This blog was written as a
response to the initiative of 'literacy across the curriculum'. Many of these
points still stand. Unfortunately, the "enthusiastic literacy
co-ordinator" lost her job and so trainees next year placed at 'School B'
won't be able to profit from her knowledge and passion for literacy. A real
shame. This blog is a testament to her short-lived but very valuable influence
on my teaching.
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Last week's sessions on
literacy across the curriculum reinforced the importance of literacy skills for
a fulfilling and happy life. Literacy is something I have always taken for
granted, having loved reading and creative writing from a very early age. The
literacy situation within education today has been one of the most informative
sections of my PGCE and other experience in schools so far. There was so much I
didn't know: for instance, that reading age is only to do with 'decoding' and
has nothing to do with comprehension. Reading age statistics can therefore be
misleading, and this is something I'll need to address when getting to know the
classes I will be teaching.
It has been the case that, on
the whole, I have observed poor standards of literacy throughout my placements
thus far. School H, the primary school I observed, had extremely low levels of
literacy due to, amongst other things:
•
a lack of parental support for,
and extension of, literacy outside of school (linking to no practice)
•
low confidence and therefore
lack of enjoyment in reading and writing
•
the lack of differentiation in
the school, meaning that weaker students were not supported and stronger
students had little room to develop their literacy skills
At School B, the secondary
school I am currently placed in, the situation is more varied. The top 2 sets
tend to be adequate, with some rare, but really outstanding, pieces of
literacy-based work: for instance, today I observed an English lesson in which
a Year 8 class were writing in Chaucerian style - something I don't think I
would be able to do! However, in the bottom 3 sets, it seems to be the case
that the children have fallen into bad habits, often forgetting capital letters
(even in their own surnames), misusing or not using punctuation, and writing
short, often unfinished sentences. This is accompanied by a feeling that
'writing is boring/hard' and reading is 'pointless' as they can just ask the
teacher for an explanation.
Strategies for coping with this
at School B have varying levels of success, some of which I have outlined
below:
•
students copying from the board
to ensure spelling and grammar are correct. This is not effective as it does
nothing to reinforce the notion of literacy as something enjoyable, and instead
makes it tedious and something to dread.
•
'literacy circles': in form
time, the class is split into groups of 5, each with a different role such as
'wordsmith', 'connector', 'discussion director' etc. They then read through a
book each session and discuss and analyse it. This is a good idea in theory but
in practice, the children read so quietly to each other thanks to their low
confidence that they cannot be heard, making discussion difficult. They are
also set by ability which I have noticed means that low ability groups tend to
give up as they all find it difficult to access.
•
a literacy MOT: this is a self
assessment done by each class every year, which points out weaknesses so that
the literacy co-ordinator can support those pupils individually or in small
groups. This helps with differentiation, and the children have told me that it
has helped them become more confident - although they sometimes forget to use
what they've learned when in a normal lesson.
It appears to me that literacy
is a real problem in the education system, and I am very grateful to have the
opportunity on my PGCE to learn new strategies to deal with this (such as the
mountain of resources given to us by PM last Friday!) It is so important to
have adequate levels of literacy when studying history, as I firmly believe in
history as a form of art and personally enjoy crafting pieces of writing as
much as researching them. I want to pass this on to the classes I teach, and so I
am determined to embed literacy into all of my lessons, and be explicit about
this focus by giving a literacy objective. I will make full use of the very
enthusiastic literacy co-ordinator at School B, checking in with her every week
for new ideas to use. Scaffolding is important, but so is developing
independence and transferable literacy skills, and I hope to develop resources
in conjunction with the literacy co-ordinator that enable the pupils to be
confident and independent with their literacy. Most of all, I want to give
pupils a sense of pride in their literacy, an understanding of why it's
important, and the joy that I personally have always found in reading, writing,
speaking and listening.
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