thurrock literacy conference tuesday, september 23, 2014

Thurrock Literacy Conference

Friday, April 21, 2023

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GEOFF BARTONGEOFF BARTON::

Making an Impact with Making an Impact with LiteracyLiteracy

LITERACY FOR LEARNING

1. Why is whole-school literacy one of the most important things we can be doing?

2. How to achieve IMPACT?

3. How can we help learners in their reading?



• Nearly 40% of pupils make a loss and no progress in the year following transfer, related to a decline in motivation

• Pupils characterise work in Years 7 and 8 as ‘repetitive, unchallenging and lacking in purpose’

• “Year 7 adds so little value that actually missing the year would not disadvantage some children” (Prof John West-Burnham)

Why do we need it?



It’s an L&T thing

“Schools are places where the pupils go to watch the teachers working” (John

West-Burnham)

“For many years, attendance at school has been required (for children and for teachers) while learning at

school has been optional.” (Stoll, Fink & East)

‘Standards are raised ONLY by changes which are put into

direct effect by teachers and pupils in classrooms’

Black and Wiliam, ‘Inside the Black Box’


DOGS MUST BE CARRIED

ON THE ESCALATOR

Please don't smoke and live a

more healthy life


PSE Poster


Sign at Suffolk

hospital:Criminals operate in this area


ICI FIBRES

Churchdown parish magazine:‘would the

congregation please note that the bowl at the back of the church labelled ‘for the sick” is for monetary donations

only’



Why cross-curricular literacy?


The literacy context ...

•A 1997 survey showed that of 12 European countries, only Poland and Ireland had lower levels of adult literacy

•1-in-16 adults cannot identify a concert venue on a poster that contains name of band, price, date, time and venue

•7 million UK adults cannot locate the page reference for plumbers in the Yellow Pages

BBC NEWS ONLINE:

More than half of British motorists cannot interpret road signs properly, according to a survey by the Royal Automobile Club.

The survey of 500 motorists - conducted to mark the 70th anniversary of the publication of the Highway Code - highlighted just how many people are still grappling with it.

According to the survey, three in five motorists thought a "be aware of cattle" warning sign indicated …

an area infected with foot-and-mouth disease.

Common mistakes

•No motor vehicles - Beware of fast motorbikes

•Wild fowl - Puddles in the road

•Riding school close by - "Marlborough country" advert

October 2005: Key findings


• The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), published in 2003, found that, although the reading skills of 10 year old pupils in England compared well with those of pupils in other countries, they read less frequently for pleasure and were less interested in reading than those elsewhere. • An NFER reading survey (2003), conducted by Marian Sainsbury, concluded that children’s enjoyment of reading had declined significantly in recent years. • A Nestlé/MORI report highlighted the existence of a small core of children who do not read at all, described as an ‘underclass’ of non-readers, together with cycles of non-reading ‘where teenagers from families where parents are not readers will almost always be less likely to be enthusiastic readers themselves


The role of teaching assistants was described in the report as ‘increasingly effective’. Many of them are responsible for teaching the intervention programmes and this work has improved in quality as a result of improvements in their specialist knowledge.


The Strategy has improved some teachers’ understanding of the importance of pupils’ literacy in developing their subject knowledge and to some effective teaching, especially in writing and the use of subject-specific vocabulary. Despite this, weaknesses remain, including:

• the stalling of developments as senior management teams focus on other initiatives• lack of robust measures to evaluate the impact of developments across a range of subjects• a focus on writing at the expense of reading, speaking and listening.

Key principles of Literacy Across the Curriculum



• Good literacy skills are a key factor in raising standards across all subjects

• Language is the main medium we use for teaching, learning and developing thinking, so it is at the heart of teaching and learning

• Literacy is best taught as part of the subject, not as an add-on

• All teachers need to give explicit attention to the literacy needed in their subject.



• Literacy skills are taught consistently and systematically across the curriculum

• Expectation of standards of accuracy and presentation are similar in all classrooms

• Teachers are equipped to deal with literacy issues in their subject both generically and specifically

• The same strategies are used across the school: the teaching sequence for writing; active reading strategies; planning speaking and listening for learning

• Teachers use the same terminology to describe language.

Consistency in teaching literacy is achieved when …

• Senior managers are actively involved in the planning and monitoring

• Audits and action planning are rigorous

• Monitoring focuses on a range of approaches, e.g. classroom observation, work scrutiny as well as formal tests

• Time is given to training, its dissemination and embedding

• Schools work to identified priorities.



Ofsted suggests literacy across the curriculum is good when …

LITERACY IMPACT!QuickTime™ and a

TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressorare needed to see this picture.



So what are we going to do about it at whole-school

level…?

Focus relentlessly on T&L

“Schools are places where the pupils go to watch the teachers working” (John

West-Burnham)

“For many years, attendance at school has been required (for children and for teachers) while learning at

school has been optional.” (Stoll, Fink & East)

‘Standards are raised ONLY by changes which are put into

direct effect by teachers and pupils in classrooms’

Black and Wiliam, ‘Inside the Black Box’

Key players

Strategy manager Working party

Headteacher

Governors

Teaching assistants Subject

leadersStudents!

Librarian

Key players

Strategy manager

Focus, tailor, customise

See as professional development rather than delivery

Differentiate training

Emphasise monitoring more than initiatives

Use pupil surveys for learning & teaching

Reading Writing Speaking & listening Use layout and language to make texts accessible –

eg white space, typographical features,

summaries, bullets, short paragraphs

Be clear and explicit about the conventions

of the writing you expect from students – eg audience, purpose,

layout, key words and phrases, level of

formality

Using a variety of groupings for structured

talk – pairs, same-sex, friendship, triads, ability

groups

Using a range of strategies to support students’

reading – eg reading aloud, key words and glossaries,

word banks, display, paired reading, talking about texts

before answering

Providing assessment criteria and models of appropriate text types

Setting objectives for talk and providing language

models – eg level of formality, key words and

phrases

Spelling – marking no more than 3-5 key

spellings per work, writing the correct spelling in the

margin with the error identified; students putting these into spelling pages in

the middle of exercise books; using starters /

word games / mnemonics / display / rules / words

within words to support students’ spelling

Using shared composition to show students how to write

Providing alternatives to traditional Q&A

approaches – eg open questions, thinking time, big questions, no-hands, paired consultation time,

dealing with answers, prompts, answer starters

Essential literacy rooted in professional development

An example …

Headteacher

Must be actively involved as head TEACHER

Eg monitoring books, breakfast with students, feedback to staff

Must be seen in lessons

Must be reined in to prioritise

Librarian

Key part in improving literacy

Include in training

Part of curriculum meetings

Library should embody good practice - eg key words, guidance on retrieving information, visual excitement

Active training for students, breaking down subject barriers

Get a library commitment from every team

Then sample to monitor it

Governors

Visit library, get in classrooms, talk to students

Clearly signal the “literacy” focus

Emphasise s/he’s discussing consistency

Sample of students and feedback

Part of faculty reviews on (say) how we teach reading

Working party

Maintain or disband?

Less doing and more evaluating - questionnaires, looking at handouts, working around rooms, talking to students

Asking questions: “What do teachers here do that helps you to understand long texts better?”

Work sampling

Creating a critical mass

Students

Tell us how we’re doing

Build into school council

Small groups work with faculty teams to guide and evaluate

Audit rooms for key words, etc

Teaching Assistants

Make them literacy experts

Let them lead training

Make their monitoring role explicit

Publish their feedback

Subject leaders

Help them to identify the 3 bits of literacy that will have the biggest impact

Prioritise one per term or year

Join their meetings at start and end of process

Help them to keep it simple

Provide models and sample texts

Evaluate

Build literacy into their team’s performance management


are needed to see this picture. So what are we going to do about it at whole-school level…?

Why do students find it harder to understand non-fiction than fiction?


Fiction is more personal. Non-fiction has fewer agents:

• Holidays were taken at resorts

• During the 17th century roads became straighter


Children’s fiction tends to be chronological.

Fiction becomes easier to read; non-fiction

presents difficulties all the way through


Non-fiction texts rely on linguistic signposts - moreover, despite therefore, on the other hand, however.

Learners who are unfamiliar with these will not read with the same predictive power as they can with fiction


Non-fiction tends to have more interrupting constructions:

The agouti, a nervous 20-inch rodent from South America, can leap twenty feet from a sitting position

Asteroids are lumps of rock and metal whose paths round the sun lie mainly between Jupiter and Mars


Fiction uses more active verbs.

Non-fiction relies more on the copula (“Oxygen is a gas”) and use of the passive:

Some plastics are made by …

rather than

We make plastics by …




READING

Subject-specific vocabulary

Approaches to reading

Active research process, not FOFO Using DARTs



Teaching subject-specific vocabulary:

• Identifying

• Playing with context

• Actively exploring

• Linking to spelling



Approaches to reading:

• Scanning

• Skimming

• Continuous reading

• Close reading

• Research skills, not FOFO



Using DARTs:

• Cloze

• Diagram completion

• Disordered text

• Prediction

England won the first corner straight off in the first minute, and from the clearance coming out, Gazza fired in a rocket of a volley that looked to be just curving wide – but Illgner lunged to push it away anyhow, and we had a second corner. And then we had a third … our football was surging and relentless – we were playing like the Germans did, and the Germans didn’t like it. Bruises and knocks, sore joints and worn limbs, forget it – there’s no end to the magic hope can work. Wright had Klinsmann under wraps; Waddle released Parker, Beardsley went through once, and then again … Hassler took the German’s first serious strike, and it deflected away from Pearce for their first corner – but Butcher towered up, and headed away. Then Wright picked a through ball off Klinsmann’s feet; the German looked angry and rattled. You could feel their pace, their threat – but still we had them, and the first phase was all England.

