Tom, a senior leader in charge of Teaching and Learning at a secondary school, has read about ‘disciplinary knowledge’ in Ofsted’s Research Review series. What he comes across echoes conversations he’s had with fellow teachers and leaders in his school around vocabulary challenges in subject specific areas. He has also been to visit a local secondary school, which has implemented a whole school focus on disciplinary literacy. Tom is impressed by what he has seen, and is keen to implement a similar approach in his setting.
Before Tom embarks rolling out disciplinary literacy, he needs to reflect on and audit the approaches to reading in his school to help him decide if the approach can help support pupils in his school and whether it is feasible to expect it will be implemented successfully.
Tom could use these stages to reflect on current practices around reading:
Learning to read
- Who are the students who haven’t acquired requisite reading skills and how are they identified?
- Do any staff need specialist training (for example, in phonics) to support these children?
- How is reading assessment data being collected and shared?
- What diagnostic tools are in place?
- Could investigating literacy interventions (as recommended in EEF’s Improving Literacy in Secondary Schools guidance report) prove a useful starting point?
Reading to learn
- Is there a common language around reading used within school?
- Has a reading strategy, or policy, been implemented already in school? What were the outcomes?
- How is it being monitored?
- Have staff received whole school training on generic reading strategies that may help students to access the curriculum – for example, activating prior knowledge; prediction; questioning; clarifying; summarising? If not, could developing students’ ability to read complex texts (also recommended in our guidance report) be a useful starting point?
Reading like an expert (‘disciplinary reading’)
- Have staff been given time to use their collective expertise to discuss and unpick what reading and writing look like in their subjects?
- How are curriculum/subject leaders supported to facilitate this discussion?
- Are there subject specific literacy plans, rooted in the discipline, that address barriers to accessing the curriculum related to reading, writing and communication development?
- Is ‘disciplinary literacy’ coherently aligned with curriculum development?
- Have staff been trained in how they might model how to read, write and think like an expert in their subject?
Knowledge of the generalisable strategies that students acquire as they ‘read to learn’ will provide staff with the foundational knowledge required to interrogate the specific ways texts operate in different subjects. It is important that Tom reflects carefully on his school’s generic approach prior to taking a disciplinary approach.
He needs to build on the knowledge and practices that have already been undertaken in his school. It is not ‘generic literacy’ versus ‘disciplinary literacy’, but instead it is a complex combination. For Tom, successful implementation will require a careful marrying of these approaches to literacy.
Our RAG Self-Assessment tool accompanies the Improving Literacy in Secondary Schools guidance report, and can be used as part of an initial audit process to establish current practice.