Writing at Key Stage 2 and 3

This is a wide topic and I have deliberately restricted these web pages to issues rather than practical instruction of how to teach writing. The suggested activities for use with student teachers are equally applicable to those who will be teaching at Key Stage 2 or Key Stage 3 although often I refer to the primary framework and guidance because this is helpful for those working in the early years of secondary education too.

Introduction

Helping student teachers to become teachers of writing involves balancing the urgent desire they often have for getting pupils to produce written texts with an understanding of what it means to be a writer. Understandably many student teachers are so absorbed by the demands of interpreting the Literacy Framework, the use of linguistic terminology, planning for writing, teaching writing – and meeting Standards – that it is difficult for them to find time to reflect on the key ideas about the nature of literacy and indeed the act of writing. I am frequently asked questions like:

“Why is it so difficult to get some children to write? They seem to be interested and motivated when we’re talking … but when it comes to the writing … many of them just switch off!” [PGCE student]

First of all I think it is important to understand the pressures that student teachers are under when they are on teaching placements. Alongside the pressures of teachingthey are driven by the need to collect evidence of their progress; in some ways, this pressure to collect written evidence mirrors what can so easily happen with pupils’ writing in the classroom. As Robin Alexander’s work has shown (Alexander, 2006), in England more than in many other countries, an educational culture has evolved in which writing is viewed as the only ‘real’ school work. Pupils’ learning and understanding is often assessed on the basis of what they have written. The cycle is difficult to break. Written work is often taken as evidence of teaching and student teachers are anxious to demonstrate ‘coverage’ of teaching objectives. This all adds to the temptation to see writing as a technical exercise, a series of formulaic skills which must be taught, and to neglect the crucial question of what the act of writing is all about.

Support material

There is now a wealth of valuable material available to support student teachers with the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of teaching. National Literacy Strategy publications have promoted ways of teacher modelling, sharing, tutoring and working with pupils on their writing as they are writing. Guidance on reading and responding to written work using the conventions of writing at word, sentence and text level has been at the heart of training and publications across KS1-KS3 since 1998. Many of these resources do provide useful starting points when working with student teachers. There are also, of course many commercial publications. I found it useful, too, to be able to show student teachers written work from pupils in local classrooms where both they and I know something about the context.

The Literacy professional development resource pack (DfES 2004) contains useful material. (You may have this as a print pack with a CD-ROM).

Other useful material

The Target Statements for Writing provide student teachers with guidance on key elements of writing and may also be used as criteria for monitoring teaching and learning of writing.
The Marking Guidelines contain useful advice on reading, responding to and analysing pupils’ writing.
The Grammar for Writing materials and the Primary National Strategy (PNS) Writing Fliers, e.g. Writing Flier: 9, can provide useful starting points for some student teachers.

However, it is sometimes a challenge to find ways of balancing these resources and student teachers’ anxiety around knowledge about language and grammar with an understanding of how people use, mediate and produce written texts in their lives. It is important that we do not position the technical and the communicative aspects of writing in opposition, for they are complementary.

If we believe that writing is essentially a communicative, purposeful and social act it is clear that ‘something’ must feed into writing instruction, and that‘something’ must have a relevance and purpose that pupils can identify with. It is in the move from ideas to written texts where such knowledge about language / impact / effectiveness / genres / text type can help pupils to improve their writing. The challenge is to find ways of connecting these two aspects in the classroom.

The following sections set out some activities that I have found useful as a way of encouraging student teachers to explore some of the theoretical debates about the nature of literacy and the challenges of writing. There are five sections: