NACE Associate Dr Jonathan Doherty shares key takeaways from our recent NACE member meetup on this theme.

The recent NACE meetup in Didcot brought together member schools to explore the theme of oracy for high achievement. This ties in with NACE’s current research into the role of oracy within cognitively challenging learning. 

The context

Oracy is at the centre of good classroom practice, since it is through quality communication and the use of talk and language that thinking, knowledge and understanding are developed. There is increased awareness of the importance of high-quality oracy education and its significance across academic, professional, cognitive, social and emotional spheres. While the case for oracy is strong, schools are still coping with the impact of Covid-19 and lockdown. Many young people experience isolation, and the past few years of limited exposure to conversations, everyday interactions and in-person classroom exchanges, have deprived many of opportunities for rich talk and spoken language development. Vulnerable students and those from economically deprived backgrounds have been most affected and this has brought fresh urgency to the issue, as schools move on from the pandemic and seek to address current challenges of closing achievement gaps and taking oracy education to the next level.

Summary of the day

Ahead of the member meetup, colleagues were invited to submit oracy-based questions that would be explored during the course of the day. Examples of these were:

• How can teachers implement effective strategies for oracy without dramatically increasing workload?
• How can we best develop oracy for the most able in mixed ability classrooms?
• What are interesting activities to help pupils improve their confidence when public speaking, among their peers and people they don't know?
• What approaches are most effective in promoting oracy in group work so that it is productive and benefits all learners? 

I opened the day with an overview of the research context for oracy. Oracy is certainly not a new issue (with its beginnings going back to 1965), but despite its recognition since then, the status of oracy in the architecture of our education system does not fully reflect its value and importance to young people’s outcomes in school and life. We looked at the case for oracy with reference to research literature in language, education and neuroscience, before explaining how the needs of more able learners can be met through inclusive oracy education and cognitive challenge. 

Haili Hughes, Head of Education at IRIS Connect and Principal Lecturer at the University of Sunderland, took up the theme of oracy and confidence-building in her presentation. She developed this with reference to oracy and metacognition and mental schema and showed, as one example, how the approach of dialogic teaching promotes oracy and academic self-concept. Her explanation of knowledge and cultural capital was very interesting and relevant. 

Rebecca Earnshaw, CEO of leading oracy education charity Voice 21, shared her organisation’s commitment to providing a high-quality oracy education for every child and the vision to empower young people to use their voice for success. She made links to mental health, oracy being a process and a product of learning, and drew upon a range of research – including the Education Endowment Foundation findings that showed that students taking part in language interventions make five months additional progress over a year and this rises to six months for disadvantaged students – to further substantiate the importance of quality oracy education in schools. The audience was treated to several practical activities on ways to embed oracy in the curriculum. 

An important part of member meetups are the school case studies. The final speaker of the morning was Chloe Bateman, ECF Lead Facilitator and History, Religion and Philosophy Teacher at Maiden Erlegh School, who shared the story of how the school has established a whole-school culture of oracy. You can read Chloe’s summary here.

Following a networking lunch, where colleagues certainly put their speaking and listening skills to good use, the afternoon was given over to speed-sharing, the part of the day which provides an opportunity for colleagues to share their experiences and ideas with peers. These important discussions provided a knowledge exchange forum for classroom strategies to develop oracy that have been effective. Some examples of the brilliant ideas shared in the speed-sharing were:

• Focus on language in discussions and how to build it up (Tina Stinson at Thornton College)
• Explicit teaching of oracy benchmarks and ways to achieve them (Michelle Ginty and Viviana Young at Salusbury Primary School)
• Frayer Model of teaching Tier 2 and 3 vocabulary (Olivia Cornwell at Central Foundation Girls’ School)
• Displaying key terms for the lesson on the board, teaching their meaning explicitly using call-and-response to aid pronunciation, and directing students to use them during ‘turn and talk’ activities (Amy Lloyd at Haybridge High School)
• Vocabulary Bullseye (Beckie New at BrookField School)

You can read more about the ideas shared on the day here.

Key takeaways from the day

• Addressing the needs of more able learners can raise achievement for a much wider group of learners in a school by increasing challenge for all. Considering the needs of more able disadvantaged learners is crucial to ensuring an inclusive and fair curriculum. (See NACE core principles.)
• There is strong research evidence for the importance of high-quality oracy education. This is supported by education, psychology, language studies and neuroscience research. The significant impact of oracy is across academic, personal and life outcomes.
• Self-confidence through purposeful practice of discussions about current affairs and wider issues builds cultural capital and confidence. A focus on oracy helps students express their thoughts and feelings in a more structured and approachable manner that will also build academic self-concept.
• Embedding oracy into school culture with deliberate and explicit teaching of speaking and listening supports student progress and achievement. Every school is different and it is essential to identify your school’s oracy needs. Providing for more able learners is about creating a curriculum which gives opportunities for all children to flourish. (See NACE core principles.)