No question: England could win this.

The press box was buzzing. Gazza tangled with Brehme; he got another shot in, then broke to the left corner, won a free-kick …

Let’s all have a discoLet’s all have a disco.

It was more than a disco, it was history.

The Life of Charles DickensChapter 1

CHARLES DICKENS, the most popular novelist of the century, and one of the greatest humorists that England has produced, was born at Lanport, in Portsea, on Friday, the seventh of February, 1812.

His father, John Dickens, a clerk in the navy pay-office, was at this time stationed in the Portsmouth Dockyard. He had made acquaintance with the lady, Elizabeth Barrow, who became afterwards his wife, through her elder brother, Thomas Barrow, also engaged on the establishment at Somerset House, and she bore him in all a family of eight children, of whom two died in infancy. The eldest, Fanny (born 1810), was followed by Charles (entered in the baptismal register of Portsea as Charles John Huffham, though on the very rare occasions when he subscribed that name he wrote Huffam); by another son, named Alfred, who died in childhood; by Letitia (born 1816); by another daughter, Harriet, who died also in childhood; by Frederick (born 1820); by Alfred Lamert (born 1822); and by Augustus (born 1827).

DICKENS

CHARLES DICKENS was dead. He lay on a narrow green sofa – but there was room enough for him, so spare had he become – in the dining room of Gad’s Hill Place. He had died in the house which he had first seen as a small boy and which his father had pointed out to him as a suitable object of his ambitions; so great was his father’s hold upon his life that, forty years later, he had bought it. Now he had gone. It was customary to close the blinds and curtains, thus enshrouding the corpse in darkness before its last journey to the tomb; but in the dining room of Gad’s Hill the curtains were pulled apart and on this June day the bright sunshine streamed in, glittering on the large mirrors around the room. The family beside him knew how he enjoyed the light, how he needed the light; and they understood, too, that none of the conventional sombreness of the late Victorian period – the year was 1870 – had ever touched him.

All the lines and wrinkles which marked the passage of his life were new erased in the stillness of death. He was not old – he died in his fifty-eighth year – but there had been signs of premature ageing on a visage so marked and worn; he had acquired, it was said, a “sarcastic look”. But now all that was gone and his daughter, Katey, who watched him as he lay dead, noticed how there once more emerged upon his face “beauty and pathos”.

PREDICTION FUN

Brian Moore, Cold Heaven

The wooden seats of the little pedal boat were angled so that

Marie looked up at the sky. There were no clouds. In the vastness above her a gull calligraphed its flight. Marie and Alex pedalled in

unison, the revolving paddles making a slapping sound against the waves as the pedal boat

treadmilled away from the beach, passing through ranks of bathers to move into the deeper, more solitary waters of the Baie des

Anges. Marie slackened her efforts but Alex continued determinedly, steering the pedalo straight out

into the Mediterranean.

1

‘Let’s not go too far,’ she said.‘I want to get away from the crowd. I’m

going to swim.’It was like him to have some plan of his own, to translate idleness into activity even in these few days of vacation. She now noted his every

fault. It was as though, having decided to leave him, she had withdrawn his

credit. She looked back at the sweep of hotels along the Promenade des Anglais. Today was the day she had hoped to tell him. She had planned to announce it at breakfast and leave, first for New York, then on to Los Angeles to join

Daniel. But at breakfast she lacked all courage. Now, with half the day gone,

she decided to postpone it until tomorrow.

2

Far out from shore, the paddles stopped. The pedalo rocked on its twin pontoons as Alex eased himself up from his seat. He handed her his sunglasses. ‘This should do,’ he said and, rocking the boat even more, dived into the ultramarine waters. She watched him surface. He called out: ‘Just follow along, okay?’ He was not a good swimmer, but thrashed about in an

energetic, erratic freestyle. Marie began to pedal again, her hand on the tiller, steering the little boat so that she

followed close. Watching him, she knew he could not keep up this pace for long. She saw his flailing arms and for a moment

thought of those arms hitting her. He had never hit her. He was not the sort of man who would hit you. He would be hurt, and cold, and possibly vindictive. But he was

not violent.

