One of the great things about learning any subject is the fact that you don’t need to know everything – you only need to understand and use a few critically important concepts and approaches that provide the most value.
This is the approach that we take with showing people how to improve their teaching practice by embedding literacy and numeracy.
Once you have a framework for embedding literacy and numeracy as well as few key approaches to work with, building on your knowledge and making progress becomes much easier. And this means you’ll be making more of a difference to your teaching outcomes and, most importantly, your learners’ lives.
What we teach is a set of key skills that we call the Embedding LN Baseline Knowledge. You can use these skills and the framework that they work with to improve your teaching practice, get better results from your learners, and increase their skill development.
Once you master the basics of embedding, you can tackle even some of the most challenging teaching and learning goals with your learners, students, or customers.
Since 2007, I’ve read everything I can on the subject of embedding literacy and numeracy, worked for various training providers, started my own NZQA registered and accredited training provider, taught hundreds of trades, vocational trainers, and other education professionals, and consulted with government departments and businesses.
Along the way, I’ve collected, distilled, and refined what I’ve learned about embedding literacy and numeracy into a simple framework. Understanding a few fundamental approaches will give you a toolbox of teaching and learning tools that you can rely on to make a difference in the lives of your learners.
If you invest the time and energy necessary to learn these concepts, you’ll easily be in the top 1 percent of teaching professionals when it comes to knowing:
- Your context including knowing why you need to embed literacy and numeracy into your training.
- What good teaching looks like including some ways to think outside the box.
- How to figure out the specific literacy and numeracy demands of your training.
- How to diagnose specific literacy and numeracy skill needs in your learners and identify the gaps between where they are and where they need to be to succeed.
- How to plan and facilitate embedded literacy and numeracy training in your context.
- How to assess your learners’ literacy and numeracy skill development progress.
- How to evaluate your effectiveness as you experiment with embedding literacy and numeracy into your training.
