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- Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
Literacy? That's someone else's job, isn't it? This is a book for all teachers on how to make explicit to students those things we can do implicitly. In the Teachers' Standards it states that all teachers must demonstrate an understanding of, and take responsibility for, promoting high standards of literacy, articulacy, and the correct use of standard English, whatever the teacher's specialist subject. In The Secret of Literacy, David Didau inspires teachers to embrace the challenge of improving students' life chances through improving their literacy.
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Praise for The Secret of Literacy
This book needed writing. Literacy, the quoin of education, has frequently been assumed, glossed over or ignored. Threaded through our personal and professional lives, it takes a brave soul to unpick it, unpack it and sort it. And that’s what David Didau has done.
I was talking to my daughter about why I was so impressed with this book. I was telling her about how, when he has asked his students to write, Didau writes too. ‘Wow, that’s amazing. Really powerful!’ was her reply. And indeed it is. And that’s what characterises this book. Beyond the sensible critiques of theory, the detailed examples for making literacy work at every level, is a man walking the talk.
One example: he makes the case that finished work often doesn’t show the blood, sweat and tears that have gone into it. And he describes some of the blood, sweat and tears that have made him the master practitioner he is. Less than helpful feedback from an observation, his response to it and his nuanced practice in relation to, for example, teacher talk. Another example in this vein: a group of NQTs observing one of his lessons where students are responding and challenging one another. And he is on the sidelines, with just the odd bat thrown in. Otherwise, they are just getting on with it. High quality conversations about their learning. But, as he says, this was not particularly helpful for the NQTs because they had not seen the struggles and the practice to get the students to this place. The point about this is that there are no easy, off-the-shelf answers. What there is, is practice, on the right things, continually refined.
Another example: modelling. Students critique his work alongside theirs. And in a mixed ability group how does he make sure that lower attaining students are getting the most out of it? Beautifully. He has them working alongside him as teacher’s assistant. He also manages to get the reluctant to get involved too. Not by forcing them. But cracking on with it anyway.
There is so much here. He makes the case for difficult, compelling texts, brimming with knowledge. And these are opened up through scaffolding and skilful questioning. There’s an incisive critique of low level scaffolding tasks. And this sets the scene for learning, which is characterised by high impact and low threat, and gets to grips with stuff that really makes a difference to the acquisition and love of language. It is sophisticated stuff, but it is also elegantly simple. Anyone reading this book and using any one of the things Didau discusses, would become a better practitioner.
One of the most powerful things for me was the realisation that some of our students who have pupil premium funding actually need some of the additional intervention and rich support which is now provided to EAL students on the best programmes.
And all of this is referenced against some serious thinkers and bloggers: Vygotstky, Dweck, Berger, Willingham, Hirsch, Robinson, Curtis, Kirby.
And he makes the case for the lower profile aspects of literacy – there’s a very good summary of Robin Alexander’s distinction between social and cognitive talk. And that means high quality talk from the teacher. There is a beautiful example of the pose, pause, pounce and bounce. If every teacher, in every school, across the country read page 77 and did this once a week, then progress, achievement, motivation, love of learning, all the cliches would increase. Guaranteed. How could they not? Really important that he paused on the pause and reminded us of the importance of thinking first before getting those ideas out.
And he holds us to account, too, in terms of the contribution our own language has on expectations. Shifting from clauses that include ‘but’ and replacing them with ‘and’. I’m not going to say more, because it’s important people read the book for the impact this shift has. At its heart, our role as professionals must be to open the door to academic games (in the Wittgensteinian sense), not dodging the difficult. And he shows how to embrace etymology. If this sounds daunting, in Didau’s hands it isn’t. There’s the potential for masses of play here. In my experience all students of all abilities and backgrounds love this aspect of language development. Light years away from peeling posters of technical vocab on the wall.
It was good to see that he had also included the importance of high quality school libraries. There’s only one aspect which I think could be developed further and that is the auracy dimension of literacy. The poorest of poor relations. He does explore it, but I think there is the potential for more. But given the man’s genius at unpacking the rest of this essential entitlement for all students, it would have been a corker. In fact he’s probably got another book in him about this.
