ResearchEd Literacy - top takeaways

There’s much I enjoy about my work: the banter with students and colleagues, the fact that you get paid actual money for spending time reading and talking about poetry, those lessons where you are teaching material so palpably interesting and worth-knowing that you really can’t think of many places you’d rather be. 

There are other, less predictable dispensers of joy also - when students say funny stuff in essays (recent favourites: 1-  “...in Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘Fruitility’...”, 2 - “...Romeo and Juliet’s ‘star-cross-eyed lovers’...”, 3 - the ‘shepherd’s pipe’, as symbolically employed by a soldier in Stevie Smith’s wonderfully bleak dystopian poem ‘Come on, Come Back’ replaced with a reference to his being in possession of a “shepherd’s pie”); the fact that, after an intense working week, Saturdays function as an oasis of ‘getting life back’: of messing around with the kids, of leisurely cups of tea, of the same weekly debate with my wife over whether access to watching Match of the Day in bed really does merit the status of ‘a basic human right’, of seeing friends and (for me anyway) the opportunity to have a decent-length nap in the middle of the afternoon, sprawled snoring on the sofa, whilst the kids craft mines on the iPad and time ticks slowly on towards Monday briefing and it all beginning again.

In the light of this, giving up a precious Saturday to go to a Research-focused conference on English and Literacy was going to have to be pretty good. And I’m delighted to report that it really was. Here’s a fairly random selection of my many takeaways:

1 - We need to get better at the systematic teaching of vocabulary, in a way which is coherently aligned with curriculum content. We’ve been thinking about this a while - it’s a bit of a no-brainer in some ways: it’s clear that too many students don’t know enough words or ideas, so therefore we should teach them more words and ideas. The problems come with conceiving of how to structure and implement it, especially in a school of nearly 1900 pupils - where do you start? Fortunately, some fascinating work was shared by from Josie Mingay at Greenshaw - you can read about it here - which helped me to get a sense of how this can be attempted. Next steps for us then are to try to run a pilot with few year 7 tutor groups, in which we:

• identify what Tier 2 vocabulary they will need in upcoming lessons in a range of subjects
• use tutor time to explicitly teach these words, using the strategies shared by Josie
• see if it makes any difference to their ability to engage with the upcoming lessons and be successful

2 - We can still get better at teaching grammar, and sentence construction in particular. Our English team are pretty hot on this already, with ‘subject, verb, other’ well-established. We still have too many students who haven’t grasped it though, and James Murphy shared some approaches to developing fluency (based, unsurprisingly, on lots of structured practice) which we’ll uptake also. One element that stood out to me was the use of target setting - he pointed out that setting a target along the lines of ‘improve sentence accuracy’ was pretty useless - it needs to be more granular - ‘identify the subjects and verbs in the sentences you’ve written’ - smaller steps, leading to small victories, leading to steady progress.

3 - Still from James Murphy - this advice on more precise teaching of inference. There are three kinds:

• Logical inference - ‘I got up at 7 o’clock’ - therefore I was in bed before this.
• Probable inference - ‘I ate six sandwiches’ - I am hungry. I might be greedy. The sandwiches might be tasty. They might be small.
• Possible inference - ‘the man stood at the door for some time before knocking’ - multiple possible reasons - often used in literature to create mystery, engagement, engage imagination.

James suggested teaching these explicitly - I’ll do this with Year 11 on Tuesday.

I could go on - Ray Land provided real insight on threshold concepts and the emotional implications of learning, I met some great people, and enjoyed the rejuvenating spirit and atmosphere of the day. I feel that we’ve become increasingly used to this sort of thing over the last few years, but worth reminding ourselves that so many people being prepared to give up their time and share so willingly, purely in the name of helping each other to learn and improve, is pretty remarkable.

Huge thanks to all at Swindon Academy for hosting it, and to David Didau and Tom Bennett for sorting - I’m off for a nap.