3

She heard a motorboat, the sound becoming

louder. She looked back but did not see a boat behind her. Then she

looked to the right where Alex was swimming and saw

a big boat with an outboard motor coming right at them, coming

very fast.

4

Of course they see us, she thought, alarmed, and then as though she were watching a film, as though this were happening to someone else, she saw there was a man in the motorboat, a young man wearing a green shirt; he

was not at the tiller, he was standing in the middle of the boat with his back to her and as she

watched he bent down and picked up a child who had fallen on the

floorboards. ‘Hey?’ she called. ‘Hey?’ for he must turn around, the motorboat was coming right at Alex, right at her. But the man in the boat did not hear. He carried the child across to the far side of the boat; the boat was only yards away

now.

5

‘Alex,’ she called. ‘Alex, look out.’ But Alex flailed on and then the prow of the motorboat, slicing up water like a knife, hit Alex with a sickening thump, went over him and smashed into the pontoons of the little pedal boat, upending it, and she found herself in the water, going under, coming up. She

looked and saw the motorboat churning off, the pedal boat

hanging from its prow like a tangle of branches. She heard the

motorboat engine cut to silence, then start up again as the boat veered around in a semicircle and

came back to her. Alex?

6

She looked: saw his body near her just under the water. She swam toward him, breastroke, it was all she knew. He was floating face down, spread-eagle. She caught hold of his wrist and pulled him

towards her. The motorboat came alongside, the man in the green shirt reaching down for her, but, ‘No, no,’

she called and tried to push Alex toward him. The man caught Alex by the hair of his head and pulled him up, she pushing, Alex falling back twice into the water, before the man, with a great effort, lifted him like a sack across the side of the boat, tugging and heaving until Alex disappeared into the boat. The man

shouted, ‘Un instant, madame, un instant’ and reappeared, putting a

little steel ladder over the side. She climbed up onto the motorboat as the man went out onto the prow to disentangle

the wreckage of the pedalo.

7

A small child was sitting at the back of the boat, staring at Alex’s body, which lay face-down on the floorboards. She went to Alex and saw blood from a wound, a gash in the side of his head, blood matting his

hair. He was breathing but unconscious. She lifted him and cradled him in her arms, his blood trickling onto her breasts. She saw

the boat owner’s bare legs go past her as he went to the rear of the boat to restart the engine. The child began to bawl but the man leaned over, silenced it with an angry slap, the man turned to her, his face sick with fear. ‘Nous y serons dans un instant,’ he

shouted, opening the motor to full throttle. She hugged Alex to her, a rivulet of blood

dripping off her forearm onto the floorboards as the boat raced to the beach.

8

PREDICTION FUN

Brian Moore, Cold Heaven

Kick-start learning

Don’t aim for false links with main lesson content

Do aim for coherence across starters

Avoid writing

Emphasise collaboration & problem-solving

Avoid the temptation to extend the activity

No Blue Peter badges

www.geoffbarton.co.uk

-ible -able


Homophones

Sound of Music Kylie Beethoven

their therethey’re

too two to

pray prey


Homophones

Freeze Stand

advice advise

practice practise

effect affect

It’s its

Hard

It was on a bright day of midwinter, in New York. The little girl who eventually became me, but as yet was neither me nor anybody else in particular, but merely a soft anonymous morsel of humanity – this little girl, who bore my name, was going for a walk with her father. The episode is literally the first thing I can remember about her, and therefore I date the birth of her humanity from that day. QuickTime™ and a


Urquhart castle is probably one of the most picturesquely situated castles in the Scottish Highlands. Located 16 miles south-west of Inverness, the castle, one of the largest in Scotland, overlooks much of Loch Ness. Visitors come to stroll through the ruins of the 13th-century castle because Urquhart has earned the reputation of being one of the best spots for sighting Loch Ness’s most famous inhabitant

Jake began to dial the number slowly as he had done every evening at six o’clock ever since his father had passed away. For the next fifteen minutes he settled back to listen to what his mother had done that day



1. If it’s a priority, do something

2. Customise and simplify ruthlessly

3. Identify the essential (simple) skills of reading - eg by asking students

4. Build into school systems of training, observation, performance management

5. Don’t forget reading for pleasure: keep it in the public domain

So ..

Thurrock Literacy Conference

Friday, April 21, 2023

Download this presentation at www.geoffbarton.co.uk



GEOFF BARTONGEOFF BARTON::

Making an Impact with Making an Impact with LiteracyLiteracy

thurrock literacy conference tuesday, september 23, 2014

Documents

school literacy

reading skills

enjoyment of reading

learningthe literacy

thurrock literacy conference

year old pupils

cycles of nonreading

lower levels of adult