Teach Reading and Writing Issue 19

out even though the feature is irrelevant or makes the writing poorer. I’ve observed poetry lessons where every line had to start with a fronted adverbial, and a story-writing unit that focused on subordinate clauses. My personal favourite was a Great Fire of London model text that had Samuel Pepys spotting the fire outside his house and reaching for his ‘woolliest’ and ‘warmest’ jumper. The ‘-est’ suffixes had to be highlighted for Year 2 moderation to reach the expected writing standard, you see. I have nothing against fronted adverbials, subordinate clauses and suffixes, but these should be taught in context and purposefully. I f a child in your Y6 class struggles with fractions, you have to unpick years of maths teaching to find where their misconceptions lie. It’s hard, but there are teachers across the world doing this daily. We’re often asked to assess other subjects based on little (and sometimes not very useful) information. None of us would be that surprised to be presented with a five-point assessment scale to determine, based on a two-week slipper-making unit we taught last October, whether our pupils have mastery or greater depth in Design and Technology. However, writing should be the easiest thing we assess in school: when a pupil produces a piece of writing, all their learning and knowledge is laid before us. Over the years, though, we’ve managed to muddy the waters and design systems that overcomplicate our assessment frameworks to the point that they lead our teaching. On the wrong track In my years of working with schools to improve their writing, I’ve seen countless examples of lessons planned so that teachers can assess against an assessment strand rather than designed to improve pupils’ writing. These lessons are carried These problems with assessment aren’t the teacher’s fault; I’ve been presented with assessment strands in schools that run over several pages. In one case, I counted fifty-two writing strands I was supposed to assess each piece of writing against. This is impossible, and I fear we have fallen through the looking glass when assessing writing. So let’s strip it all back and return to what writing is for: communication. What to do? Every school will continue to have their own assessment systems, but you will find that if you teach writing well in a contextualised and well- sequenced manner, you’ll cover all the strands you need to. LET IT GO How to assess writing by ignoring the assessment criteria CHR I S YOULES 26 | www.teachwire.net