The bottom line is that this book not only makes literacy explicit, it brings it to life in all its spirited messiness. My father, dour Scot, head of English in Peckham, word-monger of the first order, would have loved it. Can’t think of higher praise.
Mary Myatt advises, writes and inspects, www.marymyatt.com
As an avid reader of David’s brilliant blog I was really excited to read his new book. I wasn’t disappointed! In his inimitable style, David manages to enliven and illuminate literacy, making what is a potentially tricky topic accessible and downright intriguing. He distils a shed-full of research and combines this with practical pedagogy.
David puts the compelling argument that literacy is not a bolt-on job for English teachers, but it is, rather, a fundamental aspect of great teaching in every lesson for all teachers. He dispels some enduring myths and establishes a clear, usable methodology that all teachers can instantly understand and apply in the classroom. There is a fantastic array of practical ideas and sharp insights which will mean this book is a great addition to the library of all teachers.
Every teacher should pick up this book – just watch out if you are a PE teacher!
Alex Quigley, subject leader of English and assistant head teacher, Huntington School, York
The Secret of Literacy is an essential book for all teachers and school leaders. It is not just another literacy book. David Didau provides a crystal clear rationale for all teachers taking responsibility for developing literacy in their specialist areas, with lots of very practical ideas, drawing on a range of sources from blogs and the latest literature on the issue. Anyone familiar with David’s own superb Learning Spy blog will immediately recognise some of his most powerful ideas and his inimitable style: it is witty and accessible, grounded in the reality of everyday classrooms, but also conveys a sense of urgency. This is a serious business and, as David highlights, too much of what we do in the name of literacy isn’t literacy at all. The book is challenging us to do better and shows us how. ‘Making the implicit explicit’ captures the key message, but The Secret of Literacy is more than a set of tools; it is a call to arms!
Tom Sherrington, head teacher, King Edward VI Grammar School, Chelmsford
David Didau’s book is everything a book about the work of teaching should be: clear-eyed, lively, wise and funny. Written by a front-line practitioner of the craft. And best of all, reading it will make you better.
Doug Lemov, managing director, Teach Like a Champion Team
For Rosie – the star to my wand’ring bark.
Acknowledgements
I’m painfully aware of teacher and basketball coach, John Wooden’s observation that ‘The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.’ There are an awful lot of great books on literacy already out there and, if you want to find out more, most of them are well worth your time.
For those of you determined to read it, this book is the culmination of all the research and planning I have put into thinking about and designing the kind of literacy policy I’ve always wanted to have in place: one that was simple, supportive and useful.
When I started my role as director of literacy and English at Clevedon School I had, shall we say, an incomplete understanding of what a decent policy might look like. If the ideas in this book are any cop, then it’s mainly down to such talented, thoughtful and generous practitioners as Geoff Barton, Chris Curtis, Joe Kirby, Kerry Pulleyn, Alex Quigley and particularly Lee Donaghy, who explained the ins and outs of genre pedagogy to me. I’m also indebted to Dee Murphy at Priory Community School for modelling how a decent literacy coordinator approaches the role. And while we’re at it, special thanks must go to John Wells and Jim Smith at Clevedon School for all their encouragement and for basically letting me get on with it.
I’m also extremely grateful to Caroline Lenton at Crown House for giving me the green light, Phil Beadle for being polite about it, Bev Randell for making sure everything ran smoothly and Emma Tuck for her considerable forbearance, and for making me look better than I am.
Special thanks must also go to Tom Fitton and Pete Jones for thrashing out the design of a cover that I actually liked. This was no mean feat.
Finally, I need to thank Chris McPhee at Teachology for allowing me to develop the ideas contained herein into something approaching coherence during a series of day courses, which some people kindly said they quite liked.
