This is another one of those ‘work in progress’-type posts. I am doing a bit of tutoring, helping a student to improve their extended writing. Thinking about writing, I am reminded of a comment which a friend and former political colleague, who was a also a retired teacher, made to me about encouraging students to write. He tried to remove the stress and pressure which students experience about writing by telling them that writing is just a way of getting thoughts from your mind to another person’s mind. From that point of view, it has many parallels with speaking. Just like speaking, you can improve writing but I would argue that it is better if students first become comfortable and confident in writing.
When we reflect about teaching writing and the way we try to build students as writers, I’m not sure we ever start from such a simple and powerful starting point: let people know what is in your mind, what you’re thinking about. Once we get them writing, we can then look at how to improve it. Otherwise we are asking students to conform to types. We are showing students round holes which we want them to fit their writing into, when they might not know how to make round holes yet. Better to let them write, whatever shape and then work with them on adjusting their shapes to fit different holes.
One of the things I did in my previous school was look at a ‘literacy strategy’, or less grandiosely and more accurately a long-term plan or long-view of how we would develop students as writers in Geography across their five years in the school. Drawing on the work of many wonderful educators, not least Judith Hochman of Writing Revolution fame, we went back to basics. We probably went further back than we’d ever previously thought necessary. It is a helpful revelation to consider that we’re going in to high too early by jumping straight to extended writing. That is based on many assumptions, not least that students have somehow learnt how to write to a certain standard ‘elsewhere’ (probably in English).
We went back to sentences for a number of reasons: a) we all teach literacy, not just English teachers; b) practice makes perfect and we can help with that across the curriculum; c) applying common writing approaches is powerful to build confidence and capability; d) there are elements of writing which are appropriate in Geography but not in other subjects. Also teaching mixed-ability classes, there were plenty of students who would benefit from the extra teaching. For those students who appeared to be capable of certain skills already, recap and practice was not going to be a problem. This is especially true because so much of our writing ability is picked up and applied subconsciously, so students may not actually be aware of what they’re doing when writing and why that makes it bad or good.
Sentences were built into paragraphs; paragraphs built into essays. This didn’t limit students’ activities to just writing sentences or paragraphs though. We would teach sentence-related skills, but students would still have to write at length. We would still be looking to assess the geographical content. Our literacy-related feedback would focus on the sentences we’d explicitly taught. This is an approach called emphasis manipulation, where you perform a whole act but teaching focuses on one component part. For example, if coaching tennis a player would move and play a forehand, but the coach may just focus on how the player is turning the racquet with their wrist. In this way, the tennis player can still play the game and even enjoy it. By focusing on one element at a time, the player can improve systematically over time rather than being overwhelmed trying to think and act upon every piece of advice that the coach could give across their whole game.
Importantly though, you just want the students to write. Technique can come over time. Emphasis manipulation helps with this. Building skills systematically over time helps with this. Targeting feedback helps with this. Making the fundamental purpose of writing – to get ideas from your mind to another person’s mind – helps with this.
Commonplace 