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The Secret of Literacy: Making the implicit, explicit
Literacy? That's someone else's job, isn't it? This is a book for all teachers on how to make explicit to students those things we can do implicitly. In the Teachers' Standards it states that all teachers must demonstrate an understanding of, and take responsibility for, promoting high standards of literacy, articulacy, and the correct use of standard English, whatever the teacher's specialist subject. In The Secret of Literacy, David Didau inspires teachers to embrace the challenge of improving students' life chances through improving their literacy. Topics include: Why is literacy important?, Oracy improving classroom talk, How should we teach reading? How to get students to value writing, How written feedback and marking can support literacy.
240 pages, Paperback
First published January 31, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
September 3, 2017
Very readable and lots of practical ideas about how literacy can be embedded in the curriculum. Looking forward to hearing what others think at our Professional Reading Group meeting this week. His references to research and other books on the subject are useful and I've added more books to my "to read" list.
January 16, 2021
Very useful and easy take from to apply. Didau is also a very entertaining writer, keeping things light with the jokes but serious with the content.
Didau zooms in on the learning process and takes it apart from the learner's perspective to illustrate modes of scaffolding and building structures. There is a lot there and it is tempting to make use of it all. Didau immediately pumps the breaks on this himself and emphasizes the importance of achieving high results with low effort. Good learning activities do not have to take hours of preparation. Sometimes, the high-effort classes even do worse than the low-effort ones.
He also zooms out of the individual teacher's classroom and makes his case for the shared responsibility of developing literacy among teachers of all subjects. This is something I have not heared before but I think he makes an excellent case. Improving literacy should be a shared responsibility of teachers of all subjects. It might seem more obvious for a language teacher to undertake but literacy is required (to various degrees) for all classes.
In short, very useful. Didau inspires me in a way that I feel like I can implement his advice in a variety of ways to not only teach better but also teach smarter, for the benefit of my students and mysef.
Didau zooms in on the learning process and takes it apart from the learner's perspective to illustrate modes of scaffolding and building structures. There is a lot there and it is tempting to make use of it all. Didau immediately pumps the breaks on this himself and emphasizes the importance of achieving high results with low effort. Good learning activities do not have to take hours of preparation. Sometimes, the high-effort classes even do worse than the low-effort ones.
He also zooms out of the individual teacher's classroom and makes his case for the shared responsibility of developing literacy among teachers of all subjects. This is something I have not heared before but I think he makes an excellent case. Improving literacy should be a shared responsibility of teachers of all subjects. It might seem more obvious for a language teacher to undertake but literacy is required (to various degrees) for all classes.
In short, very useful. Didau inspires me in a way that I feel like I can implement his advice in a variety of ways to not only teach better but also teach smarter, for the benefit of my students and mysef.
August 9, 2015
Lots of useful strategies.
January 21, 2026
I sometimes imagine building a Fantasy Secondary School in the style of the Fantasy Premier League. David Didau would be an £8 million right-back: immaculate in defence (ignoring zeitgeisty nonsense and reasserting the importance of reducing teacher workload) and vicious on the counter (suggesting creative and effective approaches to improve quality of teaching and learning).
Whenever I find a passage in a book I want to return to, I fold the corner. I folded - on average - once every nine pages. I even found myself forced to choose whether I wanted to fold forward or backward, because there was often something worth returning to on both sides of the page.
I'm grateful Didau hasn't perpetuated the infuriating habit of education writers summarising each chapter into 'key takeaways' for time-pressured school leadsrs. I personally think it goes without saying that if you haven't engaged with the complexity of a book, you shouldn't try to implement any of its ideas. How many bullshit behaviour initiatives have been introduced thanks to the summarisation of Paul Dix's work into simple bullet-point 'solutions'?
Obviously I don't agree with absolutely everything in The Secret of Literacy. I found the brief discussion of so-called 'growth mindsets' uncritical for our more neurodiverse age. Didau's literacy marking codes are also inferior to those presented in Wexler and Hochmann's The Writing Revolution.
In the grand scheme of things, these are small quibbles. Every teacher who cares about teaching literacy will approach it in a different way - the important thing is making sure every teacher cares about teaching literacy. I already cared a lot, and this book made me care even more.
Whenever I find a passage in a book I want to return to, I fold the corner. I folded - on average - once every nine pages. I even found myself forced to choose whether I wanted to fold forward or backward, because there was often something worth returning to on both sides of the page.
I'm grateful Didau hasn't perpetuated the infuriating habit of education writers summarising each chapter into 'key takeaways' for time-pressured school leadsrs. I personally think it goes without saying that if you haven't engaged with the complexity of a book, you shouldn't try to implement any of its ideas. How many bullshit behaviour initiatives have been introduced thanks to the summarisation of Paul Dix's work into simple bullet-point 'solutions'?
