Amanda Hubball, Deputy Head and More Able Lead at Alfreton Nursery School, outlines the use of “thinking booklets” to embed challenge into the early years setting.

At Alfreton Nursery School, staff believe that children need an intrinsic level of challenge to enhance learning. This challenge is not always based around adding symbols to a maths problem or introducing scientific language to the magnet explorations. An early years environment has countless opportunities for challenge and this challenge can be provided in creative ways.  

Thinking booklets: invitations to think and talk

Within the nursery environment, Alfreton has created curriculum zones. These zones lend themselves to curriculum progression, whilst also providing a creative thread of enquiry which runs through all areas. Booklets can be found in each space and these booklets ask abstract questions and offer provocations for debate. Drawing on the pedagogical approach Philosophy for Children (p4c), we use these booklets to ensure classroom spaces are filled with invitations to think and talk.

Literacy booklets

Booklets within the literacy area help children to reflect on the concepts of reading and writing, whilst promoting communication, breadth of vocabulary and the skills to present and justify an opinion.

For example, within the “Big Question: Writing” booklet, staff and children can find the following questions:

• What is writing?
• If nobody could read, would we still need to write?

Alongside these and other questions, there are images of different types of writing. Musical notation, cave drawings, computer text and graffiti to name but a few. Children are empowered to discuss what their understanding of writing actually is and whether others think the same. Staff are careful not to direct conversations or present their own views.  

Maths booklets

Maths booklets are based around all aspects of the subject: shape, size, number. . .

• If a shape doesn’t have a name, is it still a shape?
• What is time?
• If you could be a circle or a triangle, which would you choose and why?

Questions do not need to be based around developing subject knowledge, and the more abstract and creative the question, the more open to all learners the booklets become.  

Children explore the questions and share views. On revisiting these questions another day, often opinions will change or become further embellished. Children become aware that listening to different points of view can influence thinking.

Creative questions

Developing the skills of abstract thought and creative thinking is a powerful gift and children enjoy presenting their theories, whilst sometimes struggling to understand that there is no right or wrong answer. For the more analytical thinkers, being asked to consider whether feelings are alive – leading to an exploration of the concept “alive” – can be highly challenging. Many children would prefer to answer, “What is two and one more?”  

Alfreton Nursery School’s culture of embracing enquiry, open mindset and respect for all supports children’s levels of tolerance, whilst providing cognitive challenge and opportunities for aspirational discourse. The use of simple strategies to support challenge in the classroom ensures that challenge for all is authentically embedded into our early years practice.  

Read more from Alfreton Nursery School:

• Building metacognition: breaking down barriers to learning
• Environmental education in the early years: intent, implementation, impact
• 5 steps to embed metacognition in the early years
• 4 top tips for implementing P4C into nursery

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. 
  

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

NACE Research and Development Director Dr Ann McCarthy explores the ethos behind this year’s NACE R&D Hub on the theme “rethinking assessment” – including some key questions for all school leaders and teachers to consider.

“Rethinking assessment” is the focus of one of our NACE Research and Development Hubs this year. The question we are asking ourselves is:

If I rethink an aspect of assessment, to include it as part of the learning process, will more able pupils have a better understanding of the learning process; as such will they exhibit greater depth, complexity or analytic skills in their learning?

Within this Hub, leaders and teachers are seeking to improve the value and effectiveness of assessment. Some are making small changes to classroom practice; others are seeking to make changes within teams; and others are making strategic decisions which include a change in school policies. 

One might ask why this is of interest and indeed necessary when there are so many initiatives being introduced into our schools. The answer is that assessment dominates the learning environment in that it provides summative evaluations and provides instructional feedback to help learners progress. It also has the potential to enable pupils to become powerful, autonomous and self-regulating learners, both now and into the future. 

However, assessment practice does not always benefit more able learners and often detracts from the learning itself. In this article I begin by raising awareness of potential hazards when planning assessment, before thinking about the purpose of assessment and the possibilities open to us if we rethink our own practice.

Tests, examinations and potential hazards

Every year following the publication of examination results we hear the statistics about the change in numbers achieving specific grades. Schools are then judged on the effectiveness of reaching performance thresholds. It is not surprising that curriculum in some schools is at risk of becoming narrow and entirely examination-focused.

For those that oppose the current system, there are arguments that methods for obtaining grades or performance measures should be reviewed and changed. There has been discussion about whether employers and universities understand the endpoint grades. At all stages of learning endpoint grades do not always lead to progression in learning. Prior learning is not always understood as learners move from primary to secondary, Year 11 to sixth form or on to schools, colleges, universities and employment. 

