Evidence for Learning works with organisations to map their improvement frameworks to the Teaching & Learning Toolkit.
Founded by Dr Simon Breakspear, Agile Schools is a partner of schools and systems globally, helping them to develop the capacity to continuously improve and adapt. Agile Schools have a global faculty of leading practitioners and advisors who help to build the capabilities of leaders to maximise their impact on learning and teaching.
These evidence-based teaching practices within the Teaching & Learning Toolkit have been identified to use within a Learning Sprints Lab.
To support schools to implement these evidence-based practices, Evidence for Learning is working with Agile Schools and other stakeholders to develop Practice Guides that will provide further recommendations on how to activate these practices through subject-specific strategies, tools and classroom activities. Such resources have been developed in the UK by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) through a range of Guidance Reports that help schools implement effective teaching in areas such as literacy and numeracy. EEF published Guidance Reports to date include:
- Improving Literacy in Key Stage One*
- Improving Literacy in Key Stage Two
- Improving Mathematics in Key Stages 2 & 3
- Making Best Use of Teaching Assistants
- Putting Evidence to Work: A School’s Guide to Implementation
The complete Teaching & Learning Toolkit can be accessed here.
Five elements of evidence based reading instruction
Element | Description | In the Classroom |
Phonemic awareness |
The ability to hear the sounds in spoken words and understand that words are made up of sequences of sounds. | Phoneme blending: combining individual phonemes to form words. Phoneme segmentation: breaking words into their individual phonemes. Phoneme manipulation – the ability to manipulate sounds in words. |
Phonics |
An approach to teaching reading that develops learners’ phonemic awareness. Decoding new words by sounding them out and combining or ‘blending’ the sound-spelling patterns. | Systematic phonics approaches explicitly teach pupils a comprehensive set of letter-sound relationships. |
Fluency |
Reader’s ability to recognise words accurately and quickly and to read aloud with appropriate expression | Repeated reading – students read passages aloud several times and receive guidance and feedback from their teacher. |
Vocabulary |
The words students’ know and use when communicating with others. | Three tiers of words 1) first tier – everyday words – e.g. cat, 2) second tier – complex but occur regularly e.g. coincidence, 3) third tier – specific contexts – e.g. peninsula |
Comprehension |
Learners’ understanding of the text. Requires sufficient vocabulary. |
Teaching specific strategies that students can apply to both monitor and overcome barriers to comprehension. These include prediction, questioning, clarifying, summarising, inference and activating prior knowledge. |
Effective secondary reading approaches
Approach | Effect size | What? | How? |
One to one tuition | 0.38 |
One hour of tutoring every two weeks to year 7 students focused on reading and writing. |
Coaches worked individually with students |
One to one tuition | 0.42 |
35 minute sessions once week for 20 weeks. |
Tutors are specially trained teacher aides. |
Small group tutoring | 0.30 |
Groups of 6-8 students with formal phonics instruction, understanding the global aspects of a text, and class discussion of text meaning to improve reading comprehension. |
Taught by trained practitioner and an assistant. |
Collaborative learning | 0.29 | Partner reading, story retelling, story writing, word mastery and story-structure activities. Instruction focuses on explicit teaching of metacognitive strategies. | Middle school students work in groups of four or five to build each others reading skills |
Metacognitive strategy | 0.16 |
Students given the opportunity to read independently, to work in small groups and receive whole group lessons. |
No additional time given to teaching literacy rather the time is use for Reading Intervention through Strategy Enhancement. |
*Key Stages in the state education system levels in England align to the Australian school years as follows: Key Stage 1 – Years 1-2; Key Stage 2 – Years 3-6; and Key Stage 3 – Years 7-9.
References
Baye, A., Lake, C., Inns, A., & Slavin, R. (2017). Effective Reading Programs for Secondary Students. Retrieved from http://www.bestevidence.org/word/Secondary-Reading-08-03-17.pdf
Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation. (2017). Effective Reading Instruction in the Early Years of School. Retrieved from https://www.cese.nsw.gov.au/publications-filter/literature-review-effective-reading-instruction-in-the-early-years-of-school
Education Endowment Foundation. (2016). Improving Literacy in Key Stage One. Retrieved from London: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/public/files/Publications/Campaigns/Literacy/KS1_Literacy_Guidance.pdf
Education Endowment Foundation. (2017a). Evidence for Learning Teaching & Learning Toolkit: Education Endownment Foundation. Retrieved from http://evidenceforlearning.org.au/the-toolkit/
Education Endowment Foundation. (2017b). Improving Literacy in Key Stage Two. Retrieved from London: http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/29345/1/KS2_Literacy_Guidance_2017.pdf
Lord, P., Bradshaw, S., Stevens, E., & Sytles, B. (2015). Perry Beeches Coaching Programme: Evaluation Report and Executive Summary. Retrieved from London: https://v1.educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/uploads/pdf/Perry_Beeches.pdf
2018 Agile Schools Summit
Here is Matthew Deeble - Director of Evidence for Learning speaking at the 2018 Agile Schools Summit on 'Mobilising research evidence through professional engagement: International lessons on what works best'. (Time 17.21).