Contents
Introduction
For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
Shakespeare, Hamlet
This is not a book (just) for literacy coordinators or school leaders; it is a book written with every teacher in mind. In many ways, this is much more a book about teaching than it is a book about literacy and I very much hope that whatever and whoever you teach, you will find something useful within. But that said, I make no claims that it contains ‘the answer’ to teaching, or teaching literacy or anything else, merely that it contains some possible answers. It’s important to keep in mind there’s nothing that’s always going to work for every teacher in every context. Having said that, everything that I’ve included has been road-tested either in my own teaching or that of my colleagues and, to that extent, can be said to ‘work’. But don’t take my word for it: find out for yourself. Teachers are inundated with ‘how to’ manuals and this leads us to forget the importance of why. Whatever you decide to use, I’d urge you to think carefully about the why. What do you hope to achieve? Because there are no magic bullets. As long as you have approached what you plan to do with sufficient thought, it will probably work. If you haven’t, it probably won’t.
And therein lies a problem: a lot of literacy teaching is done unthinkingly. Perhaps the biggest barrier to teaching literacy well is the word itself. ‘Literacy’ is a bit off-putting, isn’t it? Yes, of course we all know what it means, it just sounds a bit too solemn and scientific. Primary schools were forced to get cosy with it after the introduction of the Literacy Hour back in the 1990s. Kids suddenly started having literacy lessons and you might think that this would have solved the problem of what exactly the word means, but as far as I can tell it’s only muddied the already murky waters. My own daughters are currently in Years 4 and 5 and appear to be taught a confusing combination of literacy, phonics and grammar. Quite how literacy has become distinct from phonics and grammar I have no idea, but it’s certainly the case that the very mention of the word stirs up anxiety about our lack of grammatical knowledge, and sounds unutterably and appallingly tedious. Few words demand demystification as much as this one. The problem, in a nutshell, is that ‘literacy’ sounds like it’s someone else’s problem.
One way to deal with the problem of the word is not to use it. Maybe we could stop thinking about embedding the teaching of literacy in our lessons. We could try calling it language, or maybe just plain old teaching and learning instead. Because it isn’t an optional extra. Developing reading, writing and oracy are (or should be) absolutely fundamental to every teacher’s approach to pedagogy; teaching pupils to read, write and communicate is not something special that you need to do on top of your job. It is your job! But more than that, the subject you teach, whether it’s science, geography, maths or, dare I say it, PE, has its own language. Your pupils will primarily understand your subject through reading or listening and primarily demonstrate their understanding through writing or speaking.
But that’s not really the secret I want to share with you. The real Secret of Literacy was unearthed by head teacher and literacy guru, Geoff Barton, after long years of tireless study and patient experimentation.1 He’s been generous enough to share it with me and, in turn, I want to entrust it to you because this secret is something rare and precious; once you know it, it will change everything. Your teaching will, quite simply, never be the same again.
The Secret of Literacy is … making the implicit explicit.
I can almost hear the groans of disappointment. It’s what?
Having waded through our degrees, we teachers are a fairly literate lot. Even you PE teachers have to write a dissertation, don’t you? (It’s not all running and catching, you know!) This means that, whether we know it or not, we have an implicit understanding of how to communicate successfully. We know how to speak in a variety of different social situations and we don’t ever have to think too much about how we actually do it, we just do it. But because we’ve never really had to think about how we communicate, this means that we’re often not very good at explaining to the uninitiated how to go about doing what we find (relatively) easy to do. Our problem is that we don’t always know how to make our knowledge explicit, so that others can do what we can do.
That, my friends, is where I come in. The greater part of this book is about providing you with simple, straightforward strategies which will enable you to make the implicit explicit, so that your pupils will have a greater chance of succeeding in a world where the ability to communicate in a variety of media is becoming more important.
The good news is that, as far as schools and teachers are concerned, there’s no such thing as literacy. Yes, you heard me. In a book on the subject, I’m contending that literacy is a meaningless chimera and should be consigned to the hell occupied by such evils as SEAL (Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning) and PLTS (Personal Learning and Thinking Skills). Just saying this is a wonderful catharsis. There is no such thing as literacy. There is just good teaching and learning.
