1 The Writing Process
I have found that taking a step back into the writing process is the most useful starting point for student teachers. It means that they are able to reflect on their own experiences of writing and step into the pupils’ shoes. What is it that we do as effective writers when we engage in the practice of writing?
This section is designed to support student teachers with an understanding of what it means to be a writer suggesting activities relating to:
At the heart of the writing classroom is the teacher who guides the learning activities and provides a model of the writing process for the learners. If student teachers can begin to see themselves as practising writers – which they are – they will be more able to make the process explicit in their teaching. I find it useful to state the obvious: as student teachers they have all been relatively successful as writers. It is important that they realise that they hold a huge amount of implicit knowledge about language and grammar. It may be that ‘getting better’ or ‘teaching writing’ is a case of transferring their implicit knowledge into explicit knowledge.
As teachers in KS2/KS3 they will not only need to be teachers of writing but writing teachers – as they write for and with the learners. This is quite challenging even for many experienced teachers. Writing is a personal act and it is difficult to make your thinking explicit in front of thirty pupils. It requires confidence. All too often student teachers do not see themselves as writers. Some have negative experiences of writing and particularly of the feedback they have been given about their writing; some lack confidence as writers. However, because of these feelings they may be in a strong position to associate with the demands made on the young learner-writers in the classroom. The following activity is designed to provoke thinking and discussion around these ideas.
For this activity student teachers are asked to use their own experience of writing as a touchstone for future sessions. They are asked plan and write a response to a given statement. My suggestions are provided below but, if time allows, student teachers could engage in a more extensive writing project which would allow them to reflect on the writing process in a more qualitative way. The follow-up to this shorter activity at least allows reflection on the emotional as well as the cognitive demands of writing and links well into a discussion of how to create a supportive environment for teaching writing in the classroom.
Guidance to the group
- Please choose one of the two statements below for a short piece of writing.
- The text type is your choice.
- You have a short time to gather and plan your ideas.
- You will then be asked to produce a written text in response to the following:
- An excellent writer.
- Mobile phones are essential in today’s society.
Following the activity, student teachers work with a partner and share their writing.
I then ask them:
How did you feel as you planned and wrote?
These are some examples of the student teachers’ responses:
- Confused. I didn’t know what to write about or how to start.
- I needed some more help.
- I felt under pressure – I looked around and other people were writing.
- I felt annoyed – I didn’t want to do it.
As the discussion evolves they often comment on fears about spelling, punctuation and handwriting as well as not knowing what the content might be. Very often adult fears about writing are to do with how other people will judge their writing, often based on negative experiences from when they were younger.
Key issues from Activity 1.1
It’s worth considering whether these feelings were justified and how the student teachers’ experience can lead fruitfully to a discussion of pupils’ experiences and perceptions of writing.
I often ask pupils how they feel when their teacher says ‘Now we’re going to do some writing’. It is useful to draw attention to the parallels between the student teachers’ responses to this activity and some pupils’ responses to my question.
Purpose, audience and form
Purpose + audience = form. In real life the act of writing is linked to the writer’s desire to communicate. In the classroom creating a desire to write may be difficult and a little contrived, but if we believe that writers need a sense of purpose in order to engage in meaningful writing, we need to provide these opportunities in our teaching. In a climate so heavily focused on technical conventions and structural aspects of writing, student teachers are challenged to develop rich learning experiences that capture the pupils’ attention and link with real life experiences.
Reflecting on the previous activity encourages student teachers to consider these issues. I ask student teachers to reflect on their responses to the writing task they were presented with earlier:
- What made the task difficult?
- How could it have been more supportive?
Usually their responses include these comments:
- Knowing what type of text we should write.
- Knowing who we were writing for.
- Knowing why we were doing it.
- Knowing what it was for.
Depending on whether they have been in a classroom recently, the group can consider whether any writing activities they have observed had a clear purpose and audience. Also depending on when they will next have to plan for classroom work, the group might consider ways in which they could explain the purpose of a piece of writing and how they might provide a genuine readership in the classroom or school or outside the school.
Key issues from Activity 1.2
Writing is about having something to say – wanting to communicate with someone else. And often it is quite difficult to set up a real purpose for writing in the classroom; inevitably it can be a little contrived. But the challenge facing student teachers is how to offer a dual approach to pupils’ learning: one that considers the need for their development as learners alongside the need to negotiate a meaningful context for the learning. Encouraging student teachers to consider learning and development as a process of creation rather than a transfer of skills means that we somehow have to still the urgency on their part to ‘get pupils writing’ and to focus on the quality of interaction and the contextual foundations for the writing opportunities they create in the classroom.
The form and coherence of a piece of writing is likely to be linked to the writer’s feelings about the purpose of the piece of writing and who is going to read it so it is important for the student teacher or teacher to know what the writing is for and who the reader will be (apart from the teacher) when planning for writing.
Reading for Discussion: Writing by Eve Bearne has other suggestions for activities with student teachers to help them get to grips with issues of purpose and readership in writing.
If we want children to become writers it is important to distinguish between writing as a process and writing as a product. The mantra plan-draft-revise-edit is familiar to most of us, but I think it is important to understand how hugely over-simplified this can seem when presented to student teachers. When attempting to create an effective written text, a writer has to select, generate or capture ideas relevant to the task before shaping them into a written composition. Much of this happens in the head before the writer makes choices about language or grammar. The ‘planning’ stage is not quite as simple as we sometimes think it is. As the writer writes, s/he evaluates and adjusts – not simply when the writing is complete. The process of writing is therefore a combination of different sub-processes which all interrelate in complex ways. When the teacher models writing for the pupils this process becomes explicit.
Student teachers may never have considered the relationship between writing as a process and product. As effective and practised writers, they may never have consciously considered the process of writing at all as for them very often the emphasis lies so heavily with the product.
Reflecting on writing in this way can therefore lead student teachers to a greater understanding of the close and complex links between writing and the creation and expression of thought. Added to that they can realise how powerful the act of composition is and how important it is to find the balance in their teaching. Using their own experience of the original writing task as a touchstone for their responses, I ask them to consider:
- What did you do when you engaged in the writing task?
- What process did you go through?
The group may need to spend some time reflecting on how they generated and shaped their ideas into a written composition. Time constraints often dictate, but the more time and purpose given to this activity the more effectively student teachers can reflect on the process.
Examples of student teachers’ comments:
» Capture and plan » Draft » Revise » Proofread » Present
As they reflect on their own processes, they can begin to locate the stages of the planning – drafting – revising – editing process from their own experience.
Key issues from Activity 1.3
In creating an effective written text the writer has to manage both what he or she wants to say and how s/he wants to say it.
The processes of planning, writing and evaluating often occur simultaneously – this is not a simple linear process.
When student teachers have considered the process of their own writing in the session, I then ask them if they always go through the same process when they are writing. I sometimes have to prompt them by asking about notes they might leave on the kitchen table for other people in the house or shopping lists. Do they go through the planning to editing process with writing like this? Discussing different kinds of writing leads to understanding that:
- We do not always go through the whole writing process with every piece of writing.
- The act of writing is linked to its purpose.
From this experience of their own writing again I ask the group to consider the teaching implications, particularly stressing the need for them as teachers to write with and for the pupils they will be working with. This can sometimes seem daunting but a quick discussion with the person sitting next to them can generate a list of advantages to be gained by writing with and for their classes.
Usually they come up with:
- By writing for and with the pupils the teacher can make their thinking transparent and talk about the choices made in the act of writing.
- The way a teacher talks to the class about writing provides a model for self-evaluation and provides the kind of vocabulary pupils might use to identify strengths and weaknesses in their own writing.
To conclude these activities I ask the group to make their own list of ‘Key Principles for Teaching Writing’ based on their own experience during the session.
I refer the student teachers to the generic aspects of Assessment for Learning (AfL) and ask them to consider how teaching the process of writing may be linked to AfL. (If you don’t have the documentation, a list of the ten principles can be found here.
If there is time I ask the student teachers to come up with a list of success criteria for the piece of writing they were asked to do at the beginning of the session. Depending on their recent or imminent classroom practice I also ask them to think of how they might help pupils create success criteria for a piece of writing in any subject area they care to select.
Further reading
Baldwin, P. and Fleming, K. (2002) Teaching Literacy through Drama: Creative Approaches, London: Routledge Falmer.
Ball, C. and Airs, J. (1995) Taking Time to Act: a Guide to Cross Curricular Drama, Portsmouth NH: Heinemann.
Bearne, E. (2002) Making Progress in Writing, London and New York, Routledge.
Cremin, T. and Dombey, H. (2007) Handbook of Primary English in Initial teacher Education, Cambridge: United Kingdom Literacy Association, National Association for the teaching of English, Canterbury Christ Church University. (available from www.ukla.org and www.nate.org.uk)
Davison, J. and Dowson, J. (2003) Learning to Teach English in the Secondary School 2nd edition, London: RoutledgeFalmer.
Frater, G. (2001) Effective Practice in Writing At Key Stage 2, London: The Basic Skills Agency.
Grainger, T., Goouch, K., Lambirth, A. (2005) Creativity and writing: developing voice and verve in the classroom, London: Routledge.
Martin, T., Lovat, C. and Wood, G. (2004) The Really Useful Literacy Book: Being Creative with English in the Primary Classroom, London: Routledge Falmer.
Wyse, D. and Russell, J. (2007) Teaching English Language and Literacy, London: Routledge Falmer.
 
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