With each year of my teaching career I became accustomed to the cyclical habits and observations that came with the job. The refreshing beginning of the year where I would convince myself I’d be better organised than years previous would give way to the latter part of term two, which would see bad weather, sniffling students and the zombie-like crawl to the holiday break. The budding green trees of Spring would help bring about an optimism about our VCE class heading towards their exams and the end of another enjoyable year. Unfortunately, as regular as the seasons, each year would also bring about another damning report about the country’s slipping results on the international scale and the subsequent comments from ‘experts’ would follow - some well-informed and pushing wisdom and advice, others looking to take pot shots at a system or a profession that their comments and suggestions illustrated they knew little about. More recently, the slide in our students’ writing skills became a feature of the annual education news cycle as NAPLAN results were released each year. It brought about many questions for me as an English teacher and led me down many different paths in my search for answers as to how we can best teach the skill and the craft of writing and where we may fall down in our pursuit to improve the writers put in front of us.
Of all of the year levels I've taught secondary English to, there’s no group that has challenged and taught me as much about our job than Year Eight. The energy, enthusiasm and emerging attitude that emanated from every Year Eight English class I ran taught me that I had to be on the ball at all times. Coming in unprepared, with work that wasn’t engaging would never work with such a group - they’d see through you in an instant if they got even a whiff of you not feeling that the work was important and special. Working to match their enthusiasm, I knew there could be no ‘faking it’ with these young people - their energetic personalities demanded that I bring every ounce of passion for my subject each period. I always found this inspiring rather than tiring. So, it’s no surprise to me now that it was a group of such students who changed my outlook on how we teach writing.
“Guys! Why are we being so safe? You compose this great stuff in our mini-lessons - short pieces full of imagination and unique thought - but you then revert to unimaginative, boring work when we write longer pieces!”
It was a crystalising moment as I pleaded with the group of young writers in front of me. Weeks of short activities had led to our final assessment and the work we’d done was not coming through. Gone was the flair, the risk and the life of their preparation work. The final assessment had brought about a shift to safety - a retreat to what was known and comfortable.
“I know how to write. Everything I’ve written makes sense, doesn’t it?”
And there was the answer.
Whether they were all conscious of it or not, this group held the idea that they knew most of ‘the rules’ and that they could all communicate clearly in their writing and so there wasn’t much else to learn. I knew this was wrong, but when I looked at how I’d taught writing to secondary students for years previously, I could see where this attitude may have come from. The teaching of writing seemed to fall under three categories:
Let’s inspire some ideas and then you write in response to these ideas.
Here’s a grammar worksheet. Learn the rule, learn the right term, answer the questions to show that you get it.
We’ve been working on a range of skills through a range of activities for the past few weeks - you’re now going to show me what you know through a final written assessment.
It was no wonder that students saw writing as the final product of learning - the place where you show what you know. Most of the creative writing I’d taught focused on the creativity of the idea - not the creativity in the actual written piece. And finally, my own schooling in the nineties had left me woefully inept in my knowledge of grammar and all of its intricacies. I, just like the students in front of me, could make sense of parts of speech and what a clause was when it was explained to me on a worksheet, but that knowledge was quickly lost until the next time I taught it! I’d learned how to follow ‘the rules’, but I couldn’t tell you what they were! It supported the thesis of many of my Year Eight kids - there are ‘good’ writers and then there’s everyone else. Some people just get it.
And so, again I was humbled in this profession that has a habit of knocking you over every time you seem to feel you’re on top of it all. However, I was up for the challenge of reaching my students and providing them with lessons that would improve their knowledge of how to write well, but also their skills as I opened a world of new ways of thinking and seeing how their thoughts can come alive when put down on the page.
It seemed to me that the main issue for many of the writers I taught was that they weren’t aware of what existed beyond their foundation skills as writers. The link between learning rules of grammar and punctuation and the creativity within each of those disciplines was missing. My class could identify writing that was ‘good’, but they weren’t able to articulate why - why the modelled pieces flowed so well, why they held attention, why they seemed so easy to read and never became stagnant. The remedy for this came from a shift in the way I assessed and provided feedback, along with the way I read through mentor texts with my students. This remedy came from after a five week window of time that saw me assess the NAPLAN writing task for the first time.
Read part two of this series, ‘Can we use NAPLAN results to improve student writing?’, by clicking here.
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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