| 4 Planning
Reflecting on their personal experiences of writing can help student teachers identify some key principles about teaching writing (see Section One). From there, they can see the teacher’s importance as a model for developing writing. Part of the teacher’s influence will be related to how they respond to pupils’ writing. In order to respond helpfully, teachers need to know what they want the pupils to learn and how they can go about making this possible. This is where planning comes in. ‘Planning for teaching – and so for response and assessment – is a key aspect of learning to be a writing teacher’ (Bearne, 2007: 91).
This section:
- Analyses prepared planning to evaluate its usefulness
- Introduces the Expanded Process for Teaching Writing as a model for planning
- Makes links between the planning model and Assessment for Learning
- Considers issues of response and assessment
Planning for writing
To be able to plan means knowing what you want pupils to learn. Key questions are:
- What do I want the pupils to have learned at the end of my two or three week unit of work?
- What kinds of writing will be involved?
- What will the main (assessed) writing outcome be?
Once answers to these are established, the next step, the ‘how’ part – which is the planning – can be considered.
There are various ways of supporting student teachers with the next step. The National Literacy Strategy has provided a range of ways to support planning and teaching of writing. Sequences are recommended including Shared and Modelled Writing with Supported Composition into Guided and Independent Writing. It is important that student teachers are familiar with these terms and with this suggested teaching sequence.
For this Activity you will need to provide some examples of pre-prepared planning. It’s easiest to copy these on A3 sheets to allow for paired/small group work and annotations.
- Provide strips of card with each of the recommended teaching sequence headings e.g. Shared Reading, Shared Writing, Sentence Level Teaching, Model Writing, Supported Composition, Guided Writing, Independent Writing.
- In pairs or small groups, student teachers consider the plans and move the cards around to identify how and where the various learning and teaching strategies for writing are occurring.
- The pairs/groups then identify where the opportunities are for creating writing success criteria with the pupils and for reading and responding to their writing as they are writing.
Ask the student teachers to identify where:
- The context for the learning is established.
- The teaching is activating previous teaching and learning.
- Opportunities are provided for pupils to develop understanding through collaboration.
- The important relationship between talk and writing is acknowledged.
- There are opportunities for clear and specific feedback to pupils as they are learning.
- There is space for the teacher to loop back if the teaching is getting out of tune with the learning.
Key Issues from Activity 4.1
Student teachers need to be able to critically evaluate published planning materials for several reasons. For example, they need to experience the difference between planning a one-off literacy lesson and planning a sequence of lessons designed to scaffold learning opportunities. Downloading planning from websites or lifting planning from published materials does not help with this process.
The Primary Framework, available online, is a useful starting point for student teachers. Underneath the overview grid on the website are suggested key objectives for each unit of work which demonstrate how the learning objectives can be organised. A large number of the units for each year group have been exemplified to demonstrate how the objectives can be sequenced. These can be accessed by clicking on the highlighted hyperlinks on the year group overviews. The overviews and units are accessed by going to the Primary Framework site, clicking on the 'Literacy' tab and then clicking on the planning tab on the left hand side of the page.
Student teachers might be asked to consider the Primary Framework planning to ensure that it can be used to cater for diversity:
- How, for example, could planning be adapted to suit a class with a highly diverse language mix or a class with a vast ability range?
- How could it be adapted to include all kinds of text including video and visual texts and to ensure that enough talk and exploration of issues takes place?
The next step is to give student teachers time and support to experiment with the planning process. The process in diagrammatic form (Bearne, 2002: 32) is a useful tool as student teachers can visualise the teaching process in a less linear and programmatic fashion. It has three phases: familiarisation with the genre/text type; capturing ideas and writing.
NB: You may want to decide beforehand that the group will be concentrating on planning for Narrative, Non-Fiction or Poetry and to provide some texts (it may be easiest to stick to books rather than screen-based texts) which will support their planning. You will also need to provide copies of the Expanded Process diagram for students to annotate.
This activity will need a suitably extended period of time, particularly if the group are going to browse over books to help them plan.
