Oracy Talking Points

 

                                                           Oracy Talking Points

Having recently attended one of Voice 21's Open Learn online courses, I decided to develop some Oracy Talking Points. The lovely Voice 21 presenter, Rachel Dove @Dove1R, mentioned how in one Primary school teachers decided to add Oracy Talking Points around the corridors, in the canteen and across classrooms for students to discuss open questions on general topics. 

This got me thinking... 

How can we adapt this concept for Secondary schools? 

The aims of Oracy Talking Point posters would be to:

1.  Develop our KS4 students' subject specific knowledge - aiding memorisation.

2. Enable non-subject specialists (including KS3 students) the opportunity to address universal concepts within these chosen set text quotes/statements.

How can this be done? 

1. Choose quotes/statements from our set texts. 

2. Provide a basic definition/explanation/summary for non-subject specialists to invite them into a conversation about the subject specific talking point (quote/statement). 

Examples for English Literature include: 

Further possibilities:

We can challenge our students by encouraging them to provide their alternative definitions/interpretations of the quote/statement's meaning(s). 

We can challenge students to add a missing quote/statement to one of these slides as a form of retrieval.

We can add QR codes with links to a video clip of a related event for revision purposes. 

We can minimise these slides into small cards for students to revise from. Or we could display these into an oracy corner in the classroom as an extension task. 

The list of possibilities are endless. 

Work is underway on the development of Oracy Talking Points across our school. 

Will update you all accordingly. 

Enjoy access to these PPT slides here. 

What is VIPERS? What's active reading? How can we develop our students' independent reading skills?

 

What is VIPERS? 

It's a good place to start when addressing the transition between KS2 and KS3 reading skills and beyond! 

We adopted VIPERS from The Literacy Shed Blog  a few years ago as a result of my visit to one of our feeder primary schools. 

Our key aim is to consider how we can build on and address any gaps in our students' active reading skills from KS2 to KS3 and beyond. 

VIPERS seemed a good place to start to introduce students to some of the reading reflection questions an active reader goes through whilst reading actively. 

So I collated various question stems from Rob Smith's fantastic website and free resources (thank you, Rob!) into the following slide for our students to formulate their own active reading questions. 

We know there are millions of possible reading reflection (active reading) questions out there. 

But why not start with a consistent and comfortable number of reading questions/skills?

Once VIPERS is consistently applied (through teacher modelling and peer modelling) the habit of actively reading will become automatic. In turn, we will have reflective readers who interrogate a text and develop their own critical opinions. Imagine: our passive readers transforming into independent active readers because of the VIPERS foundation in active reading. 

Our active readers (students who stop and question what they are reading and have read) seemed to be far more engaged with whatever it was they were reading. 

On the other hand, our passive readers would simply read passively not knowing how to (or simply not try to) question whatever it was that they were reading. With this passive reading habit in mind, VIPERS is a logical way of demonstrating to our passive readers the sorts of questions they should be asking themselves as they read a variety of texts in English and beyond. 

As a result, I piloted VIPERS with my KS3 classes as a differentiation tool for our struggling passive readers. 

It started to increase the engagement of our passive readers with our set texts.

Students started to be pleasantly surprised with their recall of what they read (knowledge) and more importantly they were confidently voicing their opinions, providing predictions and summaries of the various texts read! They were volunteering their opinions without being asked to do so. 

Having received positive verbal feedback from my KS3 classes, I decided to roll it out with my KS4 classes. For example, my Year 10 class enjoyed actively reading Macbeth using VIPERS as one of their active reading toolkits. They explored the vocabulary, made inferences, made predictions and not always in that order. They  challenged themselves and developed their own active reading reflection questions (Socratic Seminar questions). This naturally fed into their developing oracy skills as we are aspiring to become a Voice 21 School (second year training with Voice 21). 

Students were proud of their active reading skills. I was then asked by my class why other classes were not actively reading. Good question! 

This is when I made the decision to introduce VIPERS to my department and explore their views. 

