Literacy and Oracy Strategy

The New Year is a time to reflect on past progress and set targets for the year ahead. Whether your goal is to sleep more, work less, exercise more, or drink less, we all have something in the back of our minds that we would like to focus on in 2025. But with c.80% of Brits abandoning their New Year’s Resolutions by February, the key to success is to break our goals down into easy-to-manage chunks and ensure that we regularly ‘check in’ to see how things are going.

Reflecting on our T&L Goals

For us in the Teaching and Learning team, one of our goals for the year ahead is to continue to roll out the School’s Literacy and Oracy Strategy to ensure we continue to develop excellent learners. So far, we have pushed forward with the following initiatives, which are beginning to bear fruit:

• Staff have added their current reads to their email signatures, which has helped put reading front and centre whilst also providing interesting conversation starters with pupils and parents. Some pupils have even followed suit, which is great to see.
• Glossaries and reading lists across Departments have been updated, with many staff using these for vocab tests, referring to them in their written feedback, and referencing them during the reporting cycle.
• Reading and/or research homework is becoming more common, particularly during professional pinch points when our workload increases. These tasks help to develop important literacy and research skills whilst also providing stretch-and-challenge activities.
• We are discussing oracy more explicitly as a School community, with pupils being given greater opportunities to discuss, debate, and present in lessons and beyond. 
• We launched our Drop Everything And Read initiative, which has been positively received by those who have implemented it, and there are lots more opportunities for this to be used across the School.

With only a term under our slightly tighter belts, we must continue to develop these initiatives further, embedding them across all our classes and thinking of ways to keep things fresh. This is something that the Literacy and Oracy Reps across the School will look to discuss in upcoming Faculty meetings, with some conversations having already taken place on INSET day.

Goals for the Spring Term

As we look ahead, there are several aspects of the Literacy and Oracy Strategy that we will work towards over the next two terms. Explore the ideas below and consider how you could implement them in your classrooms:

1. A Project Audit

As the projects within Learning to Learn are phased out ahead of its rescheduling to P0 in 2025/26, Rob Tanner will conduct an audit of project work across the School to check that pupils are developing these important skills in appropriate amounts. This audit will also allow us to embed consistent referencing styles across Departments, to offer greater clarity to pupils.

2. Note-taking and skim-reading strategies

Whether taking notes in lessons (Kiewra, 2002) or from reading (Chang & Ku, 2014), effective note-taking has been shown to improve student learning significantly. Likewise, getting trained in specific note-taking strategies can significantly improve the quality of notes and the amount of material pupils remember later (Boyle, 2013). So, what can we do to support our pupils in this area?

• Educate pupils on how to make effective notes

  • Use these resources from Learning to Learn (L6) to help you – which note-taking method works best in your subject? What OneNote structure is most effective for pupils?
  • Encourage pupils to dual code – I often say: “You have 3mins to make these notes look distinct from your neighbour’s” and will encourage pupils to use doodles, colour, and other formatting techniques to achieve this. Sharing the science behind Dual Coding will increase buy-in from pupils – see here
  • When starting a new topic, encourage pupils to reflect on their way of working and consider ways to improve their notes. Show examples of best practice and celebrate progress in this are through written comments and rewards.

• Integrate skim reading activities more explicitly into classroom and homework tasks

• Ideas could include:
• ‘Summarise this article in 100 words’
• ‘Write one word or phrase alongside each paragraph’
• ‘What is the big argument from the author and what are three smaller arguments?’
• ‘You have 5mins to read these pages and write down three points you could use in your piece of work … compare with your neighbour…’

3. Departmental Marking and Feedback Reviews

HoDs will be asked to focus on literacy as part of their departmental marking and feedback reviews this term, which should hopefully lead to the sharing of best practice and some interesting discussion points. To get ahead, consider the following three areas:

• Does your Department have a consistent approach to correcting SPaG? If not, then this could provide challenges for pupils from class-to-class and year-to-year. The importance of developing SPaG has been discussed extensively (see here) and so it is important that we flag any issues in pupil work and embed the correcting of SPaG into DIRT.

Circles, wiggly lines, and 'sp' provide quick, consistent, and effective feedback for pupils

• Do you provide further reading opportunities within each lesson/topic? This could be resources at the bottom of each OneNote page or specific reading homework every Half Term.
• Do you support pupils with their note-taking? This could involve written feedback, DIRT activities, the sharing of best practice, and/or providing scaffolds.

Scaffolded note sheets that accompany reading, a podcast, or a video, are helpful for all pupils

There are lots of CPD opportunities this term to support you in understanding and embedding these strategies; for example, a TLAG on questioning, a visit by Literacy reps from St George’s School, and a Journal Club focusing on reading engaging. As always, if you have an intervention that is working well or if you have any thoughts/questions, please comment below to generate a discussion.