This is part two of a series looking at the teaching of writing in Victorian secondary schools. A summary of part one is below. If you’re yet to read it, you can do so by clicking here.
The following experiences in the secondary classroom were used as a basis for discussion in part one:
Students’ writing skills can plateau in secondary school as they are unaware of how to improve their writing or add a sense of complexity to the basic structures that they can already follow.
Writing as assessment has led many students to write with a sense of safety.
Creativity is often taught in the forming of ideas for writing, yet the creativity made possible through sentence structure and punctuation is not often considered.
The formulas that may have introduced students to certain genres of writing can become all that they know and restrict their creativity.
This piece will look at how we address the issues listed above and the way in which the NAPLAN writing results and the ACARA writing assessment rubric can help us achieve this.
The mere mention of NAPLAN is enough to get tongues wagging in staff rooms across the country, with opinions and criticisms flowing freely from all involved, from politicians to school leaders and teachers. Today’s entry is not concerned with the politics or the effectiveness of NAPLAN in general, but rather how the writing section is assessed and how understanding this process can help secondary teachers teach with more precision and creativity around the more complex skills involved in writing.
One of the most common criticisms of the writing test is how it can encourage a ‘teach to the test’ mentality, or as I call it, sure-fire ‘NAPLAN Hacks’ that we can give to students to ensure they score points in certain areas. American education expert Les Perelman made headlines with his criticisms, mostly through his fifteen-step guide for students, which points out some of the more mechanical things a student can do in their writing that will be rewarded. You can take a look over the steps here.
This cynical view of the test focuses on the shallow jumps that students may make that don’t necessarily come from authentic knowledge and application of the craft of writing. However, whilst following said formula may bring about some fleeting success in some areas of the test, it has been my experience in marking the writing section of NAPLAN that the assessment rubric is built to reward students who can execute a mastery of the more complex areas of a certain facet of writing. Those who merely parrot a skill that they don’t fully understand will eventually plateau on the rubric and be limited in their eventual result. It is this plateau that I’ve seen not just in my own students (see part one of this series) but with other students I have worked with across Victoria also.
It is my opinion that a knowledge of the ACARA writing guide, coupled with an analysis of our school’s results, can lead to necessary audits of how we teach writing to secondary students and what our aim is in terms of improving this vitally important skill. Amongst the technical and complex rubrics lies an evolution of skills that we can take into our classroom and use to inform how we stretch our students in terms of their abilities to craft meaningful and fluent pieces of writing.
When discussing the ACARA writing guide with English teachers, I often find myself pointing out that if we were to see the rubric for each of the ten criteria as a ladder then we can observe the ease of grasping the lower rungs, but the increasing difficulty in taking each step. That the rubric is the same whether a Grade Three or Year Nine student is being assessed allows us to observe the improvement of a skill and the differentiation present as certain expectations come into play as the scores of the rubric rise. When we apply this to a secondary context, it becomes clear why so many students seem to plateau as they struggle to move beyond the basic competency of a criteria of the task. In my own personal experience, it led me to audit my own teaching and to ask myself ‘If students aren’t aware of what exists beyond their current level of expression, then how can we expect them to improve?’
When it comes to using the marking criteria and the data made available to us, there are some honest questions that we need to ask ourselves and our fellow team members.
Where and how do we teach each of these skills? What does it look like in our classrooms? (note: we must also be okay with admitting that there are skills that we don’t currently teach)
Do we teach this skill in isolation? Do we teach it in context? Do we teach it as a by-product of other writing lessons?
Do we model this skill, including how we can improve within it, to our students through both mentor texts and our own modelled writing?
The discussion of the answers to these questions should be seen as the starting point to improving our practice, not as another knock on our daily efforts to help our students strive for improvement.
Whilst the ACARA writing guide has its critics, it is my belief that there’s also much that we can use from it and the evaluation of our students that it provides. The ten criteria cover a wide range of skills and abilities which are both objective and subjective in the way in which they’re marked. The ability for students to engage a reader and write with life and vigour is part of the assessment along with the fundamental technical skills of punctuation and grammar. Where I see opportunity is in secondary students being much more aware of how they structure their sentences and how a variation of sentence types and structures assists them in writing more engaging and fluent pieces of writing. The majority of pieces from Years Seven and Nine students fall down in this area - they have basic, clear expression yet their pieces lack character and fluency because of the static and unimaginative nature of their sentences. So, whilst it may be a technical skill that they are not succeeding with, the impact it has is far reaching as their rigid language use and sentence structure leads to unimaginative, unengaging pieces. In thinking this way, we can plan units of work that focus on the creativity possible through different sentence structures and through the use of a wide range of punctuation, focusing on how both play such a role in the flow and rhythm of our writing. Knowing the lack of success that stand-alone grammar lessons have, we can teach these skills in the context of the writing being completed in class and expose students to the vast array of options available to them when looking to make their thoughts and ideas stand out. The rising tide of improved grammatical and punctuation skills lifts all boats, including the ideas, cohesion and engaging material for the reader in the piece.
It is also clear that some students have reached secondary school and are still limited by formulas for writing they were taught in junior years without a knowledge of how to improve upon this. In my own classroom, I have worked with students who have begun each paragraph of a persuasive piece with firstly, secondly, thirdly, followed by a collection of simple sentences that outline an argument. That lesson from earlier years has served its purpose, however it has remained as the way to begin a persuasive paragraph. So, we come back to questioning our own teaching again and how or if we have taught persuasive writing without a rigid, formulaic structure. If students are unaware of more complex structures, or if they haven’t been exposed to more complex ways of conveying a point, then how can we expect them to improve beyond the basic level where they find themselves?
I’m inspired by the possibilities that arise when we consider the ACARA rubric and the creative and engaging ways we can teach more complex writing skills in our classrooms. The annual NAPLAN tests and results allow us to see if we’re shifting the needle in certain areas and also provide our teaching teams with a set of meaningful criteria to base our lessons on. I believe there’s a place where the test is used as inspiration for the teaching of authentic and meaningful skills in writing, not as a metric in which we need to look to ‘teach to the test’.
Rather than noticing that many of the ‘difficult’ words for spelling end in ‘ion’ and encouraging students to include many of these in their writing, we can look to teach suffixes as part of a word study, perhaps even include lessons about nominalisation. An authentic understanding of such skills improves vocabulary, expression and allows students in the early years of secondary school to express themselves in new ways beyond what they’re already comfortable with. Of course, these skills are all a part of the curriculum also – yet how often do they get caught up in all of the other things we look to teach and become a footnote in a lesson that is soon forgotten?
It’s a massive task to take curriculum documents, existing unit plans at our school and throw in NAPLAN data to try and create an effective writing program. However, a concentrated approach on teaching specific skills of writing within the context of different forms of writing is possible when we consider the more developed level of expression and creativity that we want our students to achieve. There’s no possible way to have a perfect writing rubric that covers all of the facets involved in teaching students to best express their ideas, thoughts and opinions. However, using established assessment guides such as the ACARA rubric can provide teachers with a structure through which they can create engaging, meaningful and differentiated lessons that can expose students to the millions of possibilities that exist as they grow as writers.
For those looking to create or modify an improved writing program, see the details for The English Lab’s upcoming workshop ‘Creating an Effective Writing Program for the Y7-10 English Classroom’ on the workshops section of our website.
I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences in teaching writing to secondary students. Please feel free to comment below!
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