Research School Network: Evidence-Based Teaching: The Development of Colour-Coded Writing

Author: Alison Richardson and Jacqui Trowsdale, Allenton Primary School

Back in 2014 there had been a huge curriculum change (the repercussions of which are still being felt now) as well as a governmental view towards academisation which reduced the amount of local authority support around professional development.

Due to these scenarios, Derby University initiated a pilot to increase collaborative working focused around evidence based teaching in the classroom which would allow teachers to take more responsibility for developing their own practice. As a forward-thinking school, Allenton was eager to be involved.

Historically our school had done poorly in SATs testing with writing always being the weakest area. Many issues contributed to this i.e. the school being in an area of social deprivation (high level of Pupil Premium children), lack of aspirations, poor spoken language, and limited support from home and so on. Knowing this, the school made writing a huge focus. In Year 3 (our year group at the time), the push on grammar seemed particularly troublesome as this had not been as explicit before, based on the previous curriculum. Children were now required to use more technical vocabulary and have a clear understanding of what all of this meant and it was our job to make it accessible for them.

Over the course of the year, evidenced-based teaching projects had been implemented by the SLT and the whole school were encouraged to develop their own projects with the full support of the Headteacher (Jon Fordham). As partner teachers who are always looking for a challenge and ways to develop we decided to apply the theories of evidence-based teaching to the issues we were uncovering within the new curriculum.

Within the Year 3 cohort there was a large percentage who were below age related expectation for writing (96%) based on the new curriculum. To combat this, the children were put into two sets – one higher ability and one lower to try to plug the gaps more efficiently and tailor teaching specifically to their needs.

It was very clear in the higher ability set that whilst generally the children could explain clearly what the different word types were; when it came to independent application it was obvious that they were unsure of how to transfer this knowledge onto paper. This lack of a solid foundation of understanding meant that introducing higher level language concepts such as similes and metaphors was difficult, as the children didn’t understand the word types enough to be able to manipulate them.

In the lower ability set it was apparent that the children struggled to identify basic word types and frequently mixed them up even in discussion e.g. describing ​‘and’ as an adjective. This group also struggled with very basic punctuation including the consistent application of full stops and capital letters. The children were also confused as to the grammatical structure of their sentences and rarely proofread to check that their work made sense.

At this point we had already had several informal discussions as partner teachers about the issues which were evident in the children’s work and through this we identified some areas for investigation such as dyslexia and differentiation.

Upon researching a variety of areas we realised that whilst dyslexia itself wasn’t the issue, investigating this area led us to think about the use of colour and how it could support learners:

During this period of research, we also discovered that increasing memory recall would be key and that we could do this both through the use of colour but also through rhyme/​song.

“…colour-coded – children could see each specific language feature and technique (or ​‘writing tool’) in a different colour on the collaboratively constructed class toolkit poster. When they came to independently assessing their own or a peer’s writing this helped them to establish how much of the toolkit they had used successfully.”

(J.Rooke, pg 21)

With the lower ability set, Jacqui had already been using songs to try and engage the children with certain word types. These songs came in the form of youtube videos from the site www.grammaropolis.com. The children really enjoyed the characters and the catchy songs and as teachers we felt it was really useful that not only were the words of the songs written on the screen but they were also written in the colour of the word type/​character being portrayed.

We also liked that the lyrics of the songs reflected how the words should be used and the more they listened the more they understood and remembered the terms. This in turn gave them a clear word bank to draw on. However this was not enough for independent application – their understanding was improving but they still were not able to show this well in writing.

At this point we decided the children needed something more concrete to work with in order to give their writing an almost physical form. Inspired by a child from the higher ability set who declared ​“I really like the way that when he writes an adjective it puts the noun he’s describing in a colour.” We decided to get the children to start physically writing their words in colour.

We started with four colours based around what we knew the children needed further development with and what we felt were areas of weakness:

o Adjectives = red

o Adverbs = green

o Conjunctions = purple

o Punctuation = blue

NB there was no song relating to punctuation so we selected a colour that was not already connected to a song that we were using.

