Training

Training to address literacy areas identified as priorities in individual school development plans, incorporating an action research approach: engaging staff in tracking and evaluating impact, compiling reflections on evidence for their professional learning passports.

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Oracy

Improving the quality of oracy by:

  • Developing a stimulating and creative learning environment for developing listening and speaking skills and behaviours
  • Providing structured support and assessment to ensure the progress of skills development and independent application
  • Creating a clear purpose and authentic audience for listening and speaking
  • Fostering positive listening and speaking identities in all children

Focus areas

  • Developing pupil awareness of audience situation and purpose, both academic and social, when making choices about listening and speaking behaviours
  • Verbal and non-verbal interaction
  • Providing structured support through modelling, sharing, guiding and applying skills across the curriculum
  • Developing a repertoire of pupil practices to enable effective communication to suit different social contexts
  • Using a using a broad range of good models to deconstruct in order to identify key features for use in listening and speaking
  • Developing self-assessment, awareness of and empathy for others.

Improving progress in reading by:

  • Embedding a reading for pleasure culture
  • Accurate diagnostic assessment and monitoring of reading skills
  • Explicit teaching and embedding of higher order reading skills through a variety of approaches across the curriculum
  • Teaching reading strategies to develop pupil self-monitoring and understanding of texts
  • Fostering positive reading identities and enjoyment of broad ranging texts in all children

Focus areas

  • The use of modelled, shared, guided, reciprocal, paired and individual reading
  • Information retrieval, deduction and inference, summarising, evaluating, vocabulary enrichment, research skills, understanding of authorial intent
  • Increasing fluency and pupil independence
  • Increasing teacher and pupil knowledge of a wider range of high quality texts
  • Creating a social reading environment to enable pupils to explore and discuss texts in greater depth and with enthusiasm and empathy.
  • Extending definitions of reading in the 21st century to encompass digital formats.

Improving the quality of writing

(using Talk for Writing and First Steps approaches) by:

  • Developing a stimulating and creative learning environment for crafting texts
  • Providing structured support and assessment to ensure the progress of skills development and pupil independence
  • Creating a clear purpose and authentic audience for writing
  • Developing understanding of author technique
  • Fostering the enjoyment of writing

Focus areas

  • Writing strategies, explicitly related to reading, taught through modelling, sharing, guiding and applying in meaningful contexts: connecting, comparing, self-questioning, predicting, determining importance, creating images, synthesizing, paraphrasing, summarizing, using memory aids, using visual memory, using analogy, using research, using spelling generalisations, extending vocabulary, correct grammar and punctuation
  • The writing process: planning, drafting, conferring, revising, editing and proof-reading, publishing
  • Crafting a range of text forms – using a broad range of good models to deconstruct in order to identify key features for use in writing.

Further bespoke support

Text-centred approach

  • Collaborative planning for cross-curricular oracy, reading and writing, centred on selected high quality picture books and texts to dovetail with the curriculum.

Teachers as writers

  • Looking at pupils’ work with their teachers to discover problem areas and how to address these effectively through teacher modelling and shared crafting of sentences and paragraphs to produce cohesive, high quality texts.

Literacy Intervention Course

The literacy intervention course Accelerating Literacy Learning aims to train Learning Support Assistants, NNEBs and/or support teachers to accelerate the literacy learning of pupils who are falling behind the expected level for their age.