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Posted By Elly Hayward,
15 November 2022
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Elly Hayward, Head of English at Pangbourne College, shares her reflections on achievable next steps to start making changes following an inspiring CPD session.
Like many of those working in schools, I’ve found getting back to face-to-face CPD with professionals and colleagues is brilliant. After recently attending NACE’s member meetup on the theme “Speaking up: developing oracy for high achievement”, I came away buzzing with ideas, keen to feedback and also plot and plan as to how to drive forwards this key skill at Pangbourne College.
But what’s the reality of actually doing that? How easy is it in our busy school lives to act upon and embed our newfound knowledge into our school culture? When’s a good time to broach a whole-school initiative and is that necessarily the first step?
Here are my musings on the matter and perhaps, even in the process of writing how I might go about this, I may find myself one step closer to realisation in my own school context.
1) Feedback to someone… anyone!
I used a department meeting to consolidate my thoughts from the day and to pass on some of the excitement that I felt about what I’d seen and shared. I also reflected on a lot of the good things that we are already doing in our department (always good to big up your department with what they are already doing well!). As an English Department, we usually find ourselves at the forefront of anything to do with presentations, debates, talking in public. And we do it pretty well. But what I also realised whilst feeding the information back was that I was sure that good things were happening elsewhere in the school – and that’s, perhaps, where to start.
2) Find some time.
I can hear your teacherly guffawing from here. Time is something we have precious little of and as not only a Head of Department but a working mum and wearer of many hats, I needed to be seriously realistic about where my priorities lie and what might actually be achievable.
Without taking the lead on a whole-school development strategy in one fell swoop, I thought smaller. Microscopic in fact. I can hear my line manager’s words ringing in my ears already: “Don’t take on too much… We all need to strike that balance between trying to do everything and doing less, well.” I would do well to heed the latter.
It’s not a question of whether improving students’ oracy skills will raise the attainment of all students; it was clear from the evidence presented at the NACE meetup that it will. Instead, the questions need to be: Does this align with whole-school strategies and development plans? What are the school’s priorities this academic year and next? What impact will this have in my context? And coming back to my first point, what are we already doing well?
3) Find out what’s already going on that’s good.
This is my next step and the point where I find myself now. My plan – as Chloe Bateman suggested in her presentation at the meetup (summarised in this blog post) – is to find out what’s already good in my school. I have an awareness (you’d hope so!) of what is happening oracy-wise in the English Department but I’m acutely aware that it is not just the job of the English staff to develop and promote good oracy skills. My intention is to send a survey out to teachers asking them to firstly outline what oracy is, as I’m not sure many label it as such, and give concrete examples of where they develop this skill in their subject.
4) Start with small wins.
This is something that is key to our department philosophy and my approach to many things. Sharing what is already being done to promote good oracy by finding those nuggets and celebrating them with colleagues before introducing more ideas for staff to possibly adapt into their lessons. This may take the form of delivering a session of CPD or a presentation at one of our academic meetings or INSET, or it may be as simple as sending out a short video of “Have you tried…?” ideas. Chloe shared some great advice about “enhancing our existing curriculum, rather than distracting from it.” I will certainly also be following up with some of the other ideas shared at the meetup – but one step at a time!
Even in writing down my thought process, I feel fired up again. My eye-line has risen just above the mire of lessons, marking, administration and school events to look at that bigger picture about making a long-term, significant change to the way oracy is perceived in our school and, ultimately, raising our students’ confidence and skills in communication.
Elly Hayward is Head of English at Pangbourne College. You can follow her on Twitter @PangCollEnglish
Feeling inspired? Explore NACE CPD opportunities.
Tags:
collaboration
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curriculum
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Posted By Jonathan Doherty,
15 November 2022
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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:
Read more:
Tags:
CPD
curriculum
language
lockdown
networking
oracy
pedagogy
professional development
questioning
research
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Posted By Rob Lightfoot,
12 July 2022
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NACE CEO Rob Lightfoot outlines NACE’s core research themes for 2022-23, and opportunities to get involved next term.
It’s been a difficult time for everyone as we moved out of Covid restrictions this academic year. The spring term was one of the most challenging for schools since the start of the pandemic, and we can only hope that – after a well-deserved summer break! – we can now really begin to refocus our energies on planning to meet the needs of learners going forward.
NACE research themes for 2022-23
It is early days as we begin to unpick the impact of the last two years for learners and school staff alike, but we have chosen to focus our research next year on two areas:
1. Oracy for high achievement: this strand will explore whole-school oracy strategies in the context of cognitive challenge, in addition to effective oracy practices for high-achieving classrooms.
2. Rethinking assessment: this strand continues our investigation of effective assessment practices in the classroom, across all phases of teaching, including assessment through questioning, dialogic discourse and improved oracy.
