John Holmes and Helen Myers are Director and Deputy Director at Tudor Grange Research School in the West Midlands. In this blog, they describe how co-constructing professional development with a cross-disciplinary team of leaders helped to develop disciplinary literacy in their school.
“School leaders can help teachers by ensuring training related to literacy prioritises subject specificity over general approaches.”
The first recommendation from the EEF’s “improving Secondary Literacy” guidance report encourages schools to prioritise supporting ‘disciplinary literacy’ across the curriculum. Simply put, teachers need to understand what is distinct about reading, writing, speaking and listening in their specific subject discipline. This is foundational.
In order to achieve this, it’s essential that teachers have clarity about what it is to, say, ‘explain like a scientist’, ‘explain like an historian’ or ‘explain like an artist’. We need to be able to communicate this to the children in our classrooms, so that they understand the nuance in the way language is used in different disciplines.
Writers’ room: supporting disciplinary literacy in secondary schools through collaboration
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