This does, however, make the job of the literacy coordinator somewhat problematic because most teachers are crying out to know what it is they’re supposed to be doing, and just telling them it doesn’t exist is unlikely to go down well. This book is an attempt to show that ‘literacy as a thing’ is a bankrupt concept and ought to be avoided at all costs. The pernicious but worryingly prevalent idea of the bolt-on literacy objective and the content-free literacy activity needs to be taken out and shot at dawn. Instead, the secret I want to share with you is that teaching literacy cannot be usefully separated from teaching subjects. What that means is the knowledge of a subject is the language of the subject.
It’s useful to remind ourselves that beating our heads against a desk to produce resources which, if anyone ever bothers to use them, will make very little impact on pupils’ ability to communicate better, is an exercise in pointlessness. Instead, my approach to literacy is that it should have high impact on pupils but require low effort in terms of planning and implementation. Or, to put it another way, we should do the bare minimum required for all teachers to understand and be able to discharge their responsibilities as teachers of English.
What’s that you say? All teachers? Teachers of English? Nah, mate, you’ve got the wrong bloke. I teach [insert subject here], I do. You won’t catch me mucking around with no literacy in me lessons. That’s what the English department’s for, innit?
Well, I’m here to tell you that, contrary to some of the opinion bubbling in shadowy staffroom corners, improving pupils’ literacy is part of the professional responsibility of every teacher: ‘If you’re a teacher in English, you’re a teacher of English. We cannot give a lesson in any subject without helping or neglecting the English of our pupils.’2
The bad news for dissenters is that this simple piece of homespun wisdom is now enshrined in the Teachers’ Standards which clearly state that all teachers must, and I quote, ‘demonstrate an understanding of and take responsibility for promoting high standards of literacy, articulacy and the correct use of standard English, whatever the teacher’s specialist subject’.3
So that’s that. You’ve gotta do it. The Department for Education has fashioned a huge stick to beat teachers about the head and neck with. You will teach literacy, or else!
Despite the rumours, I’m not all about wanton bullying and striking fear into the hearts of PE teachers. (Before we proceed any further, I feel it’s important to make clear that PE teachers tend to take literacy teaching very seriously and are amongst the most enthusiastic, if not downright competitive, of all teachers in their desire to raise literacy standards. That said, they’re an easy target and I will continue to make cheap jokes at their expense.)
No, I see my mission as inspiring folk to understand why they should want to embrace the challenges of improving the life chances of the little blighters in our care. Because, let’s face it, whether you believe it’s all about exams or not, children’s life chances are only going to be improved by being literate.
But it’s not just that you should teach literacy; the bigger issue is that you are teaching literacy, whether you like it or not. The only question is: are you doing it badly or well? This means that at some point, in every lesson, you will be modelling how to read, write, speak or listen. And you’ll either be providing an admirable model, or you won’t. This being the case, surely it’s well past time to ensure that we’re doing our jobs to the best of our ability.
Ever since Ofsted upped the ante on reading and literacy, schools have been scrabbling around producing policies so as to be seen to be doing something. Anything. But, if what you do doesn’t show impact in the classroom then it’s a complete and utter waste of everyone’s time and effort. My advice, therefore, is to concentrate on those high impact, low effort strategies which will give every teacher the opportunity to show that they are teachers of the literacy that drives the content they are teaching. It almost goes without saying that the more you do for someone the less they value it and, conversely, the more someone does for themselves the more valuable it becomes. I’ve seen scores of literacy coordinators in schools all over the country who work their socks off producing reams of spelling starters, punctuation posters and grammar guides which no bugger ever uses. This simply cannot be a good use of anyone’s time. Much better to shift the emphasis onto equipping teachers (and therefore pupils) to do it for themselves.
Now, despite this harangue, you might be feeling that literacy really isn’t that important in your subject area and that, willing as you are, there really isn’t much scope to promote the correct use of Standard English in your average maths lesson. Well, you’d be wrong. In the vast majority of lessons, pupils are asked to read stuff and then write it down. And even in those where printed materials and pens are seldom seen (PE, again), there is almost always a requirement that pupils listen, if not speak. I defy you to conceive of a lesson that, deliberately, involves none of the above. You can’t, can you?
