Improving literacy through self-checks

Elisabeth Bowling: A Wild Surmise
5 min readNov 27, 2021

Since taking on oversight of whole-school literacy two years ago, it’s struck me as a bit of a monolith: it’s enormously important, but unwieldy and often vaguely implemented. Its inflexible systems can leave staff and pupils alike feeling that quick improvement is out of reach. But much like other vital parts of school life, such as behaviour or engagement, literacy seems to me to:

1. Underpin all academic success;

2. Rely upon every teacher approaching it consistently;

3. Require shared sky-high expectations of what children are capable of achieving.

Unlike behaviour or engagement, literacy is unique in provoking push-back, with staff understandably frustrated that they have to teach writing skills as well as getting through the enormous amount of subject content their disciplines hold. I’m sure maths teachers across the country internally roll their eyes each time a literacy based CPD session is announced. Even I as an English teacher empathise with this reluctance. However, I’ve come to realise that everyone’s involvement in foregrounding literacy in every single lesson is essential. Children — often our most vulnerable children — won’t produce the work they are capable of unless we are all routinely reminding and narrating our high standards for written work.

Don’t believe me? Organise a cross-curricular book look in which you compare the standard of work across subjects for some of your key students. The variation in the quality of work they achieve is astounding, mirroring Dylan Wiliam’s finding that ‘the quality of instruction received by students as they progress through a school is very variable’: there seems to be far more variation in teacher quality between schools than within schools (Wiliam 2014: 2). We owe it to our students to reduce this oscillation in our expectations.

It took me over a year to come up with a whole-school solution to this problem. I knew that any literacy system needed to be clear, easy to enact, and require little specialist knowledge. Although I agree with excellent thinkers such as Phil Beadle that ideally, all teachers would understand grammatical rules and clause constructions, I can’t help but think this is unrealistic in a secondary school setting. I hugely admire primary teachers who are able to embed this niche knowledge into every aspect of their teaching, and I hope with time all secondary teachers will be equipped with this same ability. But for now, I needed something quicker.

The result has been the self-check.

The self-check process

The self-check is designed to remind all teachers to maintain high standards of literacy in their teaching, and to ensure all students proof-read and improve work before they are ‘finished’. It draws pupils’ attention to not just what they write, but also how they write. It works like this:

The self-check sticker, stuck into the inside front cover of every book

1. A self-check sticker is stuck into the front inside page of every single book / folder across the school.

2. Teachers are trained in narrating and praising expectations, for example ‘Everyone: underline the date and title with a ruler. Massive well done to Ali who’s doing that neatly now’.

3. After writing an extended piece (a paragraph, a page or more), teachers invite students to complete their self-checks in green pen. Children re-read their work, identifying the building blocks of accurate expression and correcting any missing elements. In my experience, the identification of, say, capital letters by boxing them works better than just asking students to proof-read. In giving a clear action, students scrutinise their writing far more closely.

4. The default self-checks are written on the sticker. However, teachers are welcome to adapt them for their subject areas and/or the attainment of the class. A weaker group might simply complete the first three self-checks. For my high achieving Year 11s, for example, we box apostrophes (a common allergy) rather than capital letters.

5. As part of our feedback policy, codes are used to quickly draw attention to major errors children haven’t been able to self-correct. Whole-class feedback is used to teach key spellings or syntax issues.

The impact has been enormous. Children know to ‘think literacy’ each and every time they write. Teachers are pleased that most avoidable errors are removed before they need to act, reducing their workload. Books show higher quality of written work more consistently across the schools.

Self-check in an Y7 SEN RSE book
Self-check in chemistry. You can see where the student has made improvements as a result.
Self-check plus teacher literacy feedback in an LPA biology book

FAQ

Don’t students hate drawing over their neat work?

Not in my experience. Green pen is lighter than dark blue/black, and the self-checks make visible their accuracy and style, especially when they’re working on varying sentence structures or high-level vocabulary.

Do I really need to do this?

A consistent approach is vital in ensuring all children maintain high standards of their work. However, subject specialists are welcome to adapt the self-checks for their disciplines. The maths department at my school are currently developing numeracy self-checks which follow similar principles.

Can’t they just proof-read, without the underlining/boxing/circling?

They could, but you’d find lots of children, especially those we most want to reach, will make no changes to their work. In actively engaging with the foundations of accurate expression, simple tasks are used to provoke close scrutiny and active correction of written work.

Can you do it as peer assessment?

You could, but peer checks lose the proof-reading practice that is so valuable.

Does this really solve all issues around literacy?

Hah, if only. But it’s clear, simple to use and instantly actionable. It works well alongside teachers considering carefully how they expect children to be writing in their subject areas.

For more on whole-school literacy, you might be interested in these two previous posts:

Beautiful writing across the curriculum

Building a reading culture

Dylan Wiliam, ‘The Formative Evaluation of Teaching Performance’ (2014). http://www.dylanwiliam.org/Dylan_Wiliams_website/Publications_files/The%20formative%20evaluation%20of%20teaching%20performance%20%28CSE%202014%29%20secure.pdf

Elisabeth Bowling, Assistant Principal for Teaching and Learning.

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Elisabeth Bowling: A Wild Surmise

Considering education, schools and books. Elisabeth Bowling, Assistant Principal and Head of English. I tweet at @elucymay.