Another issue is that testing does not necessarily respond to the different ways pupils learn, the additional needs they might have or the wider intellectual, developmental or metacognitive gains which might be possible. Pupils with differing learning needs or experiences can find it difficult to demonstrate their skills and abilities within the format of the current assessments. 

More able pupils deserve the highest grades and the expectation from parents and pupils is that this will become a reality. This puts pressure on both the class teacher and school to provide a curriculum which consistently leads to these outcomes. It also places pressure on the pupils to achieve an examination or test standard bounded by a fixed curriculum. Schools carefully package the curriculum into small but connected areas of learning which can be delivered, revised and assessed effectively. 

However, another potential hazard lies in the preparation of the curriculum in that pupils can experience too many assessments. Schools wishing to maintain a prescribed standard each year with a trajectory of performance with the target grade as the endpoint will often use data-driven assessment. Here they risk placing numeric data ahead of meaningful learning. Pupils are then at risk from pressure imposed by continuous high- and low-stakes assessment detached from learning. In the worst-case scenario, more time is invested in measuring learning rather than developing the pupils’ potential. 

Another problem associated with a prescribed endpoint measure is that the assessments which pupils experience throughout the period of instruction mirror the endpoint assessment even though pupils may not have the maturity, linguistic capability or experience to make the greatest learning gains from the experience. This is often seen most clearly in the secondary phase of learning when pupils are given GCSE-style questions as young as age 11. 

Regardless of all these points, the reality is that for all the problems which exist within the current system, we live in a country where our qualifications have international recognition and value. So how then, working within the current constraints, can we help our pupils to become confident and successful learners while avoiding some of these hazards?

What then are we seeking to rethink, if not the system itself?

In rethinking assessment, we seek to enable our pupils to achieve the highest standards; because they have mastered the learning through effective curriculum, teaching, learning and assessment. To achieve this, we need to imagine what pupils have the potential to know, learn, think and do. We also need to think beyond the limitations of compulsory prescribed content. We can enable more able pupils with their variety of backgrounds, learning needs and potential to acquire a deeper understanding of subject, context, applications, and of their own learning. We can provide pupils with more information about the nature of learning and their own learning so that they feel in control of the process.

Deciding the purpose of assessment 

When rethinking assessment, it must align with the educational philosophy held by all stakeholders. Different schools will adopt different approaches to assessment, but the most effective practices exist when the purpose of assessment is clearly articulated and understood. It works well when there is consistent practice, which not only informs the teaching but also facilitates learning and engages pupils in their learning. Assessment should not create an additional workload, nor should it be focused on the acquisition of data which is detached from learning.

There have been many attempts to characterise good assessment practice. An example here comes from The Assessment Reform Group who summarised the characteristics of assessment that promotes learning using the following seven principles:

1. It is embedded in a view of teaching and learning of which it is an essential part;
2. It involves sharing learning goals with pupils;
3. It aims to help pupils to know and to recognise the standards they are aiming for;
4. It involves pupils in self-assessment;
5. It provides feedback which leads to pupils recognising their next steps and how to take them;
6. It is underpinned by confidence that every student can improve;
7. It involves both teacher and pupils reviewing and reflecting on assessment data. 

Broadfoot et al., 1999, p. 7

 When planning formative assessment teachers may want to reflect on the view expressed by Black and Wiliam that it is:

“the extent that evidence about student achievement is elicited, interpreted, and used by teachers, learners, or their peers, to make decisions about the next steps in instruction that are likely to be better, or better founded, than the decisions they would have taken in the absence of the evidence that was elicited.”

Black & Wiliam, 2009, p. 9

When deciding the purpose of assessment, we need to be clear about the way in which it will feed information back into the learning process. Students need to understand themselves as learners and know what else they need to learn. This moves us away from activities which are pressured and demotivating. It moves us towards assessment choices which increase motivation and focus. Good assessment practice will allow pupils to take greater control of their learning when they understand the level of challenge, can set themselves challenges and utilise information or feedback to make progress. 

When you rethink assessment:

• How would you summarise the characteristics of good assessment in your school?
• What is the purpose of the planned assessments?
• What impact will they have on learning and progress?
• What impact will assessment have on teaching?
• How will pupils use the assessment and feedback to regulate their own learning

To what extent will authentic assessment enhance learning?

Authentic assessment practices are seen to be favourable by linking the classroom to wider experience. However, there are a wide range of views on what this might look like. We often see examination questions which are set within a “real life context”. The difficulty with this approach is that the questions become complicated and often distract the pupils from the learning rather than contributing to it. Gulikers, Bastiaens and Kirschner proposed assessment which relates more directly to the context in which the learning might be experienced. Their model enabled:

“students to use the same competencies, or combinations of knowledge, skills, and attitudes that they need to apply in the criterion situation in professional life.”