This means that every single lesson is a golden and unmissable opportunity to take responsibility for doing all that the Department for Education says you should be doing. And if you’re not actively teaching pupils how to better use the academic language they need to access your subject, then you’re ensuring that the gap between the haves and have-nots will only get wider.
Chastening, isn’t it?
1 Geoff Barton, Don’t Call It Literacy! What Every Teacher Needs to Know about Speaking, Listening, Reading and Writing (London: Routledge/David Fulton, 2013).
2 George Sampson, English for the English: A Chapter on National Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921), p. 25.
3 Department for Education, Teachers’ Standards (May 2012). Ref: DFE-00066-2011. Available at: <https://www.education.gov.uk/publications/eOrdering Download/teachers__standards.pdf>, p. 7.
Chapter 1
Why is literacy important?
It’s not (just) because Ofsted say so!
In the world of the current Ofsted inspection, few schools will quibble with the prominence being given to the teaching of literacy. But I’m far from convinced that we’re clear on precisely why teaching literacy is so important, beyond the fact that Big Brother is watching.
The effect of ‘affect’
For those of us fortunate enough to be literate, the whole idea of literacy in schools can seem bewilderingly overcomplicated. Something that comes to us as naturally as breathing can hardly require all the fuss and bother devoted to it, surely? Reading and writing can appear so straightforward that there must be something wrong with those who struggle.
But, if we’re able to resist the temptation to label those with poor literacy as somehow deficient and thus attribute biological or social causes for their shortcomings, we might have more of a chance of addressing some of the real issues. One of the most fascinating of these is the effect of affect. How we feel about a thing determines, in large part, how good we will be at that thing. The feeling of struggling with reading and writing can create a sense of searing anxiety. For the most part this tends to be portrayed as the result of failure: ‘We always describe anxiety as the cart, but it could just as easily be the horse. Anxiety could just as easily be a primary cause of failure rather than its result. It could, at least beyond the very initial stages of literacy failure, be prior to, rather than consequent upon, this failure.’1
When I was at school, I decided early on that I was bad at maths. I found manipulating numbers tricky and this made me feel stupid. When given a maths problem to solve I would become anxious, and the more anxious I became, the harder it was to concentrate on the numbers. It got to the point where I would feel that I was having a panic attack.
Unsurprisingly, I decided that it would feel far more comfortable not to try. And so I gave up. I spent the remaining years of maths lessons doodling, staring out of the window and generally avoiding doing any work. It was easier to give up and resign myself to being rubbish at maths than it was to deal with the crippling anxiety of making an effort and failing. Teachers shrugged and shunted me down the sets until I found myself largely untroubled and left to my own devices in the bottom set. My teachers’ expectations of me were as low as those I had for myself. Equally unsurprisingly, I got a D grade in my GCSE maths exam.
I didn’t care. I left school blithely convinced that I was bad at maths, and who needs to know any of that stuff anyway?
Some years later I decided I wanted to be an English teacher. No problem. I had a decent English degree and a variety of universities were happy to take me. Except that I needed a C grade in maths. I railed against the injustice of this and howled ‘why?’ at the moon before buckling down and enrolling in an evening class.
This was probably the single most difficult and painful episode I have ever endured. I wept bitter tears of frustration at the improbabilities of probability and almost tore out my hair at grid references. I just didn’t get it. Who was I kidding? There was no way I could ever pass the damn thing; I might as well give up. In my desperation, I even considered paying someone to sit the exam for me.
But something in me persevered. I got hold of some past papers and, with the help of a friend, did one of them every day for the month before the exam. If I started to bug out, I would just skip the question and focus on the ones I could do. And, as I got used to the processes of solving equations and translating shapes, my anxiety began to fade and I started to recognise that I could do it. On the day of the first exam I experienced a moment of pure joy as I realised that I knew the answer to every single question on the paper! I didn’t have to miss out any of them. The second paper didn’t go quite as perfectly but I was still pretty sure I’d done well.