Obviously I don't agree with absolutely everything in The Secret of Literacy. I found the brief discussion of so-called 'growth mindsets' uncritical for our more neurodiverse age. Didau's literacy marking codes are also inferior to those presented in Wexler and Hochmann's The Writing Revolution.
In the grand scheme of things, these are small quibbles. Every teacher who cares about teaching literacy will approach it in a different way - the important thing is making sure every teacher cares about teaching literacy. I already cared a lot, and this book made me care even more.
December 14, 2020
Practical and accessible work that clearly explains why all teachers, regardless of their subject, should pay explicit attention to language and then gives a clear framework with concrete tools and sensible advice for doing so.
Reading it gives a lot of good ideas, but really you then need to pick one aspect at a time to implement and get better at. I like Didau's comment that, in education, a lot of things are simple but not easy. The insight is clear enough, but actually getting it to work in real classrooms is hard. That does not mean it cannot or should not be done, just that we need a bit of grit and perseverance to get there and not give up as soon as a group doesn't respond to our first attempted intervention.
That perseverance is all the more important because if we manage to improve our students' literacy across the board then we're making a real contribution to reducing inequal opportunities.
At some points the book is clearly embedded in the UK context, but that should not stop those in other educational systems from reading on and translating to their own context. The practical advice is equally applicable.
Reading it gives a lot of good ideas, but really you then need to pick one aspect at a time to implement and get better at. I like Didau's comment that, in education, a lot of things are simple but not easy. The insight is clear enough, but actually getting it to work in real classrooms is hard. That does not mean it cannot or should not be done, just that we need a bit of grit and perseverance to get there and not give up as soon as a group doesn't respond to our first attempted intervention.
That perseverance is all the more important because if we manage to improve our students' literacy across the board then we're making a real contribution to reducing inequal opportunities.
At some points the book is clearly embedded in the UK context, but that should not stop those in other educational systems from reading on and translating to their own context. The practical advice is equally applicable.
September 9, 2020
I am a massive fan of the author, David Didau, and found his simple, direct style really easy to connect with.
I would highly recommend this book to all newly qualified/trainee teachers. Didau gives some great tips to really help our learners learn and from that perspective, it's a very empowering book because of course, that's our ultimate goal as teachers isn't it.
I read the book cover-to-cover but you could just as easily dip into different sections as needed.
I would highly recommend this book to all newly qualified/trainee teachers. Didau gives some great tips to really help our learners learn and from that perspective, it's a very empowering book because of course, that's our ultimate goal as teachers isn't it.
I read the book cover-to-cover but you could just as easily dip into different sections as needed.
October 22, 2017
Excellent- read it in one day and found it affirming and a much better and more practical articulation of my instincts in education. Loads of useful tips to put in place on Monday.
February 11, 2020
An excellent resource that deserves a place on your bookshelf or in the school library for cross curricular use.
August 8, 2022
Very useful and an essential tool to have under your belt as a teacher. Very easy read and to inspire and assist with day to day teaching.
April 9, 2015
As a regular reader (and retweeter) of David Didau's blog posts, and having attended one of his excellent CPD days, I knew this book would be brilliant. Ultimately, I wanted to read it in the hope that it would revolutionize my thinking, thereby changing my practice; there's no doubt it will.
Exhausted by yet another term with its impossible work load, I limped into the Easter holidays feeling rather like Humpty Dumpty, wondering how I would put myself back together again and rediscover love for my career whilst tackling the huge amount of marking I'd brought home... I'd reached the point where it was difficult to think clearly, drowning in marking and floundering when it came to planning well considered lessons. I wanted to do things differently but was too tired to think how. Thank God for this book. I feel refreshed, excited and full of resolve.
Whether you're an experienced teacher or a newbie, this book is essential reading. Didau sets out the rationale for everything he suggests thoroughly and engagingly - if you're anything like me, you'll be plastering it with post it notes and annotations, eager to try out his suggestions. It isn't gimmicky. He's not in the business of pointless bells and whistles, just the teaching methods that you can see will really work. Furthermore, he doesn't just tell you in theory, there are helpful examples, diagrams and illustrations. Finally, unlike a lot of books about teaching, he takes care not to heap burdens on teachers. Although I know I will find his optimum frequency for giving children written feedback difficult to attain with 12 different classes, most of the recommendations can be done with no extra work from me. In fact, they will most likely reduce my workload, and all without guilt because I can be confident that the quality of the tasks I'm setting will improve my students' learning.
My only bugbear is, regardless of the emphasis it can add to a piece of writing, every time a sentence begins with 'and', 'but' or 'because', I feel like I've been smacked in the face with a dead fish. Used rarely, this might be effective (perhaps Didau wants us to feel the scaly slap of shock that we have been overlooking these obviously effective methods). However, occurring as often as it does, the impact is reduced and the unsettling feeling of its grammatical 'impropriety' grates. (Disclaimer: no doubt I'm in no place to criticise.)
