Empowering Education Through Project Word Power

The sustainability of the Word Power project

Our story.. Anthony Gell didn t qualify to be a part of the Word Power project as a recipient of the funding and training that came with the project. As an SLE I was designated to work with 2 schools to deliver the bid and as such I went to the training for all elements of the project most importantly: the inference training and the Academic Language training As I was in the training I thought that my school would really benefit from lots of the elements of the training. The issue was how to get the project up and running with no funding or formal external support.

Our Journey.Getting Started Helpful pre-starters were that my English Dept have already done a lot of work with Steve and value his work so they took no convincing of the merit of doing this type of work. Some colleagues had already done inference training previously so had some knowledge of how it works. I am a member of SLT (responsible for CPD and T&L) and therefore perhaps have an easier route to engineering change It was beneficial that we weren t going to have to do any of the reporting that came with the project so we could do it at our own pace alongside our other development priorities.

Our Journey.Making Change Happen I condensed the Academic Language training down into a 1 hour inset session to deliver to one of my SLE schools I then re-used this training in my own school to train all teaching staff in the skills relating to Academic Language training. There was no onus on staff to have to choose a set number of words or report back on their relative successes. It was about giving staff more tools in their toolkit Two faculties decided to use Academic Language as their peer development work for the year and they followed the model form the project. Both faculties saw good success with the acquisition of new language.

Our Journey.Making Change Happen We are very fortunate to have a fully qualified teacher who works as our English Learning Mentor. We already have an established system of withdrawal from English reading lessons for small group literacy work so the structures to make the inference training work were already in place. I begged a copy of the resources form the inference training and went through them with my colleague (she knew more about it than I did within about 20 minutes!) Since then she has run inference groups in y7 & Y8 very successfully. We have clear data that shows gains for many of the students. A debate for us has been about whether to expand the inference training across the English Dept. We decided against it as the English staff felt it would be too restrictive on higher ability groups. However we planned (before Covid 19 struck) to train all the English staff in the Inference techniques so they could apply them in class with the students who have done the training (and for others who may find it useful). Covid has got in the way of this but we will return to it next year.