When, a few months later, I went to collect my results I actually managed to feel disappointed that I had only got a B! This was back in the days when there was an intermediate tier for maths GCSE and a B was the highest grade it was possible to get. I can’t tell you how proud I felt. This was the first time in my life that I had accomplished something that I hadn’t found easy. It was, I realised after beginning my PGCE course, great preparation for the rigours of teaching.
Anyway, that lengthy and self-indulgent anecdote does have a point. There’s lots to infer about the importance of mindset, and it certainly taught me that I could achieve anything, if I was prepared to put in effort despite the discomfort of failing. But, more than that, it has allowed me to empathise with those pupils who ‘can’t do’ English. Although reading and writing have always come so easily to me, I know what it’s like to feel stupid and to believe that I can never get better.
Those who struggle with their literacy feel the same anxiety about their deficiencies as I did about mine. And my story is both a cautionary tale and a cause for hope. The debilitating anxiety felt by so many pupils when asked to read or write chimes so absolutely with my own experience: emotions affect performance. They affect the enjoyment of learning and they also affect the work we are able to produce. Obviously, this can also be a huge benefit: I have always got a huge kick out of studying language. Because I so actively enjoy reading and writing, my performance of these skills is also joyful.
The Matthew Effect
For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.
Matthew 13:12
In his excellent book, The Matthew Effect, Daniel Rigney sets out a stark message. He points out that, ‘the word rich will get richer while the word poor will get poorer’.2 There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, ‘while good readers gain new skills very rapidly, and quickly move from learning to read to reading to learn, poor readers become increasingly frustrated with the act of reading, and try to avoid reading where possible’.3 Who can argue with that? Few people persevere with something they find difficult and uncomfortable. No one wants to feel stupid, and struggling to read is guaranteed to make you look thick. If you’re literate you will gravitate towards literate friends. It comes as no surprise that ‘good readers may choose friends who also read avidly while poor readers seek friends with whom they share other enjoyments’.4 And these friendships make a difference. The more we interact with the word-rich, the deeper our own pool of words will be. Because, as Myhill and Fisher point out, ‘spoken language forms a constraint, a ceiling not only on the ability to comprehend but also on the ability to write, beyond which literacy cannot progress’.5 So, if our spoken language isn’t up to snuff nothing else will be either. This advantage means that those ‘who possess intellectual capital when they first arrive at school have the mental scaffolding and Velcro to catch hold of what is going on, and they can turn the new knowledge into still more Velcro to gain still more knowledge’.6
Success breeds success, and our confidence and enthusiasm will be bolstered, further stoking our expectation that we can succeed again in the future. When we struggle, we don’t consider ourselves to be failures. Instead, we’ll put this down to the complexity of a text. The more difficult a task, the keener we’ll be to attempt it, and our motivation becomes intrinsic.
But this is not the case for many. It’s all too easy to write off ‘kids like these’ as thick and having no hope of achieving anything. The pressure on pupils to be literate is enormous and failure is usually attributed to something inherent in a child. This kind of labelling and negative language is toxic.
This leads inexorably to the same learned helplessness I used to feel when encountering numbers. Interestingly, this ‘mathematics anxiety’ is well known and has been knocking about in academic literature since the 1970s. But ‘literacy anxiety’ hasn’t had the same kind of coverage.
And, as you’re no doubt aware, poor literacy results in some shocking statistics:
• One in six people in the UK struggle with literacy. This means their literacy is below the level expected of an 11-year-old.
• Seven million adults in England cannot locate the page reference for plumbers in a telephone directory.
• One in sixteen adults cannot identify a concert venue on a poster that contains the name of the band, price, date, time and venue.
• More than half of British motorists cannot interpret road signs properly.7
So there it is. We practise what we’re good at and we’re good at what we practise. If the problem starts with poor reading skills then so must the solution. As Robert Macfarlane says, ‘Every hour spent reading is an hour spent learning to write.’8 This is only becoming more pressing as increasingly ‘the digital world is centred around the written word’.9 As teachers we need to know that if we’re not explicitly addressing the needs of the have-nots, then the gap between the word-rich and word-poor will grow ever wider.
So whose fault is it?
