This document provides numerous tips and strategies for teachers regarding literacy, differentiation, marking, and feedback. Some of the key suggestions include: 1) Check spelling, punctuation and grammar (SPAG) separately from content, as they are different skills. Provide questions at different levels of difficulty for differentiation. Commit to regularly scheduled directed improvement and reflection time (DIRT) for students to improve their work based on feedback. 2) Use games and creative writing prompts involving subject keywords to engage students in literacy. Explicitly teach key skills like note-taking and find ways to incorporate student choice and voice into lessons. 3) When marking, focus on what students have done correctly, find positives in poor work, and get

1. Words of Wisdom

2. When marking…
•Check SPAG separately to content –
it’s a different skill !

3. KS3 literacy starter
suggestion
•Provide students with 5 – 10 words
appropriate to the topic and give five
minutes to come up with a creative story

4. Differentiation
•Differentiate by questioning
•Prepare top band questions, middle
band questions and lower band
questions
•Give extra points / rewards for getting
the higher band questions

5. Differentiation
•Print different worksheets in different
colours by levels. As the year advances
you can demonstrate progress as some
students move through the colour
bands.

6. ‘Bad Teacher’ counter-intuitive
marking
•Mark everything which is right, WRONG
•Mark everything which is wrong, RIGHT
•Then get the students to correct the
‘bad teacher’ and write feedback on
your bad marking

7. Word games
•Create games such as Scrabble,
hangman, word-search or crosswords for
your subject, using relevant key words

8. Find the positive
•Even for a poor piece of work, always try
and find some positives!

9. Empathy feedback
•How would YOU feel if …

10. Correct the mistakes
•Give the students key words with errors in
the spelling and get them to correct

11. Keywords
•Scramble the keywords for each lesson
on the board as a starter

12. Literacytip
•Use mini whiteboards regularly to check
spelling of key words

13. Differentiation
•Always change the colour of your
whiteboard and font to dyslexia friendly
•Always use pictures alongside writing in
displays, powerpoint or smart-board
presentations

14. Marking and feedback
•Commit to DIRT – Directed improvement
and reflection time – on a REGULAR
rather than a ‘nice idea’ basis!

15. Differentiation
•Name students for different roles in the
group to ensure all students participate
and feed back eg. leader, negotiator,
questioner, summariser, relayer.

16. Literacy
•Use THINK PINK highlights for SPAG errors
and ask students to use their dictionaries
to correct spellings themselves when
they get the work back.

17. Differentiation
•Don’t make the task easier – make the
thinking around it easier for those who
need it

18. Differentiate from the top
•Aim high: start with the most challenging
elements of the success criteria and
scaffold UP to that, rather than
beginning with a low starting point

19. Differentiation
•Lower - Use ‘cloze’ fill in the gaps tasks or
paragraphs, either providing the
vocabulary needed or leaving it open
depending on ability.
•All - Always ask students to justify and
develop opinions verbally and in writing.

20. Student marking and
feedback: colour code
•Use different questions at different levels
on different coloured paper (these can
be pre-prepared for certain tasks.

21. Rewards!
•When creating your own DIRT sheet for your
subject, ensure you have an area for a
reward value wheel to make sure students
are rewarded for their efforts in improving
their work
•Reward excellent literacy, both with specific
verbal praise ‘I like your excellent choice of
vocabulary / your accurate use of key
words / the way you are speaking like a
historian’ and give out reward wheels

22. Choices for differentiation
•Offer choices of plenary or a homework
menu to give students more control of
their learning and keep students
stretched and challenged right to the
end of the lesson and beyond…

23. Marking and feedback –
saving time
•Have a code or pre-printed sheet or
stickers for your most common
comments or questions in feedback to
save time writing the same thing many
times.

24. Marking and feedback – no
grades!
•When marking, don’t always give a
grade, sometimes just give feedback as
students are more inclined to pay
attention to formative comments rather
than skip to the grade.

