This course is suitable for teachers of all subjects looking to embed literacy skills across their curriculum.

Supporting a rich and ambitious curriculum

This course will be essential to make sure your school is providing a rich curriculum which supports children’s development of reading and critical literacy across all subjects.

The real challenge for secondary school teachers is not so much teaching children how to read, but teaching children how to read to learn. This is not just semantics: it’s a reorientation away from the notion of reading as being some kind of general ability that students can deploy equally across the curriculum. It involves seeing reading in terms of specific disciplinary practices.

With a greater emphasis on whether schools have adopted or constructed an ambitious curriculum, school leaders are now in a strong position to evaluate and improve how reading is taught in all areas of the curriculum and how they prepare all children to make good progress and become better prepared for the next stages of their learning.

What is Critical literacy?

Critical literacy moves the reader’s focus away from the “self” in critical reading to the interpretation of texts in different environmental and cultural contexts (Allen Luke, 2000).

This allows educators and students with an opportunity to read, evaluate, and reflect on texts, and embark upon the creative process of actively constructing or reconstructing texts.

Promoting reading across the Secondary curriculum

Do you know what good practice is and how to promote reading across the curriculum?

How can you make your school’s curriculum ‘language rich’?

Do you know how children can be inspired to draw on high-quality published and on-line texts?

Are you aware of the current framework and the changes for 2019 and the implications this has on teaching and leading within a school?

Do you know that all of your children are making good and better progress in reading in foundation subjects and how to evidence this?

Defining Reading and Literacy

• Establishing a clear definition of reading in terms of the critical literacy needed for success and full participation
• Reading for meaning to promote ‘critical literacy’
• Developing an ambitious reading curriculum
• Role of reading in developing writing and oracy skills

Inspection requirements for reading across the curriculum

• What are inspectors looking for and gathering evidence on?
• What implications do inspection frameworks and criteria have on how children should be taught reading
• Curriculum Intent and curriculum implementation – ensuring consistency.

A Practical Approach for Teaching ‘Critical Literacy’

• How to develop a genuinely cross-curricular approach to literacy:
• Speak like a …….
• Reading for meaning
• Zoom in and zoom out
• Exploring ‘task based’ approaches for teaching reading skills
• Structure and style
• Explore questioning strategies for teaching reading skills
• Investigate approaches to suit a range of curricula
• Teaching mixed ability groups – using roles in reading practice
• Constructive and developmental feedback
• Involving parents/carers – tripartite systems, projects and competitions

Literacy for all children (across all subjects)

• Skills of reading – practice and summarizing
• Evaluating texts
• Annotation skills
• Encouraging pupils to become ‘active’ readers
• Links to progress in writing and evidence-based research
• Meeting the needs of EAL and less-able readers.
• Promoting a ‘love of reading’ in the school
• Benefits of reading aloud
• The role of ‘visual’ literacy in reading development
• From readers to writers

Presenter Profile

Ed is Curriculum & Literacy Associate for JMC Education and Education Manager at the University of Bath, leading a major curriculum transformation and evaluation project in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Ed’s leadership expertise in schools includes leading teaching and learning, curriculum change, and on staff development as Deputy Head (Academic) in an HMC boarding school. He has 15 years’ experience leading digital learning, including as Head of Education for an English and Maths edtech platform, and he is a Microsoft Certified Educator. He is a governor of an SEMH primary, secondary and AP multi-academy trust with responsibility for safeguarding. He has also previously been a director of a mainstream MAT and has board experience in HE and third sector care and heritage organisations.

After graduating from Oxford University, he qualified as an English teacher with Teach First in a London Challenge school. He has subsequently led literacy in state and independent schools and is adept at developing whole-school and department-specific literacy within a classroom and digital context.

Ed has been a highly engaged Ambassador for Teach First supporting the Initial Teacher Training of English and MFL teachers in a variety of contexts and as an Associate Tutor at the annual Summer Institute.

Broader education experience includes A-Level examining, running summer intervention programs to improve transition from primary school, and education trials including the use of Virtual Reality in English and the humanities, a Microsoft Reading Progress pilot, and NFER-led studies on assessment in English.

Ed’s academic interests are in the intersection between literature and literacy. His Master’s in Advanced Subject Teaching from Cambridge University investigated the impact of attitudes to creativity on students’ progress in writing. This developed from his Open University Master’s which explored inclusive voices in contemporary English. He is currently a part-time postgraduate researcher at the University of Bristol studying the impact of poetry initiatives on cultural and economic regeneration.

Feedback from this course

‘Really helpful – lots of ideas regarding whole school literacy, as well as in department. An excellent understanding / knowledge of how the Ofsted framework will impact schools – thank you’

Cost: £150 per delegate

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