Research School Network: Implementing Disciplinary Literacy – what it might look like in practice The new EEF guidance report provides a lot of helpful advice and strategies for improving reading, writing and oracy

The new EEF guidance report on improving secondary literacy provides a lot of helpful advice and strategies for improving reading, writing and oracy. It’s a really clear and accessible document which makes you want to do something about each of the seven recommendations and to mobilise a disciplinary literacy approach as quickly as possible. This, of course, would be a mistake.

As the EEF’s own Implementation Guidance report points out, before making any changes, it is important to be clear about the precise problem the change in practice is trying to solve. An intervention should have a narrow focus and a clear plan for how to evaluate its impact, and should only grow and scale up in reach if impactful.

The third recommendation from the report identifies four key considerations:

• Specify a tight area of focus for improvement that is amenable to change.
• Determine a programme of activity based on existing evidence. 
• Examine the fit and feasibility of possible interventions to the school context.
• Make an adoption decision.

What, then, might such an approach to implementation look like in a school that has identified improving reading as a priority, but where the prevailing ethos is that literacy is really the work of the English department and where there is little expertise across the organisation on how to teach reading effectively?

Instinctively, it would seem that recommendation three (developing students’ ability to read complex academic texts) and recommendation five (combining writing instruction with reading in every subject) would be the most obvious starting points to meet the needs of the school.

Yet, whilst developing students’ ability to read complex texts and combining reading and writing in the classroom is the end goal, it may not be the best place to start. If the culture is not quite ready for a disciplinary approach to academic reading, or expertise is not currently in place to enact the advice effectively, then the impact on literacy levels would likely be minimal.

Better then to pave the way for more nuanced and sophisticated disciplinary work later on by working on the culture and building the expertise base first. This could involve identifying a small group of teachers with an interest in developing literacy, ideally ones from across different subject areas, not just the English department. These teachers would be the agents of change.

Their first job would be to dig deeper into the Literacy Guidance, and make sure they fully understand the concept of disciplinary literacy and have the time, space and support to think through what it actually looks like in their different subjects. Shared reading of one or two of the underlying research papers would provide the means to frame questions and build up levels of expertise.

A senior leader would need to be involved, or at least someone with the ability to drive and sustain any change. This might be a literacy co-ordinator or a member of the senior leadership team. Either way, it would be their responsibility to develop an implementation plan, drawing upon the growing expertise and practical experience of the group.

Even if the first year of action only involved reaching a shared understanding of disciplinary reading, and generated some experience of putting this into practice in one or two classrooms, this would still represent a significant step forward and increase the chances of success further down the line. As more and more examples of reading in subjects appear, and people start asking questions, the culture changes and changes in practice start to embed.

A crucial part of the plan involves evaluating the success of the plan at each of the designated markers identified at the outset. It would be expected for the plan to evolve and be reshaped in light of lessons learned or changes in context. This again would be the responsibility of the leader, with input from the group, which by now may have increased in size and diversified.

This is, of course, only a hypothetical approach to meeting the identified need of improving reading across the school. Other approaches are available! What’s important to remember is that for any approach to increase its chances of being successful, it needs to be intentional, sustained and establish a clear theory of change. It needs to answer the question: what will literacy levels look like when they have improved, and how will I know?

The EEF has just published an improved version of its Implementation Guide which provides a lot of guidance to support leaders making these kinds of changes, whatever the size and scale. There are now a range of useful tools to support each step of the implementation process, increasing the chances of any implementation sustaining itself over time.

When we see areas in our schools that need our attention, it can be hard to resist the urge to act swiftly, but if we can get better at being more disciplined in understanding the nature of the problem and what it would take to address with the limited time and resources we possess, we are more likely to be successful in making things better. This approach is true not only of this example, but for any change we are thinking of making to our practice.