Our English team appreciated that it was a simple way to make the implicit explicit for our students when reading. We obviously use an array of active reading questions/skills as teachers but are students able to identify those active reading skills and explain their differences?

 Are students able to check if they've used those active reading skills effectively whilst exploring an unseen text independently? 

Making the implicit explicit: active reading using VIPERS. 

We live model to our students how to actively read and encourage students to use VIPERS as their active reading toolkit (and challenge them to go beyond those questions too!). 

VIPERS cards for group discussions  of a quote, extract or chapter. 

VIPERS has been used to support students with their exploration of poetry. 

VIPERS has also been introduced as part of our students' library lesson records: 

Here's an example of our of our EAL Year 7 students using VIPERS library lesson record:

VIPERS questions stems have also been introduced as part of our students' D.E.A.R Drop Everything and Read Time with their form tutors at form time once a week. 

VIPERS and parental engagement

As part of Year 7 Parents' Evening we sent out to parents a copy of the VIPERS handout below to use with their child at home for active reading. Parents responded positively to the resource and we happy to use it. 

VIPERS and disciplinary literacy

This year I was provided with the opportunity to run a reading group and yes, you guessed it! 

This staff group was presented with VIPERS as a source of inspiration for departments across our school to start considering how they develop subject specific reading skills (an example of the multifaceted nature of disciplinary literacy). 

We also questioned how we ensure that our students are reading a wide range of texts beyond their set texts and school library lesson books. 

Our Active and Wider reading group resulted in us sharing some fantastic research on reading from the brilliant @AlexJQuigley   and EEF's Improving Literacy in Secondary Schools. I also drew inspiration for these sessions from @MrMPritchard's Slough Curriculum Continuity Literacy project (@DLContinuity) which sees a number of Slough cross-phase schools work together to promote disciplinary literacy.

VIPERS is not a whole school reading strategy. 

However, it is a good place to start conversations with departments to ask teams: how are students expected to read in your subject? How do they actively read like a Scientist? How do they actively read (and widely read) like a musician? 

The main question was... what it your subject's reading strategy? How are we modelling to our students how to actively read in each subject? 

This is what our Music Curriculum leader has developed as a result of considering how to model the act/skills involved when reading music. 

Computer Science VIPERS 

I will be sharing more details about our reading journey and thank you for having taken the time to read this information! 

VIPERS has started our adventure into the world of active and wider reading for our school.

Active reading seems to be in line with what Ofsted are calling Comprehension Monitoring. That's what we continue to explore.  

#VIPERS #activereading #widerreading #comprehensionmonitoring 

 

Exam starter tasks

Please find below some starter tasks that focus on exam skills for Language and Literature GCSE papers.

You can download these starters here. 

Whole School Literacy Strategies

               Don't raise your voice. Improve your argument! 

 As Literacy leader, I continue to adapt and improve our literacy across the curriculum strategies.

Before I became a literacy leader, we had a list of WOW words for students to go through each week with their tutors.

We also had an ERIC (everyone reads in class) session once every half term which would replace any subject specific lesson that they were timetabled to have. This involved students reading a news article and applying Language Paper 2 style questions to them in order to develop their ability to infer, compare and summarise.

 Nevertheless, students were not memorising the WOW words as there were too many to go through each tutor time (six words a week). Some teachers were uncomfortable with delivering an ERIC session instead of their timetabled subject once every half term. 

Therefore, some updates were required. These are the following literacy updates/initiatives I decided to roll out at our school.

Step 1. One word each week and a Talk for Writing style template (inspired by Twitter #teamenglish) encouraging students to consider the context of each key word. 

Step 2. Having collected staff feedback on literacy, I developed writing/oracy tasks for tutors to choose from in order to allow students an opportunity to use the WOW in their own discussions and writings. 

Step 3. I updated the ERIC lessons into Literacy Days. Literacy sessions delivered by English specialists. We are lucky enough to have a Writer in Residence to deliver these Literacy Days where we focus on creative writing, grammar skills, improving transactional writing and improving our oracy skills. We will also look to invite external speakers and authors to deliver their views on the importance of literacy in the next academic year.