Get involved…
If the themes above sound of interest, you can sign up to participate in the 2022-23 NACE R&D Hubs programme. This will comprise a Hub on the two themes above, along with a third Hub focusing on cognitive challenge within the new curriculum for Wales. To learn more, register for the online launch event, taking place on Tuesday 27 September. Sign up here.
Registrations are also open for our first member meetup of the new academic year, “Speaking Up – Developing Oracy for High Achievement”, which will take place in Didcot on Tuesday 18 October. Sign up here.
And finally, next term will also see the launch of our new Challenge Award Ambassador Schools programme, which will be open to all schools who have been accredited with the NACE Challenge Award on two or more occasions. Further details coming soon!
I wish you all a relaxing and enjoyable summer break and I hope you get the chance to recharge your batteries ready for the new academic year.
Tags:
assessment
cognitive challenge
collaboration
CPD
enquiry
language
leadership
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oracy
professional development
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Posted By Keith Watson FCCT,
02 December 2020
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Dr Keith Watson, NACE Associate
I wonder how cognitively challenged you are feeling right now. I am, in a good way. Creating a new professional development course is always exciting but also challenging, particularly one that is full of relevant content. Using NACE’s newly published research on cognitive challenge to develop the programme for the Creating Cognitively Challenging Classrooms (4Cs) course, my first thought was how I, alongside my brilliant colleague Laura March, could do justice to the integrity of the findings? There is much to share, so how do we capture the learning in three meaningful twilight sessions? I feel like Eddie Jones, the England rugby coach, picking his back row for the next match. He has so many brilliant players to choose from, so who does he leave out?
The starting point is going back to key messages from the research. What do we learn about cognitive challenge from the NACE Challenge Award schools acknowledged in the publication, and how can we share practical examples from these schools to inspire and inform practice elsewhere?
The first point is to define cognitive challenge. NACE uses this term in reference to “approaches to curriculum and pedagogy which optimise the engagement, learning and achievement of very able young people” so that they can “understand and form complex and abstract ideas and solve problems”.
So how is this made visible in the classroom? The NACE report identifies three key strands:
- Curriculum organisation and design,
- Design and management of cognitively challenging learning opportunities, and,
- Rich and extended talk and cognitive discourse.
These three key pillars underpin the 4Cs course, but in order to make it useful for teachers, we need to translate the theory into meaningful classroom experiences that teachers can recognise and implement. Taking these in turn…
1. Curriculum organisation and design
It is vital that curriculum organisation is underpinned by the vision, values and ethos of the school. Schemes of work need to reflect this vision but also provide detail on what this means in practice for groups of pupils, including more able learners. Is the pitch designed to create challenge? If using a knowledge-based curriculum, how is this mapped out for more able learners who may be achieving beyond their year group peers?
2. Design and management of cognitively challenging learning opportunities
Cognitively challenging learning opportunities need to be planned for in terms of task design and also the management of the class. This includes tasks designed to develop ‘grapple’, where learners have to work hard to find solutions. But it is also important for teachers to consider how pupils are grouped for learning, when mixed-ability teaching is effective, and when other systems may be more effective for more able learners. Whole-class teaching that teaches to the top can be effective, but how is this whole-class teaching modified for the exceptionally able pupil?
3. Rich and extended talk and cognitive discourse
Rich and extended talk is a third pillar of the 4Cs programme, and can be developed through the quality of questioning. Teachers need to avoid an over-reliance on initiation-response-feedback that can limit deeper responses that generate new learning, not merely repetition of known facts (Alexander, 2000). Cognitive discourse prioritises explanatory, exploratory and cumulative talk and can, for example, be encouraged through the use of visualisers as a hook to support meaningful talk.
Plus…
In considering these three pillars of cognitive challenge in the classroom, attention needs to be paid to other current educational research in relation to more able learners. For instance, we need to ask questions about which elements of Rosenshine’s principles particularly apply to more able learners, and what role does direct instruction have for them? Just as we encourage our students to develop their own schema, we need to build our own schema as educators to make sense of new knowledge and perspectives. (For more on this, take a look at NACE’s new Lunch & Learn webinar series – exploring key areas of current educational theory and research, and their application for more able learners.)
While the principles of cognitive challenge in the classroom apply across all phases, the practical examples are often better understood through a more phase-specific focus, supporting teachers to develop their theoretical understanding of cognitively challenging classrooms and also extend their repertoire of teaching techniques in order to achieve this. For this reason, we have developed the 4Cs course with dedicated primary and secondary strands.
So much to consider and so much to explore. We are calling this the 4Cs course and of course, we foresee it being great!
Join the 4Cs programme…
Running in the spring term 2021, the Creating Cognitively Challenging Classrooms course is a series of three online twilight sessions, with dedicated strands for primary and secondary practitioners. The course will explore key themes from NACE’s research on cognitive challenge, with a practical focus and gap tasks between sessions to support delegates in applying the course content in their own school context. For those unable to join the live sessions, the recordings can be purchased instead. Full course details and booking. References and further reading
Tags:
cognitive challenge
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