Oracy at Meridian

Intent 

Oracy provides all students with the skills to be challenged, to learn and achieve, where every voice is valued, active listening and critical thinking are embedded in line with the ethos of resilience, ambition and respect. 

Key focus throughout the curriculum

These skills have been assigned to support each year group to develop and become more confident in their articulation and justification of ideas.

5 year learning journey 

The oracy learning journey shows the development of oracy from KS2 through to the end of KS4. It enables us to map out where students should be compared to where they are and support them on reaching the intended milestones, helping to close the gap between students with lower reading and speech ages with those in the same year group.

Oracy-learning-journey.pdf

Implementation

As talk is integral to learning, students will be encouraged, in all lessons to employ talk tactics. These will encourage students to summarise, clarify, challenge, build, probe and instigate ideas, building on critical thinking and confidence. These will be displayed in classrooms and used by staff to develop the articulation of ideas. Staff will model good oracy by articulating the thought processes underpinning talk and will always mark by highlighting an important idea or type of contribution.

We aim to encourage confident fluent speakers, who can articulate their ideas in a wide range of situations through the following whole school strategies:

• Speaking in standard English and full sentences
• Direct vocabulary instruction
• Debate
• Talk tactics

Students will be experience a range of oracy explicit activities across the curriculum including:

• Talk like an expert
• Critical thinking
• Debates
• Talking trios
• Collaborative work
• Reading lessons
• Presentation of learning
• Questioning
• Modelling of tier 2 and 3 words

“Talk is the most powerful tool of communication in the classroom and it’s fundamentally central to the acts of teaching and learning”. Professor Frank Hardman.

Please watch the videos below to see oracy in action at MHS:

Oracy in Year 9 Science
Oracy in Year 9 Geography 
Discussion in Year 9 Geography
Setting up a discussion in Year 7 Worldviews 
Stimuli for talk in Year 7 Worldviews
Paired talk Year 7
Paired talk Year 9
 

Feedback

Feedback is given throughout lessons by teachers aiming to build the confidence of all students in their oracy skills.

Careers

Learning beyond the classroom

Meridian Talks 

Click here to watch our students delivering speeches

Debating competitions

Links made to careers

Developing higher order thinking skills through the use of Talk Tactics.

 

Oracy tips for teaching and learning