Anyway, I will be returning to this book regularly as I begin to implement the strategies, badgering the rest of my department to try them too and most likely buying it as a gift for a friend of mine who's starting a PGCE in September. I can't wait to see the benefits!
Exhausted by yet another term with its impossible work load, I limped into the Easter holidays feeling rather like Humpty Dumpty, wondering how I would put myself back together again and rediscover love for my career whilst tackling the huge amount of marking I'd brought home... I'd reached the point where it was difficult to think clearly, drowning in marking and floundering when it came to planning well considered lessons. I wanted to do things differently but was too tired to think how. Thank God for this book. I feel refreshed, excited and full of resolve.
Whether you're an experienced teacher or a newbie, this book is essential reading. Didau sets out the rationale for everything he suggests thoroughly and engagingly - if you're anything like me, you'll be plastering it with post it notes and annotations, eager to try out his suggestions. It isn't gimmicky. He's not in the business of pointless bells and whistles, just the teaching methods that you can see will really work. Furthermore, he doesn't just tell you in theory, there are helpful examples, diagrams and illustrations. Finally, unlike a lot of books about teaching, he takes care not to heap burdens on teachers. Although I know I will find his optimum frequency for giving children written feedback difficult to attain with 12 different classes, most of the recommendations can be done with no extra work from me. In fact, they will most likely reduce my workload, and all without guilt because I can be confident that the quality of the tasks I'm setting will improve my students' learning.
My only bugbear is, regardless of the emphasis it can add to a piece of writing, every time a sentence begins with 'and', 'but' or 'because', I feel like I've been smacked in the face with a dead fish. Used rarely, this might be effective (perhaps Didau wants us to feel the scaly slap of shock that we have been overlooking these obviously effective methods). However, occurring as often as it does, the impact is reduced and the unsettling feeling of its grammatical 'impropriety' grates. (Disclaimer: no doubt I'm in no place to criticise.)
Anyway, I will be returning to this book regularly as I begin to implement the strategies, badgering the rest of my department to try them too and most likely buying it as a gift for a friend of mine who's starting a PGCE in September. I can't wait to see the benefits!
July 21, 2014
I picked this book up, because I wanted to improve my skills to teach literacy. What the book mostly did, was confirming things I already knew. It may have giving me that extra nudge to 'do the work myself', but it was nothing more than a nudge.
What struck me the most was how the writer labelled himself a 'good writer', whereas the book was really badly structured. It was like he had collected all this post-its with topics that should go in the book, then categorized them into speaking, reading and writing and that is how they made the book. Every chapter read like a collection of post-its and sometimes it was hard to figure out what message the writer wanted to convey.
Next to that, the writer was often 'against Ofsted', whereas to me, being from another part of the world, this didn't mean a thing. Furthermore, I like it when people are making a case for their approach instead of dismissing someone else's.
I have to admit, the book is an easy read, that much I can say for 'good writing' and that is the only reason I finished it.
What struck me the most was how the writer labelled himself a 'good writer', whereas the book was really badly structured. It was like he had collected all this post-its with topics that should go in the book, then categorized them into speaking, reading and writing and that is how they made the book. Every chapter read like a collection of post-its and sometimes it was hard to figure out what message the writer wanted to convey.
Next to that, the writer was often 'against Ofsted', whereas to me, being from another part of the world, this didn't mean a thing. Furthermore, I like it when people are making a case for their approach instead of dismissing someone else's.
I have to admit, the book is an easy read, that much I can say for 'good writing' and that is the only reason I finished it.
May 29, 2014
This book is useful. Very useful. Yet my rating does appear to underestimate its worth.
The reason for this ranking is that this book enfolds one great idea. When teaching and thinking about literacy "make the implicit explicit." This is an excellent maxim. The book does demonstrate how to enact this process for reading, writing and speaking. There are examples and strategies to deploy in primary and secondary education.
To explore this one, important idea - this book is recommended. For wider and more complex discussions of literacy, it will be necessary to look elsewhere.
The reason for this ranking is that this book enfolds one great idea. When teaching and thinking about literacy "make the implicit explicit." This is an excellent maxim. The book does demonstrate how to enact this process for reading, writing and speaking. There are examples and strategies to deploy in primary and secondary education.
To explore this one, important idea - this book is recommended. For wider and more complex discussions of literacy, it will be necessary to look elsewhere.
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May 23, 2015Very good informative in places. Not sure the audience is literacy leaders but there are some real gems in here which will definitely inform practice. Style is very accessible and links to lots of other good reads.
December 29, 2016
Not just for English teachers, and very useful for those looking to make literacy an expectation across subject areas. Had many excellent ideas in there and I particularly liked 'slow writing' which I have used in humanities classes.
April 18, 2019
Not an entirely unique concept (see Geoff Baryon and co), but very coherently argued. The idea that literacy should not be a ‘bolt-on extra’ seems to be overlooked in many schools and hopefully this book will help to redress that.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews