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.