Well, apportioning blame never really helps, but it’s interesting to note that at age 7, children in the top quartile have 7,100 words whilst children in the lowest quartile have less than 3,000.10 At this age we could argue that the main influence is parents. But one study shows that at age 16, one in twelve children have a ‘working vocabulary’ of around 800 words.11 Whose fault is that?
Could we be responsible? Even if we’re not, there’s no one else who can, or who will, help the word-poor. It’s up to us. But are we up to the task?
Anecdotally, I hear that many teachers struggle with their own literacy and, obviously, this will be a barrier in their roles as teachers of English. So, what to do? As professionals we have a duty to do something about our own standards of literacy. And clearly schools have a duty to provide training that helps address this problem. Ofsted say in Removing Barriers to Literacy that, ‘in the secondary schools where teachers in all subject departments had received training in teaching literacy … senior managers noted an improvement in outcomes across all subjects, as well as in English’.12 So this is about enlightened self-interest as much as anything else. Ofsted also say:
[S]chools need a coherent policy on developing literacy in all subjects if standards of reading and writing are to be improved. Even with effective teaching in English lessons, progress will be limited if this good practice is not consolidated in the 26 out of 30 lessons each week in a secondary school that are typically lessons other than English or the 70% or so of lessons in primary schools that do not focus on English.13
This would seem entirely reasonable. If you’re going to have a policy of developing literacy, why not make it a coherent one? And if pupils’ reading, writing and oral communication is only valued in 30% or less of their lessons then it’s little surprise if they’ve got the message that these things are not that important. It’s become clear to me that what we practise we get good at. It would never occur to me not to use capital letters when writing even the scrappiest of notes. I just do it. Likewise, when many of our pupils write formal essays, it doesn’t occur to them to use capital letters. Not because they don’t know how to, and not because they’re lazy. It’s because they’ve practised not using them and have become really good at it.
The O Factor
Depressing as it is to reduce such things to a checklist, I’m sure it will be of more than passing interest to most teachers to know what it is that inspectors will be looking to see in their lessons. Helpfully, Ofsted have published a list of what they’re looking for:
• Are key terms and vocabulary clear and explored with pupils to ensure that they recognise and understand them? Are they related to similar words or the root from which they are derived?
• Do teachers identify any particular features of key terms and help pupils with strategies for remembering how to spell them or why they might be capitalised (e.g. ‘Parliament’ in history or citizenship)?
• Do teachers remind pupils of important core skills – for example, how to skim a text to extract the main elements of its content quickly or to scan a text for information about a key word or topic?
• Do teachers make expectations clear before pupils begin a task – for example, on the conventions of layout in a formal letter or on the main features of writing persuasively?
• Do teachers reinforce the importance of accuracy in spoken or written language – for example, emphasising the need for correct sentence punctuation in one-sentence answers or correcting ‘we was …’ in pupils’ speech?
• Do teachers identify when it is important to use standard English and when other registers or dialects may be used – for example, in a formal examination answer and when recreating dialogue as part of narrative writing?
• Do teachers help pupils with key elements of literacy as they support them in lessons? Do they point out spelling, grammar or punctuation issues as they look at work around the class?
• Does teachers’ marking support key literacy points? For example, are key subject terms always checked for correct spelling? Is sentence punctuation always corrected?14
I have to say that this is setting the bar rather low. We can and should all be doing these things routinely. It helps to remember that if we’re not teaching literacy well, we’re teaching it badly.
Real solutions are as simple to identify as they are difficult to implement:
• If a pupil is struggling with literacy, assume that this is a combination of anxiety and learned helplessness rather than a deficiency.
• Have high expectations of all pupils – even those kids.
• Give pupils a taste of success at reading and writing. This involves making tasks hard enough not to be easy, but not too hard that they won’t be able to manage to complete them without minimal support.
• Make the implicit explicit: teach pupils the reading and writing strategies others take for granted.
This is all a lot easier said than done, but with an unswerving belief that intelligence is not fixed, and with deliberate practice and the power of positive language, it might be possible to alter the crippling anxiety many of our pupils experience on a daily basis.
Academic register: the language of power
Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope.
