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.

English Literature Macbeth Revision task

Thinking of the 'Combination drawing' game, I wanted to try and create an equivalent with GCSE English Literature revision in mind. Click on the image below for a copy of this resource. 

Instructions:

Students create their own exam style question for (AQA) Macbeth. They write down their names and fold/glue the AO1 question in order to keep it covered. Students then pass on the folded AO1 section to a different student in the class.

Student B has to write down everything they can remember about Macbeth for AO2 (quotes, events and analysis) and AO3 (context) without looking at the folded mock exam question.

Student C has the joy of revealing what the AO1 mock exam question was (by gently unfolding the AO1 section) and checking if any of the AO2/AO3 information is actually relevant to the essay question.

Purple Pen 
Student C's next task involves using  a copy of Macbeth in order to find relevant quotes for the essay question and relevant contextual information. Student C also has to cross out in purple pen any irrelevant quotes/contextual information. For homework, students have to write up their essay response to the essay question. 

Why did they use this activity?
1. Students understood the importance of using relevant quotes for their chosen exam question.
2. Students considered the importance of using relevant historical, social and political contextual information.
3. Clear formative assessment opportunity for the teacher to gain an insight into their students' knowledge of: the play, quotes and contextual information.
4. It's a kinaesthetic task which involves students moving around and looking forward to discovering what their question was all along.

The way forward? 
Next time, I'll add an extract to the AO1 section as it was quite difficult for them to formulate a question without the extract in front of them. However, for Set 1, not having the extract meant that students could decide (using purple pen) on the best extract for their question.

Power and Conflict poems and memory cards!

It's time for our students to take ownership of their learning. I've created these memory cards for my Year 11 classes to complete as a revision task.
Click on the image below to download your copy of the memory card sheets!