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 in this blog 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 are interesting activities to help students improve their confidence when public speaking, among their peers and people they don't know?
• 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?

View the slides from the day:

• Dr Jonathan Doherty
• Haili Hughes
• Chloe Bateman
• Membership updates

Read more:

• 6 ideas to develop oracy in your school
• 7 steps to establishing a whole-school oracy culture 
  

Dr Chris Yapp, NACE Patron

First, may I say thank you and best wishes as the return to school starts. The process will be uneven and difficult. Over the last few weeks many of you have been experimenting with technology to try to maintain access to education for your students during the lockdown. I recently ran an online forum for a group of NACE members to discuss what they were doing. It was good to see good innovative practice in the schools involved, but also a willingness to share ideas and practice between individuals and schools.

I have been involved in technology in education for more than 30 years and reflecting on the NACE online forum discussion, I would like to offer some observations that I hope will help us all move forward to whatever the “new normal” may turn out to be.

The most important lesson for me is that the best way to develop teaching practice is through teacher-to-teacher communities of interest. Learning from peers about what works for them and adapting it to your own circumstances stimulates personal development and innovation. Tablets of stone from the great and good are at best blunt instruments.

Second, different teachers and different schools have for 30 years found themselves in quite different stages of development when it comes to using technology as a tool in teaching and learning. The crisis that we are living through gives us a chance to “level up” and enhance the profession to support our learners. It will not be quick, nor cheap.

A common mistake throughout the years is to believe that the children are so much more confident with the technology compared to the adults. Some teachers are reluctant to use technology for fear of looking foolish. Around five years ago I was in a presentation of a study on first-year undergraduates that came to an important conclusion: just because young people are very comfortable with technology, that does not mean that they are comfortable with learning through technology.

Learner confidence is best developed by thinking about “LEARNING technologies”, not “learning TECHNOLOGIES”. That is true for teachers too. My own experience is that three to five years’ experience is required for most teachers to develop full confidence in deploying technology as a learning tool, both in the classroom and increasingly beyond the school. That is why building teacher confidence lies at the heart of creating new practices that will be needed now and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

Let me illustrate part of that challenge, which came up during the recent online discussion.

My first schools conference on technology in learning was over 25 years ago, in Hull. With a local telephone company, Kingston Communications, despite being a poor city, Hull had better connectivity than elsewhere in the UK at that time. After my talk, a young primary teacher came up to me and gave me an example of what I had talked about. She had a shy eight- or nine-year-old girl who was nervous in class and sometimes difficult to engage. She had been off ill while they had been doing a project on a topic (from memory I think this was the Egyptians). The girl returned on the final day of the work. Much to the teacher’s surprise the girl volunteered that she had done the work while she had been off sick. The teacher asked if she could see it. The girl said sorry, it was on her home page. The teacher said that is OK, bring it in tomorrow. The girl instead offered to take the teacher to the library, which had a few internet-connected terminals. The teacher discovered a multimedia project of rich detail, beyond what she thought the girl was capable of, sitting on the girl’s home page in her dad’s work room. So, she asked if her parents had helped. She got a firm no. Her dad was a computer engineer and they had a significant set-up at home that the girl could use, while her dad was away. Her mother was not interested in computers.

The teacher had become upset because she saw it as her failing that she had underestimated the capability of this pupil and wondered how many others she had “let down”.

Over the years I have heard many similar stories. We had examples during the NACE online discussion. Online learning and online teaching are quite different. Some children thrive on the autonomy and others need much support, as is true in the classroom setting. You may have had surprises yourself recently or will encounter them over the coming weeks and months.

That is why I argue for building teachers as confident learners with technology as a precursor to students becoming confident learners. When you encounter such surprises: IT IS NOT YOUR FAULT.

To build teaching into a confident technology-ENABLED, not technology-driven, profession my takeaway message is that we need to build communities of teachers on- and off-line to share peer-to-peer the development of new and innovative practice at scale.

I hope as a patron of NACE to be able to play a part in your journey. Best wishes. Stay safe and well.

This article was originally published in the summer 2020 special edition of NACE Insight, as part of our “lessons from lockdown” series. For access to all past issues, log in to our members’ resource library.