Using the planning circles shown in Activity 4.2, the student teachers will work on a chosen unit of work and plan ideas for their teaching. Student teachers should select a year and text type (narrative, non-fiction or poetry) and use the strands for the year group to plan an extended unit of work. The phases outlined in the planning circles are primarily intended to support pupils in writing a text confidently over an extended number of sessions and within a creative context. Their ability to write is heavily dependent on their understanding of how texts work through exploration of texts as readers and users of spoken language. If a unit of work is structured over the phases of the planning circles then pupils can build on their experiences as readers and apply this knowledge as writers. A planned unit of work would typically:
- begin by providing quality texts for pupils to read for enjoyment and explore as readers using the reading and speaking and listening strands of the framework
- examine the text structure in detail from the perspective of writers to identify organisational, structural and language features
- use speaking and listening strands of the framework to develop ideas for the children's own writing recording them on appropriate plans
- develop the ideas into writing paying attention to structure, organisation and compositional aspects linked to audience and purpose drawing on reading and speaking and listening experiences earlier in the unit.
Generally the reading strand objectives would be clustered at the beginning of a unit with the writing strands towards the end. Speaking and listening strands would be used to support both reading and writing objectives as well as featuring strongly in the phase between reading and writing.
The length of time required for each of the phases should depend on the age, experience and prior learning of the pupils. For example, if they have not encountered a particular type of text before, or the text is complex in its structure, the class will require an increased number of days to read a wide variety of examples and re-interpret the text through drama, role play and discussion. The same principle applies to the writing of longer text types such as narrative. To plan, draft and publish a myth or fairy tale could require upwards of five sessions.
While most units would usually follow the structure outlined above it has to be remembered that this is a model for planning. The model can and should be altered depending on the needs of the pupils and the creative context outlined by the teacher.
Planning should be based on quality texts and creative outcomes drawn from a range of sources on both page and screen.
A note about Assessment for Learning (AfL)
This process of assessment should continue throughout the unit to enable the plans to be adapted. Assessment for Learning is generally undertaken at the end of a phase in the learning to evaluate if the pupils are ready to continue with the unit at the current pace. Through the use of assessment approaches, learning is evaluated and additional sessions can be added to the unit or re-visited in a later unit. The student teachers should note how they plan to assess the pupils’ learning at each phase of the unit.
They should also note at the bottom of the diagram the written outcome which they will use to assess the success of the whole unit of work and the pupils’ achievement.
When the student teachers have noted their plans, it is useful for them to discuss them with each other, perhaps in year groups.
Prior learning
If the student teachers are working in partnership with teachers, they will be in a better position to ensure the unit of work meets the needs of the pupils by considering the 'prior learning'. Elements of prior learning are the aspects of learning the pupils need to be secure with in order to work independently. If the pupils are not secure in certain aspects of learning, then decisions should be made about planning for additional sessions in the early stages of the unit to revise and secure objectives.
There is plenty of material and advice on response and assessment. The key ideas are that any response should be focused on the features that the pupils were expected to learn. The tone of the response can also be crucial in helping pupils improve.
This can be quite a quick activity as a basis for developing some principles for response. I usually ask the student teachers to think of a time when they had completed a piece of writing which was then responded to in a negative way. They often refer to having worked hard but having their writing covered in red ink, or not marked at all or just given a cursory comment like ‘quite good’.
I then ask them to remember a time when a piece of writing was successful and well received. They often respond with memories of times when their teachers asked them to read their work aloud to the class, praising their efforts, or it won a prize or someone at home put it on the wall. Sometimes, too, they recall a time when they felt satisfied that they had produced something they were proud of.
From these reflections I ask the group to compile a list of ‘Key Principles for Responding to Writing’ to accompany their ‘Key Principles for Teaching Writing’.
Key Issues from Activity 4.5
Response to writing needs to be constructive and linked to the learning and teaching objectives for the unit of work that generated the writing.
Corrections or ‘marking’ need to be focused, again on the targets/objectives planned for.
It is useful to develop ways of encouraging pupils to evaluate their own writing, sometimes against success criteria already worked out with the class. Such self or peer evaluation needs to be part of classroom practice where the pupils feel secure and able to make mistakes in a supportive environment.
Assessing writing needs to be tackled as a separate session where examples of pupils’ work and the contexts for the writing are available. The Assessment Focuses for Writing can then be used as a basis for beginning to discuss how to make judgements of achievement or attainment.
References
Bearne, E. (2002) Making Progress in Writing. London: Routledge
Further Reading
Corbett, P. (2002) How To Teach Fiction Writing at Key Stage 2. London: David Fulton Publishers
Grainger, T. and Tod, J. (2000) Inclusive Educational Practice: Literacy. David Fulton Publishers
Lambirth, A. (2005) Planning Creative Literacy Lessons David Fulton
For an expansion of the planning process outlined here, see Bearne, E. and Wolstencroft, H. (2007) Visual Approaches to Teaching Writing: Multimodal literacy 5–11. London: SAGE/UKLA
 
| 