Our literacy days took place in the main hall with one year group on a set day. Students completed activities in group tables after an initial assembly style lecture on research connected with the importance of literacy. Shocking statistics to really get the message across that literacy matters!

We decided that each year group at KS3 would get two literacy days across the year to give students a chance to demonstrate their progress through the use of a Literacy Passport. We developed subject specific literacy passports in order to ensure that every teacher (and student) understood that literacy is important across our school and beyond. Each department developed their own Year 7 literacy passport page for their subject. An example page from our Drama department can be seen below:

A challenge we identified was maintaining momentum over the importance of completing literacy passports (amongst our students) and encouraging tutors to provide the WOW session every single week.

 Step 4.
Therefore, I decided on recruiting literacy leaders from KS4 in order to model to the rest of the school our high literacy expectations. These students were chosen due to their brilliant attitude towards learning across the school and most importantly due to their solid literacy skills. Initially, they were involved in supporting our literacy days with leadership over particular group tables. Thereafter, I decided to give them the responsibility of completing WOW learning walks once a term to gain an insight on the quality of WOW teaching and learning.

Step 5.
We also ran literacy lunch celebrations as our literacy leaders selected student winners based on the quality of their participation during our literacy days. We have now completed our KS3 literacy days for this academic year with the following slogan: don't raise your voice. Improve your argument. This was an oracy based literacy day inspired by https://www.voice21.org/

This has been the first year of many literacy changes.

We are excited about the future of literacy at our school.

Retrieval of prior learning and the development of oracy skills

Noticing a remarkable difference (of confidence, structure and poise) between some of our students' presentations skills, I decided to dedicate my end of term lessons on developing our students' speaking and listening skills. Naturally, I couldn't help but add a Literature revision element to their lessons with respect to the number of quotes and set texts that they're expected to know very well. As a result, you'll find below a selection of some of the resources I developed with these objectives in mind.

Please click on the image in order to download the resources for yourselves. I would be grateful if you could tweet how your students have responded to these materials in future lessons (@3dimension1) in the new academic year.

The start of the lesson involved getting students to make a series of random links connected to current affairs.

Then links between characters from the same Literature set text.

 I decided to get our students thinking about links between different set texts so that they could get an  understanding of overlapping themes to help them with their revision.

Students were given the choice to write their speech (with the support of the template below) or to improvise their speech.

All in all, I can see how this strategy can be easily adapted to promote students' higher level thinking skills across all departments with the aim of simultaneously developing their oracy skills.

Please find the link to these resources here.

Change-O-Meter and the concept of structure in English Literature and Language

Thanks to @mrthorntonteach's Change-O-Meter idea on Twitter, my students are effectively engaging with structure in Literature texts. I've adapted his original idea (see below) for AQA Literature Section A Papers 1 and 2. I've added extracts for comparison for earlier on and later on in each set text and the students are responding to it really well. I will be uploading their responses later on today.

Here is an example for An Inspector Calls:

You can download a copy of the sheet for yourself from here: click here

I've also created one for Macbeth here. 

I can't wait to create some Change-O-Meters for Language Papers 1 and 2 too.

Thank you, Greg!

Memory retrieval Power and Conflict poetry tasks

Memory retrieval Power and Conflict poetry tasks

Currently, our KS4 students are revising their Power and Conflict poems and I hope this memory game will improve their recall of quotes.

Each image represents a short quote from one of our Anthology of poems. I've chosen to focus on three quotes from four poems with the deliberate intention of using the same images (with a variety of memory tasks) at the start of every lesson for a week. Our students love it!

Please find lesson 2's starter here. This time the images have been organised in columns with three poems from the same poem.

Here's lesson 3's memory starter:

Here's lesson 4's memory starter. This starter involves PowerPoint animations so that columns 1 appears independently first and then slides 2 and 3 and presented afterwards together.

All in all, I will continue to use this strategy for Power and Conflict quotes as well as Literature set text quotes.