Making good progress in KS3

We had our first meeting with the school today, of which more to follow.  For now, here is a link to some documentation that might be useful... Making good progress in KS3

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Everbody Writes Day - 21st October 2010

A Guide for Secondary Schools

This might something useful for the school to get involved in if they don't already.

CLPE Writing scales

Here is a link that might be useful when planning our intervention...

CLPE writing scale 2

It is discussed in the paper Putting literature at the heart of the literacy curriculum (Nicholson, 2006).  What do you think?

Handout for the meeting

Raising attainment in literacy

By looking at the information available to us, including Ofsted reports, the school’s website and the previous creativity project we have begun to come up with a picture of where the school currently stands with regard to literacy. 

Our aims

Building on the success of last year’s project, we propose a programme focusing on developing pupils as writers.  Using the critical reading skills acquired through the intervention Ready Steady Book, we hope to remove barriers within the reader writer relationship and therefore increase attainment. 

We would like to consult the pupils that we will be working with in order to incorporate their interests and ideas about what would work for them into the programme.  Some of our initial thoughts would be to:

introduce response partners

look at the talk for writing model

model and scaffold the writing process explicitly with the children

shared writing

develop success criteria through a genre approach

develop writing through immersion in text type

writing frames/ starters

displays to aid writing / working walls

ensure creative purpose and audience e.g. blog, book, or magazine.

Our plan for the meeting

We have arranged our first meeting with the school; in preparation for this we came up with a plan to help structure it.  Here it is...

Background

We have been given the project of working with a school to raise attainment in literacy.  It has been described by Ofsted as:

A large community college...in West Sussex. The town is an area of coastal deprivation with low basic skills in the adult workforce. The proportion of students with learning difficulties and/or disabilities is well above the national average. The school has specialist status as a sports college.

By looking at the information available to us, including Ofsted reports, the school’s website and the previous creativity project we have begun to come up with a picture of where the school currently stands with regard to literacy. 

·         Ofsted reports have highlighted that...

-       standards need to be raised for all children

-      children need to be more actively involved and challenged in their learning

-      progression needs to be monitored more effectively

-      children need to be aware of their targets and what they need to do to meet them.

-      Speaking and listening has been focused on through the school’s new curriculum but levels of literacy are still low

-      There are opportunities to develop functional literacy skills across the curriculum

-      The students come in from the feeder schools with below average levels of literacy and numeracy

-      Low levels of literacy, particularly writing, hinder students’ progress in other areas of the curriculum.

·         The school’s website shows us that they have implemented a number of initiatives to raise standards in literacy such as:

-      Literacy plus programme

-      West Sussex Book Awards transition project

-      The FAB group

-      Writers’ Club

-      Key Stage 3 Gifted and Talented’ group

-      And extra-curricular opportunities, such as visits from authors and invited speakers.

·         Reading the booklet produced by the students managing last year’s project has identified that they:

-      Implemented a 6 week literacy intervention for Year 8 pupils

-      Focused on removing children from the classroom where possible to keep them engaged

-      Kept pupils’ self esteem high by empowering them as the experts

-      Gave the children strategies that allowed them to become autonomous learners in English

-      Used a variety of teaching strategies including the use of multi modal resources, reading journals, blogging and free writing.

Our aims

Building on the success of last year’s project, we propose a programme focusing on developing pupils as writers.  Using the critical reading skills acquired through the intervention Ready Steady Book, we hope to remove barriers within the reader writer relationship and therefore increase attainment. 

We would like to consult the pupils that we will be working with in order to incorporate their interests and ideas about what would work for them into the programme.  Some of our initial thoughts would be to:

-      introduce response partners

-      look at the talk for writing model

-      model and scaffold the writing process explicitly with the children

-      shared writing

-      develop success criteria through a genre approach

-      develop writing through immersion in text type

-      writing frames/ starters

-      displays to aid writing / working walls

-      ensure creative purpose and audience e.g. blog, book, magazine

A mind map of our initial ideas

We mapped out our initial ideas after we received the title of our project.  Here are some of the things we came up with.

Budget 

We've been thinking about budgets for our project and due to the nature of the things we intend to carry out we won't have one as such.  If we need to go on any trips then this should be covered by the school and the things we are using are our own skills rather than things we've had to buy - great news!

Yesterday we had our first Creativity 3 lecture. We were assigned the project of working with a local school to raise literacy attainment. We were all really excited (but a little shocked) about the prospect of working with a secondary school as it's quite different to things that we have done before.


The first thing we did was to discuss our ideas. We brainstormed our initial thoughts (see file) which included loads of ideas about the possibilities that this project might bring us and the school. Some of our ideas included:

• focusing on ICT in literacy and through this wiki that we hope to share with staff and students
• looking at good practice in literacy in other secondary and middle schools
• finding out the children's perceptions of literacy in secondary and primary schools
• the literacy environment
• having a launch day (authors??)
• linking drama to literacy more
• cross curricular links
• the library
• Year 6 to Year 7 transition.

We met Duncan after our brainstorming session and received some background information on prior initiatives that have taken place in the school with regard to rasising attainment in literacy, specifically reading. There were a number of similarities between these and our own ideas. We found this surprising but also quite reassuring as this told us that we were probably thinking along the right lines.

In our intial meeting we decided to set up this wiki as a way of recording our work in progress, as well as our reflections.


Next steps...
We plan to ring the school and arrange a meeting to find out what the school needs and how we can try to help them.