Every Teacher is a Literacy Teacher

This week The South Newcastle Federation met for a training session on how to promote 'Literacy for Learning'. The session was led by Thomas Pilsel who is Second in English at Clayton and Leader of Literacy. The link to his Prezi presentation can be found here

 

'Top Tips' for marking for Literacy:

• Focus only on one aspect of literacy at a time. For example, only correct one area, such as: missing capitalisation, inaccurate use of the apostrophe or homophone confusion. This helps marking to be more focussed and positive.
• Focus on marking just the first paragraph for spelling and grammar errors. This will allow the teacher to appreciate the content of the work as a whole and allow the student to feel that their work is valued.
• When marking work set an additional SPAG (spelling and grammar)  target, as well as a content based target.
• Allow students the time to review their feedback and to work on improvements. This will allow both the student and the teacher to feel that progress is being made.
• Mr Pilsel also explained the benefits of occasional 'live marking'; whereby the teacher meets with the student on a one-to-one basis, to discuss and evaluate work and to support students in their literacy. This ensures that the feedback given is detailed and precise; it also allows the teacher to coach their students in a highly personalised way.

The final part of the training focussed on 'Tier Three Vocabulary'.

In subject groups we began to record the subject specific words, which students often struggle with (these 'tier three' words are more technical, academic words). A sound knowledge of these words will undoubtedly equip students with the tools that they need to access and demonstrate higher level learning.

The Learning and Teaching Team at Clayton worked with departments during the training, to help develop learning activities and teaching strategies, which will help students to acquire this subject specific vocabulary. 

We would appreciate our readers sharing their comments below. We would like to hear in particular:

• suggestions of words to add to 'Tier Three Vocabulary' banks for every subject
• further ideas and strategies for the learning and teaching of vocabulary
• feedback on the training session
• links to other useful literacy based webpages