Oracy …. in an Infant School?
How Advanced Accredited Thinking School, Stanley Park Infants, has made oracy an explicit focus … and the impact it has had.
In conversation with Liezel Jacobs, Oracy Lead, Stanley Park Infants School
With just under 300 pupils in EYFS, Year 1 and Year 2, Stanley Park Infants School (SPIS) is a member of Cirrus Primary Academy Trust, a group of 5 schools within the London borough of Sutton. The school has been an accredited Thinking School for over a decade and an Advanced Thinking School for almost six years. In keeping with one of the characteristics of Advanced Accredited Schools, SPIS is committed to constantly strive for excellence in their pursuit of developing ‘meta’ learners.
In part that was driven by research from Oxford University Press showing that 40% of UK children have fallen behind in vocabulary development, a gap that many teachers attribute to pandemic-related disruptions. Following a survey which highlighted that 68% of parents would welcome more guidance on supporting their children’s vocabulary, SPIS saw an opportunity to work with their committed parent body to develop vocabulary through oracy.
With an oracy background from her previous school and a passion for debating, one of the school’s Year 2 teachers, Liezel Jacobs, was charged with leading the initiative. Along with colleagues, Liezel planned an initial 3 step ‘route map’ for embedding oracy. However, before doing so, and in keeping with an Advanced Thinking School’s interest in evaluative research, SPIS successfully applied to join the English Speaking Union’s, Oracy Action Research Programme. Highly recommended by Liezel, this programme supports schools to develop their in-house research capacity and contribute to a collective understanding of ‘what works’ in oracy-based classroom practice. Specifically for SPIS – they looked to research the following question:
“What is the impact of regular, effective discussions on the confidence of infant school’s pupils after six months of focused oracy teaching and learning?”
Without wanting to let the cat out of the bag, SPIS received a prestigious ESU ‘Oracy Culture’ award for their commitment to developing oracy – spoken communication skills – as a central part of their curriculum.
Back to the three step plan. The pillars were:
1. Developing ‘Teaching Oracy’ via Training & Supporting Documentation – which outlines 6 strategies for teachers to draw on in order to help embed oracy across the curriculum.
2. Utilising a Weekly Oracy Discussion Topic – provided by Picture News this is an age-appropriate news story with accompanying teacher scripts.
3. Launching a Debating Club – specifically for their Year 2
Let’s look at each of those in more detail…
Pillar 1: Developing ‘Teaching Oracy’ Training & Supporting Documentation
To make oracy accessible across each year group and to provide a common language, Liezel and team identified six key strategies they wanted all teaching staff to become comfortable using. Crucially, to avoid the oracy push being seen as “yet another thing”, they also wanted these strategies to tie in with the existing work being done at a whole school level on high quality teaching. The framework SPIS were using for this was Sherrington’s ‘Teaching Walkthrus’. Each of the strategies was therefore shaped to link in with the Walkthrus approach. Staff were provided with four hours of twilight training on the first four strategies below (more on strategy number 5.) Metacognition and 6.) Linking oracy to writing in a future blog.
- Strategy 1:
Talk Partner Skills: A structured approach to improving speaking and listening techniques used in paired discussions. These techniques are both verbal and non-verbal – for example those used in ‘Active Listening’ such as facing your partner, maintaining eye contact, nodding and using small verbal cues to validate an idea and encourage them to continue speaking. How to Take Turns is another sub strategy – where e.g. respectful pauses and small hand signals become part of the ‘rules’ to signal a change in turn. Likewise using certain ‘Giving a Turn’ phrases such as “What do you think?” and ‘Taking a Turn’ phrases such as “I’d like to add that…”.
- Strategy 2 (links closely in with developing those types of phrases in Strategy 1):
Stem Sentences: essentially the provision of structured ways to express thoughts. For example, stems for giving opinion such as, “In my opinion…”, ones for agreeing with and building on ideas such as “I agree with you because …” or “That’s a great idea. I would like to build on it by adding…” and stems for respectful disagreement, such as “I partly agree, but also believe..”