Each of the children were given a ​‘pack’ which included the four colours. It was made clear that they would be using the pencil crayons across all curriculum subjects so that they didn’t just feel they should apply it in English. Teaching staff also had a pack of whiteboard pens that matched the colours and each time writing was modelled the colours would be applied. The colours were introduced in a series of lessons which also included the use of the Grammaropolis videos and songs.

Within the first week of the project it became very clear that the level of enthusiasm that the children had towards writing had increased. Giving them coloured pencils and a physical way to express their understanding was a huge motivator. It did decrease the output of the children initially but the quality of their writing was much higher and it only took them a few weeks to get back to their original pace of work.

From the teacher perspective, it was clear very early on that this was an immensely helpful assessment tool to gauge understanding. For example, an EAL child who appeared previously to have a good understanding of the concept of conjunctions and what they were, clearly didn’t at all as when she wrote at length she colour-coded words such as ​‘is’ and ​‘the’ as conjunctions and left words such as ​‘and’ and ​‘because’ without colour at all. This immediately impacted planning, leading to a lesson with a conjunction focus.

Confusion around certain word types became much more obvious and evident. Initially, it appeared that the children were confusing adjectives and adverbs but upon further investigation it soon became clear that the actual misperception was around the understanding of nouns and verbs. Upon entry in Year 3, the children had seemed sound with these concepts but it was clear that this was a false assumption. On reflection, the fact that the children had little time working on the new curriculum meant that these word types hadn’t been as deeply embedded or as explicit in their use, as we assumed they would have been.

As a cohort, Year 3 had made an average of 2.5 bands progress over the two terms – which is accelerated progress. At this point in the year the children had also closed the gap and now rather than 96% not being at age related expectation, now only 76% were. Whilst not as dramatic as the bands progress, it still showed a closing of the gap. While we are aware that there are other factors that could have contributed to their accelerated progress, colour coding played a huge part in this.

After it was clear that the colour-coding was having a successful impact the outcomes were shared in a variety of ways both internally and locally.It was agreed to take colour-coding school wide but that it could be adapted as appropriate depending on the age and ability of different cohorts in school. Colour-coding was executed as follows:

Year group
Implementation and adaptation
Foundation stage
Teachers modelled writing adjectives in red pen and collected word banks of the different word types using the colours.
Year 1
Specific focus on punctuation (capital letters and full stops) and adjectives.
Year 2
Applied colour coding in line with Year 3 and introduced new colours for nouns and verbs.
Year 4
Used strips of coloured paper rather than crayons as they felt that sentence structure and the ability to manipulate these word types was important.
Year 5& 6
Used colour coding as an assessment tool whereby the children used the colours to go back and underline the particular word types in their work. Other colours were introduced for prefixes and suffixes.
Colour-coding over the years

What is written above details the start process for colour-coding in Allenton Primary, however a reflection of its greatest success is in its longevity. Colour-coding is fully embedded, so the way it has been applied has evolved. Upper Key Stage 2 now use it more frequently during peer critique to give appropriate and more specific feedback; Lower Key Stage 2 use it to help differentiate phrases as well as words (such as identifying adjectival versus adverbial similes); Key Stage 1 use it more as Year 3 used to and EYFS continue to expose their children to in a manner of practical ways.

As teachers, this first project gave us the confidence to strive to improve our practice in more formal ways; using research to support and justify our courses of action, all with the support of our headteacher.

References

Rooke.J (2012) Transforming Writing: Interim Evaluation Report London: National Literacy Trust, Esmee Fairbairn Foundation

Grammaropolis (online), 2009 – 2018, Available at:

www.grammaropolis.com (accessed 19^th April)

Further reading:

Poultney. V (Editor), 2017. Evidence-Based Teaching in Primary Education. Critical Publishing

Davis Dyslexia Association International (online), 1995 – 2016 Available at: http://www.dyslexia.com/about-dyslexia/understanding-dyslexia/guide-for-classroom-teachers/ (accessed 03 August 2016).

DfES National Literacy Strategy (2001) Improving Writing: DfES Publications.

Dolmans.D, Wolfhagen.I, Ginns.P (2010) Measuring approaches to learning in a problem based learning context. International Journal of Medical Education (1) 55 – 60

Dyslexia Institute Limited, 2005 – 2015, (online), Available at: http://www.dyslexiaaction.org.uk/for-educators (accessed 03 August 2016).