Like all teachers, I started searching for the problem and I revisited one thing I have had on my mind for a long time: how we teach students to write in secondary schools. Previously, our Year 8 students had been studying Macbeth, so they were obsessed with analysing all the time. Therefore, they felt that was what the exam was asking them to do. After all, this is what their teachers had been concentrating on in lessons.
Personally, I think there are two problems with writing in schools and I know that they are common to most, if not all schools.
Problem 1: We don’t
make students write a lot in schools.
I made my daughter copy out some spellings this week and I
had to laugh as they did the typical ‘shaking hand after writing’. According to
them, they had clearly written too much. There are several things that stops
teachers from making students write pages and pages. I feel there are two
things affecting how students write: marking; and engagement. There is an
unwritten assumption that if a student writes something, then a teacher must mark
it. Based on that logic, it would be in the teacher’s best interest if they get
students to write less often, then they would have less to mark and be able to
cope with the demands of teaching Wow,
the marking in the book is great, but hang on there’s only two detailed pieces
of writing here for the whole year.
Engagement has always been a stick to beat a teacher with.
How many teachers in the past have avoided prolonged moments of writing because
they were being observed? Even this week with Year 11s, I was about to
apologise to students for making them do another practice question. I stopped
myself and thought: no, they need it. There seems to be a lot of guilt over
making students write and write for long periods. I’m sorry about this, but you
are going to write. I’ll make it up to you next lesson when we can do something
different. We have been conditioned to feel that getting students to write for
long periods is bad teaching, when in reality it is good teaching. All the
flashcards in the world are not going to improve a student’s performance if
they can’t write at length for long periods.
The drawback of this fear of writing is that too much
emphasis is placed on end of unit assessments. We are becoming slowly aware that some
students selectively crank up the effort when it matters. Students will float
through work lesson by lesson with a pinch of effort, but when we introduce the
idea of assessment, students transform and work their hardest ever. Persistent
hard work is much better than sporadic work, but am I part of the problem? Do I
place too much emphasis on the assessments and not enough emphasis on the
writing before the assessment?
I fear that our relationship with writing in schools makes
it, either a thing to be feared, or a thing to be simplified. The more a student
writes, the better the student’s writing will be. Therefore, we need more
writing, fewer worksheets, and fewer tasks that replicate writing. Pen meet
paper. Write.
Problem 2: How we
teach writing
I have a lot of beef with how we structure the teaching of writing.
We have reduced the writing process to blocks of understanding. And, there, for
me, lies the problem. We have made the process of writing reductive. At the core
of most English curriculums is a unit aimed at specific type of writing. It
might be a unit on persuasive writing, or gothic writing. I should imagine that
these topics will last weeks and will kill the enjoyment of writing. There
might be some interesting texts chosen by the teacher, but I think the idea of
teaching writing like this is so constricting and restricting the process of
writing.
If I am honest, if I spent five weeks looking at persuasive
writing and what other persuasive writers have done, the last thing I will want
to do is write a piece of persuasive writing. I’d write anything but that. We
treat teaching writing like the way we teach novels. We have an end point and
the teacher feels duty bound to teaching everything about the genre of writing
and then some.
Primary schools do a good job of teaching the genres. Students come to secondary schools able to adapt writing to a particular form. They might miss out on the subtleties of the form, but a five week unit will only serve to compartmentalise writing. Secondary school writing should focus on exploring different forms and exploring how students can copy and use of the grammatical structures and features of these types of writing.
Our insistence of text types and genre teaching has narrowed a curriculum that should be exploratory and diverse. Instead of teaching students about writing to advise, they should be just reading texts and attempting to recreate or make their own versions. Look at how we teach poetry to students. We tend to drop a poem into a lesson every so often. If I am at a loose end, I will dig out a poem. But, we never do this with non-fiction. Instead, we have a big song and dance about a topic on non-fiction and then kill enjoyment off with five weeks of studying it. I read non-fiction for pleasure, but only in short bursts. I read novels in longer bursts.
I want students to be good writers and I feel that the way we have taught writing has hindered this in the past. I always bemoan the lack of creativity from students when writing non-fiction, but I can’t blame them when we teach non-fiction writing in the most uncreative way possible. A student needs to read hundreds of different voices with a hundred different ways to structure a text and with a hundred different techniques and approaches to engage the reader. They will only experience that if they see different texts on a regular basis and not just a ten for a five week unit of work.
My attempt at resolving the problems:
Problem 1: We don’t
make students write a lot in schools.
I have stopped making students stick things in books. I have
stepped away from the photocopier and I am changing how I get students to do
things. I want to place more emphasis on them writing. They are writing more
than they have before and it shows in their books.
I started this several months with a class and they
constantly write in lessons. They copy things out or write detailed pieces. In
fact, every Friday they have a writing task, which is in addition to the normal
topic. They have to write for thirty plus minutes on an aspect and they just
write. They know they can’t ask me questions. They have a few pointers, but
they have to write. At the end, they share mark each other’s work. If we have
time, I read a few out and we comment on the effectiveness of each piece. One
week they write a description. Another week a piece of non-fiction.
It surprised me how much they enjoyed the writing. But, what
even surprised me even more was how creative their responses were. Spontaneous
writing created effective writing. It allowed them to write without any constraints.
Plus, it didn’t take me too long for me to spot problems and iron them out.
More importantly, I was getting students to be independent writers, and they
enjoyed it. I have yet to have a single moan. They like it.
I want more writing in a week and I want it to be clear that
the writing is work and thinking through ideas and concepts. I want students to
see that writing is lessons is about providing food for the marking machine
called a teacher. It is there to make them think, breathe and develop as
writers.
Problem 2: How we
teach writing
I am re-evaluating the units of work for next year, so that
the writing skills are across units or in short chunks. I am saying good bye to
the long topics on writing and building the writing across terms so that the
skills are revisited often, but the duration of them is short.
In addition to this, my plan is to build up my bank of
non-fiction texts. Non-fiction writing will be inspired by particular texts
rather than genres. One text or a pair of texts will be the starting point for
writing and we will avoid the death by non-fiction anthologies favoured by so
many. We will explore and analyse a text and then write. Their text might be a
reaction to the original one or an attempt to write a similar one on a
different topic. But, what I am sure of, is that they will have lots of
practice.
Finally, over the year students will have written a number
of non-fiction texts, then at the end of the year I am going to get students to
select their best. That one will be redrafted and submitted as their assessment for
the year. Hopefully, over the year we will see a range of texts, styles and
approaches.
One thing I am
determined to do: make students work harder than teachers. For too long,
teachers have worked harder than students. I am determined to make students
work hard and harder. To do that, I think they need to write more in lessons.
Their books should show crafting and drafting.
I need to stop writing now as my hands hurt.
Thanks for reading,
Xris