- Strategy 3 (builds on the second .. quite literally!):
Sentence Building: This was a key strategy for supporting children in forming complex ideas. The most basic of these was to support learners in adding because – “I think …. because ….” and then to add an ‘and‘ e.g. “I think …. because … and …”. Other builds include “I agree with you because … , but I also think ….
- Strategy 4:
Repetition and Modelling of the first three strategies. This sought to tie them in with the wider repetition and modelling work that the staff had been doing via Teaching Walkthrus.
Pillar 2: Utilising a Weekly Oracy Discussion Topic
In addition to the strategies in pillar 1 being woven into all lessons. SPIS wanted to create space in the timetable where there was a specific focus on improving oracy. To that end, depending on the year group, 15-30 minutes is set aside weekly, typically in assemblies, for each class to develop their speaking and listening around a weekly discussion. In order to link this to a focus on expanding awareness of the wider world, SPIS identified Picture News as a provider of resources to support them.
For a very reasonable yearly subscription, Picture News provides a setting specific resource pack that is sent through weekly, via email. The resource pack contains an image of a pertinent news topic and some teacher guidance on questions to ask and activities to do. Questions such as “What do you like/not like about the image?”, “How does the image make you feel?” are often used in order to develop vocabulary and language around emotion and feelings. SPIS has found it an incredibly useful tool to support conversations about local and international topics and to develop both curiosity and speaking skill.
Pillar 3: Launching a Debating Club
To add icing to the cake, SPIS have set up an after school debating club. Operating weekly and open to all Year 2s, up to 25 learners opt in for 45 minutes a week of ‘light’ debating. The club typically starts with a drama game such as ‘Splat!’ to develop listening skills and the confidence to speak out in the group. Often, they will first have a discussion based on a previously unseen Picture News topic before exploring different notions. They are then given the opportunity to agree or disagree and extend their sentence, which could include a ‘statement’, a reason (using ‘because’), ‘and’ any additional information.
Impact
The initial approach to monitoring impact has been through teacher, parent and pupil voice. The pupil voice interviews have shown the children to be more aware of talking as a skill and that they feel heard. They know that their partner can help them and in return they can help their partner. Teacher feedback is that there is a strong sense that children are enjoying their learning more because of intentional talk partner work and that learners are more actively engaged. Some samples of parent feedback is below:
“When sitting for dinner, EG (Year 2) would start a conversation about an advanced topic, usually with a story. After a while it would become clear that it was the week’s debating topic. We always enjoyed talking as a family about EG's debating topics including Princess Diana, and I genuinely think that he would not have been as interested in the recent election if he had not been part of the club. With no prompting he read the leaflets coming through the doors and made his own mind up about who he wanted to support and why….. We could see the effect of talking and listening; he always seemed to pick up knowledge in-depth and he loves being listened to and participating as an equal in conversation."
“EB (Year 2) is much more confident as a result of being in the Debating Club. She is much more confident in her speaking and delivery. She has often come home after the club and carried on the exercises. We will be looking for similar opportunities for E.B. to engage in in the future.”
JG (Year 2 EAL student) parents noticed that he was able to have a conversation about the Euros with a coffee shop worker confidently. At a museum, he displayed skill when having a conversation about an artist with family and friends.
Next Steps
Whilst it is encouraging to see parents noticing their children displaying an increased confidence in expressing their thoughts with friends, unknown people and when out and about, SPIS are wanting to further develop their understanding of the impact that oracy can have on their learners’ writing. Can a child that can speaks in clear, well-constructed sentences transfer their verbalised thoughts into their writing? From anecdotal conversations to date, SPIS believe that they can. Their next action research project is to explore this further.
We look forward to hearing from SPIS on this in due course. In the meantime, look out for a second blog on how they have tied in oracy and metacognition… coming soon.
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