Gulikers et al, 2004, p. 69

Litchfield and Dempsey (2015), proposed authentic assessment would lead to in-depth learning and the application of knowledge. Assessment activity becomes meaningful, interesting and collaborative. Through authentic practice pupils can develop a greater range of learning attributes. They become more active learners using critical thinking, problem solving and metacognitive strategies.

Whether or not we use the idea of authentic assessment as a driver for our assessment practices, we would all agree that we want pupils to engage in meaningful and interesting activities. If our assessment practices sit within the learning process and enable pupils to work collaboratively to achieve more, then the assessment activity and the learning activity can combine to improve the quality of learning and cognitive development. 

Evaluating our practice

Once a decision has been made to rethink assessment, we need to revisit our aims and principles.

Do your aims and principles:

• Promote assessment as integral to learning and the shaping of future learning? 
• Promote high expectations for all pupils and ensure assessment places no inadvertent ceiling on achievement?
• Value and represent achievement for all pupils across the breadth and depth of the curriculum using a variety of approaches?
• Recognise that assessment needs to be constructive, motivate pupils, extend learning, and develop resilient, independent learners?
• Take account of how the expanding knowledge of the science of how pupils learn is changing modes of assessing what pupils know?

These principles are used by NACE members to audit assessment practice in their schools. Here we can see how the pupil is catered for within the process. We seek to help the pupil to become more resilient, resourceful and independent. We want both the pupil and the teacher to have realistic high expectations so that there is no ceiling on learning but also no undue pressure by praising the outcome over the effort. 

The assessment itself is integral to the learning process. The assessment shapes the learning and the learner. It guides the teacher’s practice and is dependent on a good understanding of both the curriculum and cognition. By rethinking assessment we can still achieve the endpoint measures but also go beyond this to create an environment for learning which nourishes and develops each individual.

Metacognition and assessment

If we are truly committed to using assessment as a practice integral to learning and as a learning tool for both teacher and pupil, we need a good knowledge of the curriculum, the connections between areas of learning, potential for depth and breadth of learning beyond the limitations of core curriculum, cognition and cognitive processes. When assessment practices enable pupils to develop metacognition and metacognitive skills, they will be able to respond well to new experiences and learning.

Dunlosky and Metcalfe (2009) describe three processes of metacognition: knowledge, monitoring, and control.

• Knowledge: understanding how learning works and how to improve it.
• Monitoring: self-assessment of understanding, 
• Control: any required self-regulation.

I would argue that rethinking assessment should be driven by our increased understanding of metacognition. Self-assessment skills sit at the heart of metacognitive competencies. If we view metacognition as “thinking about thinking” or “learning about learning” we can then see that the pupils need answers to some questions.

• What should I be thinking about? 
• What do I need to know? 
• Am I understanding this material at the level of competency needed for my upcoming challenge?
• What am I trying to learn?
• How am I learning?
• Do I need to change my focus?
• Do I need to change my learning strategy?

Self-assessment is a core metacognitive skill that links understanding of learning and how to improve it to the development of self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is a person’s belief in an ability to succeed in a particular situation. Self-efficacy is the product of experience, observation, persuasion, and emotion. If pupils learn to monitor their developing competencies and control their cognitive strategies, they will be able to organise and execute the actions needed to respond to new learning experiences. 

Next steps for teachers and leaders

All schools, regardless of outcomes, will review and evaluate practice each year. As a part of this it is important to revisit assessment practices within the classroom, across subjects and phases and at a whole-school strategic level.

Within the classroom the teacher can begin by imagining small changes which can lead to a better learning experience and a greater impact on learning and metacognition. These changes might include:

• Changes to recall practices with acquired vocabulary or knowledge being used in different contexts;
  
• Organisation of collaborative learning groups where understanding can be observed through pupils’ interaction;
• Pre-planned “big questions” and extended questioning which challenges understanding;
• Independent research, challenges or project work;
• Changes to feedback and response activities;
• Use of entry and exit tickets;
• Use of “cutaway” learning models;
• Pupil-led diagnostic responses;
• Pupil self-selected challenge and extension activities;
• Whole-class marking, feedback and active response.

Many of these are possibly in use at present but they have greatest impact when planned within the lesson structure and used consistently so that teachers and pupils share an understanding of learning and learning potential. When planning within a subject or phase, a strategy which is shared between teachers and understood by pupils will reap the greatest rewards. If pupils know what they are doing and why they are doing it, they will recognise the importance of the activity. When activities combine cumulatively to improve knowledge, learning and understanding of both subject and self, then pupils will make the greatest gains.

