A year of writing creatively, independently and silently

Next week, I am off to the ResearchEd event and this is the second one focused on English. Yesterday, I thought, what did I have to offer? What would I impart if I was speaking at the event?

Well, since the start of the academic year I have made all Year 7, 8 and 9 students write every week for a lesson. People familiar withthe blog will know about the 200 Word Challenge. Students are given a different writing task each week and there are certain ingredients students must include and those ingredients vary each week.

As a result of all this, I have read hundreds of examples of work over the last few terms. The same task has been used with each year group and that has produced some interesting results.

Findings

1.  Year 7s default mode is narrative writing.

With several modes of writing, the Year 7s turned everything into a story. I had some ‘interesting’ pieces of writing about the ‘dangers of smoking’ told as a story. In fact, when a student decided to use one of them as an assessment piece, it took us three drafts to get the student to realise that it wouldn’t work for a whole text.

2.  Year 7s struggled conceptually with speech writing.

We asked students to write a speech from the head teacher persuading students to work harder. Boy, did they struggle with this. Here’s a typical approach:

The head teacher walked to the stage. “Now, the reason I have called you together is…

3. Dramatic monologues produced the greatest level of creativity in students.

This was really interesting because we hadn’t explicitly taught dramatic monologues, but the detail, creativity on this style was phenomenal. Their attempts to recreate natural speech was much better than their scripts – another 200 task. Plus, naturally, they played around with holding back information from the audience. The task was to write a dramatic monologue based on someone committing a crime.

4. Some very able boys struggled with humour and audience.  

These boys saw the tasks as an opportunity to show me their wit, but sadly their attempts weren’t very witty. They took every writing task as an opportunity to have a laugh. One student tried to include Bob Marley in every piece and another student used absurd humour. What is interesting is that they were writing for themselves? When, they discovered they were writing for an unknown reader, their writing got better. The Bob Marley student is writing the best in the class at the moment.

5. Boys tended to demonstrate a clear, opinionated voice than girls.

Comparing hundreds of students together, it seemed that, in terms of writing, the boys had more to say in their writing. Plus, their voices were a lot more distinct and clear. They had an opinion and their writing. The girls were often vague and lacked perspective when it came to opinionated when conveying a point. Boys, after a while, took really pleasure from being bombastic and controversial. We’ll explore how we can get girls to do this.

6. Students struggled the most with changing perspective.

We asked students to describe a character from three different perspectives. They really struggled with this one, suggesting that maybe our students aren’t forced into writing from different perspectives enough. They are limited by the narrow first person and third person and are unaware of the variations within and between those two.

7. Quiet girls have responded very positively to the weekly writing.  

Parents and students alike of very quiet students have commented on how much they have enjoyed the weekly experience. Some said that this was a result of the extra creativity, whilst I think it might also be a result of them having a lesson without the risk of attention.

8. All students struggled when the writing did not follow a linear order.

We asked student to write a story at the end and then describe how you got to the end. There was much head scratching. In fact, to get the gist of the task, we had to repeat the instructions and provide an example.  

9. Writing inspired by a picture was problematic.

It seems that students need a number of structures to approach this task. There clearly needs to be a way in.

10. Non-fiction writing always produced the shortest paragraphs compared to fiction.

On all pieces of non-fiction, it was common to see that students wrote brief and glib paragraphs. Their writing was often very general and vague. There seems to be a real problem with students writing directly and precisely with non-fiction.

11. Overtime, the writing fed in to other lessons.

Last week, I student make a connection between a writing task and a scene in Macbeth. ‘Shakespeare has structured this scene like the writing task we did about a change of mood in the middle.’ Ideas from lessons surrounding the writing task also fed into the writing.

12. Girls used more figurative writing in their texts than boys. The boys were always literal with their ideas and writing.

13. When given a choice, the boys selected a non-fiction task instead of the fiction tasks.

The girls would pick a non-fiction task if it was on a topic they could choose. However, they gravitated to the narrative tasks.

14. Boys used more humour in their writing.

 In fact, the girls’ writing was devoid of humour. There was none. The boys relished the opportunity to use humour. The girls didn’t.

There will be more findings in time. Some of these points will change. But, they do make some interesting points. I have never really been in this position before. A position where I can see trends across year groups. As a teacher, I can see the differences and similarities across the years. The above finds are based on all three year groups.

I will continue to explore are watch the trends and adapt my teaching as a result.

Thanks for reading,

Xris

P.S. Technically, it hasn’t been a full year.