions we ask students about what they understand about a topic, or why they have come to the conclusion they have, as well as the use of retrieval practice, interleaving and knowledge organisers, are all based on a metacognitive understanding of the process of learning. The EEF’s Teaching and Learning Toolkit suggests that metacognition can raise the attainment of pupils by seven months, which is justification in itself for focusing on it in school.
For a while now I have been conscious that the students at my school are generally well-behaved and want to do well, but that a number of them find it hard to motivate themselves to be more active in their learning. This has come out in areas like homework and attitudes to learning, where often the same students are receiving sanctions regularly for not doing homework.
We developed an intervention based around teaching metacognition skills with the aim of empowering the students to take control of their learning. Teaching students to be more aware of how they learn will enable them to find links and develop strategies to become more independent and more in control.
Research suggests that most classrooms are set up to promote metacognition in teachers rather than students; a bit like having a personal trainer who says “I’m going to help you meet all your fitness goals – now sit back while I lift all the weights”. We need to shift responsibility; for years our students have internalised the idea that students are supposed to get answers from teachers, and so stop trying to find out for themselves – they assume the person in charge of their learning is someone other than them. A great teacher teaches as little as possible, while modelling behaviours of how to figure something out.
We decided to focus on three key areas:
- Promote purposeful dialogue about thinking in the classroom;
- Provide challenge;
- Model metacognitive skills – talk about thinking and how as a teacher we think things through.
The first two areas were fairly straightforward to implement. Teachers needed to be more aware of their own language and questioning in their classrooms and could use the strategies suggested by websites such as metacognition.org.uk to support them if they wished.
Number 3, however, was a bit trickier. We were good at breaking down a task into manageable stages for students and scaffolding their writing, but found that next time we asked them complete a similar activity, they had forgotten how to do it. Looking at an exam-style question for the fifth time and saying to the class “so what do we do first?” we were met with blank faces and puzzled silence. In verbalising our own thought processes we allow the students to see how to work out what to do, which eventually will enable them to use the strategy for any assessment they are asked to complete.
Here is a modelling example from history (although other subjects would be similar!). It is important to focus on the modelling of process – not modelling the task:
What to do: modelling process |
What to avoid: modelling task |
“The first thing I think about when I’m about to start writing is ‘how can I make sure I directly answer this question?’ One simple way I know I can do that is to pick out words from the question to include in my first sentence, because I know if I get the first sentence right then my paragraph will be well focused.”
The teacher writes the first sentence.
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“The first sentence of our answer always needs to include words from the question so that we focus our answer in the right area.”
The teacher writes the first sentence.
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“Next I’m thinking ‘what do I know about this topic that is relevant to the point I’ve just made?’ Here I tend to pause for a bit to run through the knowledge I’ve got and make some choices about which pieces of evidence will best support my point. Once I’ve made a decision I start writing again.”
Teacher writes second sentence, describing key historical facts connected to the point.
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“Next I need to include key pieces of precise evidence that will support my point.”
Teacher writes second sentence, describing key historical facts connected to the point.
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In verbalising their thought processes in this way, teachers are showing students how to think about their learning. They are giving students knowledge of the process so that they can also use it when approaching assessments, which of course they will have to do on their own eventually.
Having worked on this for two terms, we discussed how well we thought the students had taken on board the skills we were teaching them and how it had impacted on their progress and homework sanctions. The data showed they had an improvement in P8 score, on average of +0.40 (over half a grade) and 40% students had received fewer sanctions for no homework.
Of course, it is difficult to measure whether or not the strategies we employed directly impacted on students’ progress – it could also have been down to other influencing factors both in and out of school. However, the soft data gathered from staff and student surveys showed an improvement in students’ own understanding of metacognition as well as staff willingness and ability to use metacognitive approaches in their own teaching. Anecdotally there was a sense that lessons were more focused and students more engaged as a result of the attention being paid to metacognition in the classroom.
References
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Posted By Bob Cox,
17 June 2022
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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.
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).
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English
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