The preparation for endpoint examination then appears in the final months of study, when the format of the testing is explained, shared and practised; not to increase knowledge and understanding, but to secure outcomes. Pupils will be able to approach this preparation, as they would any testing or competitive situation, as training and warm-up for the final event. Their education as a whole having been confident and secure, they will approach this new challenge with a sense of purpose and self-belief.

So how then can leaders manage a whole-school strategy? This can often prove an obstacle when planning to make change. Leaders must know how well pupils are progressing, how well the curriculum is being delivered and the quality of teaching in the classroom. This is where school ethos, aims and principles are important. By agreeing a model for assessment practice which does not overload teachers but provides evidence of the quality of education, leaders can themselves adopt the same assessment and evaluation models as they use in their classrooms. 

When teachers all work towards a common and agreed framework for curriculum, teaching, learning and assessment, pupils do not need to be tested to measure teacher performance. High-quality professional development, dialogue and collaboration supports high-quality practice. Good-quality systems provide the narrative which expose the quality of learning and performance within the school. It is the responsibility of school leaders to create a narrative which can be evidenced through consistency of belief and practice in all classrooms. The conversation then returns to learning and teaching and individual pupils’ needs or aspirations rather than numeric data tracking.

Whatever style of data tracking and targets a school chooses to use, it is important to keep the pupils and their learning at the centre of the conversation.

Taking steps to rethink assessment

The NACE “Rethinking Assessment” R&D Hub is supporting teachers and leaders to take a small step in making a change in practice. The Hub supports those wishing to plan a small-scale project through which they can evidence the impact of change. Here we can see how activities which may be evident in other schools can be trialled over a short period of time so that their true impact can be observed. Teachers and leaders participating in the Hub are engaged in a variety of activities as they seek to rethink assessment practices in their classrooms and schools. These include:

• Improving pupils’ understanding of assessment by providing greater guidance;
• Enabling pupils to respond well to questions which have greater stretch and challenge;
• Make better use of feedback and individual response activities;
• Reconfiguring the sequence of assessment so that there is a more coherent structure;
• Developing assessment strategies for project-based learning which enable pupils to challenge themselves and extend their knowledge; 
• Making use of “what if…” questions and developing teachers’ skills in new ways of assessing the responses;
• Refining the language of feedback so that pupils can extend and deepen thinking;
• Updating marking and feedback policies and strategies so that there is a whole-staff appreciation of effective practice;
• Improving the use of disciplinary language within teaching, learning and assessment;
• Planning assessments within a metacognitive model.

The ideas proposed for rethinking assessment in all these schools build on existing good practice. Teachers have examined the context within their schools and evaluated the impact of current practice. From this they hypothesised on elements of practice which could be improved, replaced or refined. They are now seeking to enhance existing good practice to meet the aims and principles as discussed. Regardless of your position in the school it is possible to revisit your assessment practices.

Share your experience with others

• Do you routinely use an assessment practice or approach which helps you to assess, monitor or evaluate learning well? 
• Do you have a good assessment strategy which you can share which enables pupils to learn well or helps them to improve their performance? 
• Do you have some advice for others which you can share?
• Can you describe some changes to classroom assessment practices which have improved learning?
• Can you share a whole-school assessment strategy which has made a difference in your school?

If you feel you can add to the conversation, please contact us so we can help to share your successes with the wider NACE community.

References

• Black, P. J., & Wiliam, D. (2009). Developing the theory of formative assessment. Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability, 21(1), 5-31.
• Broadfoot, P. M., Daugherty, R., Gardner, J., Gipps, C. V., Harlen, W., James, M., & Stobart, G. (1999). Assessment for learning: beyond the black box. Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge School of Education.
• Dunlosky, J. & Metcalfe, J. (2009). Metacognition. Sage Publications Inc., Thousand Oaks, CA.
• Gulikers, J. T., Bastiaens, T. J., & Kirschner, P. A. (2004). A five-dimensional framework for authentic assessment. Educational technology research and development, 52(3), 67-86.
• Litchfield, B. C., & Dempsey, J. V. (2015). Authentic assessment of knowledge, skills, and attitudes. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 2015(142), 65-80. 

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

• A. Stott, Introduction to the Oracy Benchmarks, 2019
• W. Millard, L. Menzies, G. Stewart Oracy after the pandemic: what Ofsted, teachers and young people think about oracy, 2021 
• Voice 21, Understanding Oracy, 2022
  

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

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:

1. Promote purposeful dialogue about thinking in the classroom;
2. Provide challenge;
3. 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:

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

• EEF, Teaching and Learning Toolkit
• EEF, Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning Guidance Report
• Hunter Maats and Katy O’Brien, Hands-Off Teaching Cultivates Metacognition
• metacognition.org.uk