How we created a bespoke Oracy session for our Maths and Physics trainees

Laura Harvey - National Programme Lead of the National Maths and Physics SCITT

This article was written by Laura Harvey, National Programme Lead of the National Maths and Physics SCITT and Assistant Headteacher at Wycombe High School. A link to the original article, published on 20 January 2025 on www.nasbtt.org.uk (The National Association of School-Based Teacher Trainers), can be found at the bottom of the page.

The National Mathematics and Physics SCITT is a national provider of subject-specific training in Mathematics and Physics.

The SCITT has both its national community with over 40 trainees and its local communities that stretch the breadth of the country from Newcastle and Bolton to London and Oxford. Each local community is supported by a hub school where the trainees complete their training, and numerous placement schools, meaning the diversity of school context is large, including independent, state, selective and non-selective environments.

This gave us a unique challenge when selecting the foci for our Intensive Training and Practice (ITaP) elements, which we embraced fully, considering what would allow the greatest impact for the students in our placement and hub schools.

Our search for impactful ITaP elements led us to consider the aspects of education that most greatly affect the life outcomes of all students, regardless of geographical or educational context, and we quickly gravitated towards the aspects of literacy, which maybe is a little surprising considering our subject specialisms.

However, the research to support its inclusion is concrete, with findings such as children with poor vocabulary aged five are more than twice as likely to be unemployed aged 34 (Sutton Trust, 2019), and that low attainment, negative experiences at school, exclusion, truancy, poor health and poor employment prospects all hold a relationship with low literacy (National Literacy Trust, 2014).

Once settled on a literacy focus it was then essential to narrow the focus to allow for clear success criteria and meaningful practice. This is when we needed to consider our specialist subjects and how our trainee teachers could support literacy in the most effective way in their subject specific classrooms. When engaging with the research and scholarship it was clear that allowing opportunities for students to take part in structured talk would provide meaningful support for literacy. This would include Oracy strategies such as dialogic activities and structured questioning, shown across all subjects to have a high impact on student progress and though less so, still measurable positive effects in Maths and Science studies specifically.

Once decided on the focus of ‘Meaningful Oracy in the Classroom’ it was then essential to provide an expert to support trainees understand the success criteria for structured talk, practice the classroom set up and discuss possible barriers to implementation. We engaged the charity organisation ‘Talk The Talk’ to lead this process. The organisation’s main remit is to provide workshops directly to students and in 2023-24 they engaged with 37,120 students in 497 schools across the country to help them becoming more confident communicators. We could not think of an organisation better positioned to train our future teachers and we began collaboration to create a five-hour training experience.

Talk The Talk were very receptive to our ideas and interested in the mechanisms of intensive training and practice, creating bespoke practice activities and scenarios, as well as clear criteria for successful implementation. They also provided a facilitator who was an experienced Physics teacher, who had also taught Maths, meaning any trainee questions or experiences could be analysed and answered by a subject specialist.

On 3rd January 2025 our trainees gathered in London to engage in the newly written training day. Starting with the rationale for a focus on Oracy the four workshops quickly took shape with trainees asking pertinent and challenging questions, practising structured talk scaffolds and discussing adaptations to talk strategies needed for unique scenarios. Quite unexpectantly, one of the most impactful outcomes was when trainees were asked to review the success criteria for their current practice.

Most trainees had experienced very little opportunity for structured talk in the classroom, with the most frequent reasoning being its apparent incompatibility with successful behaviour management strategies and an unwillingness of student participation. Our Talk The Talk facilitator took this in their stride providing passionate and unrelenting justification for the inclusion of all students in structured talk opportunities. They did explain to the trainees that in some contexts and for some students they may have to tread carefully, but this should not mean that we do not give every student a chance to experience Oracy practice.

The trainees left the training day exhausted but determined, with a renewed urgency to support their student’s literacy through Oracy activities. Anousheh Salahshour, a Physics trainee at our Newcastle hub, sent us the following a few days into the new term: ‘I added an oracy section with scaffolded structure to one of my lessons yesterday and that was the time I felt most satisfied with my work as a teacher. I saw solid learning and improvement.’

References:

National Literacy Trust (2014) Literacy Changes Lives. Available at Microsoft Word – Literacy changes lives 2014 – a new perspective on health, employment and crime. MASTER.doc (literacytrust.org.uk) (Accessed 23rd July 2023)

Sutton Trust (2019) Closing the Regional Attainment Gap. Available at Closing the Regional Attainment Gap – Sutton Trust (Accessed 23rd July 2023).

Laura Harvey is National Programme Lead of the National Maths and Physics SCITT.

Republished by Talk The Talk on 24 Jan 2025 with permission from Laura Harvey. Many thanks.

The original article can be viewed by clicking here – clicking this link will take you to the website of The National Association of School-Based Teacher Trainers.

You can find out more about our Teacher CPD here or get in touch to arrange a meeting with Talk The Talk to discuss your CPD objectives here

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