25. Literacy
•Always spell out, write up or say aloud key
words during the lesson and check
understanding and spelling using
questioning or mini whiteboards.
•Have spellings and definitions of key words
clearly displayed in your classroom and in
books
•Set regular spelling tests, quizzes and
comprehension tests to check basic
knowledge.

26. Clear success criteria
• Create separate literacy targets for
improvement
• Use a SPAG checklist before tasks are started
• Link this to the SPAG criteria in the new GCSEs
!

27. Marking tip
•When marking exams, don’t mark the
whole paper through, instead mark all of
Q1 across the group, then all of Q2 and
so on – it helps you to self moderate as
you mark.

28. Know your students
•Include a snippet of something that
appeals to your students based on
knowledge of their personalities and
interests, whether football teams, sport,
art, music or computer games.

29. Always think:
•Would YOU like to be in your lesson?

30. Empathy:
•Students have been sitting still behind
desks all day – how much are you
talking? How engaging is your lesson?
How will you get them to focus? Design
tasks with their whole day in mind and
make your lesson stand out.

31. Explicit teaching of key skills
eg. note-taking• Do you explicitly teach students how to make
notes?
• Skills which we take for granted do need to
be taught.
• Try using a series of instructions or quick
reminders to improve the structure and
quality of student notes
• Think: how will they use these notes to revise?
Do you know? Do they know?

32. Marking & Feedback:
questioning
•Plan your questioning: While some
questioning is responsive, other questions
can be planned, particularly for higher
ability students
•Have a series of questions ready which
challenge reasoning skills, not just
knowledge eg. Instead of ‘Is France a
democracy?’ – ‘What does it mean for
country a democracy?’

33. Marking & feedback: get
students working!
•Are you working harder than your
students?
•They should be working harder than you!
•Get students to do the work in response
to your marking and feedback eg. by
asking questions, responding to
feedback, improving and rewriting.

34. Marking
•If you feel you are marking too much,
check the marking policy! You may find
you don’t have to mark as much as you
think you do!

35. If they can’t speak it, they
can’t write it
•Use questioning to develop extended
verbal answers in class, asking students
to justify and explain in full, using
standard English and excellent, subject-
specific vocabulary.
•By developing oracy, the quality of
written work will follow.

36. Literacy is still important at
KS5
•Give sentence starters to develop higher
level responses at KS5, whether orally or
in writing eg.
•‘It could be argued that..’
•‘Initially, it may appear that… however
…’

37. Literacy: zero tolerance
•Spot a basic error on a piece of work?
Hand it back and don’t mark it until it
has been proof read and corrected

38. Thought stems
•Use thought stems for your subject to
develop oracy and literacy
•Differentiate thought stem posters at
different cognitive levels eg. identify,
evaluate, analyse

39. Student-led learning
•Ask students to design the plenary or the
starter for the next lesson
•Challenge higher ability students to link
the learning to prior knowledge before
fully introducing new information

40. Literacy and general knowledge:
‘read like a scientist’… ‘think like
a historian’•Find a relevant, challenging text relating
to your subject and set reading for
homework or classwork.
•Take turns reading aloud (eg. ‘popcorn’
reading) and set comprehension
questions.
•Then create a list of key words or
questions arising from the text.

41. Marking
•Frequent and immediate feedback is
more valued by students

42. Drop everything and read
•Why wait for your turn to come in a Year
7 Drop Everything and Read lesson?
•Choose a relevant text and take time
out!

43. Use ‘CUPS’ for proofreading
•C – Capital letters
•U – Understanding: does it make sense
•P – punctuation
•S - spelling

44. Nominalisation – turn verbs
into nouns
• For more stylish academic writing, ask students to
turn verbs into nouns.
• Eg. instead of ‘Germany invaded Poland in 1939.
This caused World War Two to break out’ try
turning the verbs ‘invaded’ into the noun
‘invasion’ and ‘to break out’ into ‘the outbreak’
• ‘Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939 was the
immediate cause of the outbreak of World War
Two.

45. HAPS and A*
•Have an A* reading list
•Develop an A* glossary or vocabulary list
•Have extension questions from the next
level up eg. GCSE questions for Year 8 or
9, AS questions for GCSE students