TR&W Issue 20

Kathryn Brereton has taught pupils across the primary age range and is now an English Adviser for Cambridgeshire County Council. pleasing shift in confidence and in attitudes to writing across the year. Targeted input A clearer understanding of the target pupils’ needs meant that bespoke provision could be planned. In some cases, this was a time-bound intervention in addition to English, such as additional spelling or handwriting teaching. In Closing the Writing Gap (David Fulton, 2022) Alex Quigley writes beautifully of boosting his son’s handwriting stamina through short ‘sprints’ paired with the teaching of self-monitoring strategies. Several schools successfully trialled similar approaches. One headteacher decided to run additional ‘Grammar Gang’ sessions herself. Easier to resource, but also impactful in schools short of additional adults, was the increased use of flexible guided groupings within the main English lesson. Experiential learning James Clements in On the Write Track (Routledge, 2023) tells us, ‘There are few things in education more valuable for children’s learning than ensuring they have first-hand experiences.’ The Writing for Pleasure Centre, which promotes research-informed writing teaching, says that children write, ‘because they are moved to’ ( tinyurl.com/ tp-Moved2Write ). With this in mind, we reviewed medium- and long-term planning with some schools. For example, making pizzas resulted in high-quality instruction writing, showing a consistent awareness of purpose and audience. CPD for EAL We discovered that some teachers lacked confidence or recent training in how to support learners using English as an additional language. The Bell Foundation offers a range of useful, practical resources such as their substitution tables (a table giving model sentences with a range of choices from which learners may select) to scaffold talk and writing ( tinyurl.com/ tp-SubstitutionTables ). Opportunities for oracy James Britton famously wrote that ‘Reading and writing float on a sea of talk.’ When reviewing writing teaching sequences with teachers, we sometimes found that oral rehearsal had been squeezed out. Building in using the substitution tables mentioned above, sentence stems or opportunities for partner talk or for using recordable devices, proved supportive measures. Make links with reading Speaking, listening, reading and writing are of course inextricably linked. We repeatedly heard of pupils struggling to secure the basic concept of a sentence – in particular, not yet understanding where sentences should end/begin. Although the approaches recommended here can help with this, we also found that supporting pupils to develop reading fluency – learning to attend to punctuation for meaning – impacted their ability then to understand how punctuation ‘worked’ within writing. The ‘drip, drip’ approach Alex Quigley says that novice writers need ‘support, scaffolds and nudges’. Revisiting identified spelling patterns and common exception words and imitating sentence structures via quick lesson starters or early morning work provided this. Pie Corbett’s Jumpstart! Grammar (Routledge, 2015) is an essential part of your teacher toolkit for ideas. Sometimes though, just reminding pupils of the prompts available on classroom working walls was the simple nudge needed. As we all met throughout this project, it was exciting to learn of the progress teachers and their pupils were making. We were impressed, as always, by the careful reflection practitioners made and their efforts to provide equity for their pupils. There were many key takeaways from the project. The biggest lesson, however, was never to make assumptions, as the perceived rather than the actual barriers that emerged were sometimes very different. “Check your capital letters and full stops,” said one teacher – a continued refrain in countless classrooms. But what if (as it transpired was the case for one pupil), you don’t know what capital letters are? What else might be slipping through the net? T E ACH I NG T E CHN I QUE S Consider the assessment of writing in your class/school. How robust and consistent is it? Has it enabled you to diagnose sharp next steps for teaching and learning? What resources are available to support the process? Utilise add-in rather than add-on experiential learning. As you plan a unit of writing, think how hands-on experiences might enhance the teaching and learning. If you lack a teaching assistant, where might targeted work fit within your quality first teaching? Start simply and manageably. Not all writing must be written down! Consider how talk, audio and video recording or teacher scribing can capture ideas and vocabulary and support sentence construction. Where are the gaps in your own professional development? What is now on your CPD wish list? Make time for pupil voice. Listen to the barriers pupils tell you about so you can offer support – but also to the positives on which you can capitalise. YOUR ROUTE TO WRITING SUCCESS @kat_brereton www.teachwire.net | 19