At Woodlands Primary School, we believe that structure helps children to learn. We apply this to our lessons, and all of our teachers impart knowledge of the curriculum using a structured approach. How we do this is broken down into different areas called CONFIDENT. This stands for cognitive science, outstanding behaviour management, nurture and wellbeing, formative assessment, instruction – the principles of, deep curriculum knowledge, excellence, needs of pupils and teaching of reading.

Teaching and learning coaches support the development of CONFIDENT through school, and all teachers learn and develop their skills within a framework written for Woodlands teachers. This ensures that there is clarity on all of our approaches, and how we teach from Early Years to Year 6. We ask teachers to learn and develop their understanding of the following:

• Supporting younger pupils, or those who are not yet, to become fluent readers and to write fluently and legibly. 
• Teaching unfamiliar vocabulary explicitly and planning for pupils to be repeatedly exposed to high-utility and high-frequency vocabulary in what is taught. 
• Modelling reading comprehension by asking questions, making predictions, and summarising when reading. 
• Promoting reading for pleasure (e.g. by using a range of whole class reading approaches and regularly reading high-quality texts to children). 
• Modelling and requiring high-quality oral language, recognising that spoken language underpins the development of reading and writing.
• Exposing children to a range of high quality sources within lessons beyond reading sessions.
• Modelling a love of reading within the classroom through book talk, discussions and recommendations.
• Making links to carefully chosen texts in all curriculum subjects, modelling high quality reading instruction.

Our teaching and learning coaches in school (and the Teaching and Learning Leads) are Katie Hall and Sarah Bustamante.