Improving Writing in Secondary School

Write for fun. Write to escape. Write to tell your story. Write to learn, explore or wonder. Write your heart out in an exam. Write to relax. Write together. Write with confidence. Write to explain, inform or argue. Write to discuss, argue or persuade. Write to let that feeling out. Write to evaluate. Write to campaign, or complain. Write for justice. Write for pleasure, anytime, anywhere.    

Choose writing.   

But, do we? 

‘Writing is a neglected skill.’

Writing can be an exciting, rewarding activity when it’s taught well in schools. Laudable aims in any classroom include nurturing our students’ agency as writers and validating their voices as young people with something to say.

Writing is also an important skill for life which we want our students to develop so that they leave the education system with, at least, basic competency. 

We know that writing in secondary schools becomes high stakes at KS4; we want our students to experience academic success and this is achieved through writing effectively in exams. Written outcomes really matter for them. 

Writing is a complex skill that needs to be taught explicitly through a variety of instructional approaches yet I wonder how many of us have drilled down and looked at how we teach writing at secondary level, in all areas of the curriculum. Writing may tend to be functional and assessment-driven but how do we ensure it’s also enjoyable and engaging?  What scope is there for creating authentic, purposeful writing opportunities?

Recent research into how writing is taught is sobering. Graham (2019) states that, ‘the NCoW (2003) report was correct: Writing is a neglected skill.’ He is referring to the findings of the National Commission on Writing in the US which called for a comprehensive change in the teaching of writing. Alarmingly, he corroborates those findings 16 years later in his research paper, ‘Changing How Writing is Taught.’ He argues that although there is some exemplary practice in classrooms, writing is a neglected skill for ‘many children worldwide’. 

How might we address this? 

My context

Last academic year, my school took part in a Literacy Trust project, Disciplinary Writing in the Secondary Curriculum. I worked with three members of staff, piloting an approach to Improving Writing at KS3 which targeted year 8 students with low to middle prior attainment. The results were promising – before and after samples of students’ writing showed significant differences in the quality of their responses. Feedback from the staff involved was positive. 

This year, I’m rolling out the project whole-school, with staff from all departments involved in practitioner research. I’ve been thinking deeply about what excellent teaching of writing might look like, how to develop staff as expert teachers of writing, and students as confident, enthusiastic writers. I’m reviewing research-informed practice, looking at samples of student writing and holding regular meetings to support those involved in the process.

By the end of the year, we hope to have some findings to share as the project is evaluated and we moderate samples of writing.  

For now, I want to give an overview of some key considerations when working on improving writing at secondary, drawing on my experience so far. 

Key Considerations at Secondary

1. The challenge of writing

The EEF’s guidance provides an overview of why writing is a cognitively demanding task. This diagram presents the three main aspects of writing which compete for attention when we are writing. 

Writing is complex because we need to have ideas and be able to put them into words and sentences while employing motor skills (to control a pen or keyboard). At the same time, spelling and punctuation conventions demand our attention. Since writing is a process, not a single event, planning and reviewing skills are also important. Writing motivation underpins all.

Although a useful starting point, even this ‘simple view’ of writing obscures the complexity of cognitive, affective, social, cultural, linguistic and physical factors at play. 

But from this, we can conclude that excellent teaching of writing must address all these factors, using a range of classroom strategies.  

2. Student attitudes towards writing

If you were to ask year 8 students with low prior attainment about their attitude towards writing, what do you think they might say? 

When we surveyed this group of year 8 students during our pilot writing project, 46% of students agreed with the statement, ‘I enjoy writing’.  But given the impact of high stakes testing at KS4, might we expect this to get worse as they get older? National Literacy Trust research into children and young people’s writing reveals a marked decrease in enjoyment between ages 8 – 16. 

It’s concerning to note that their most recent report finds, ‘Writing enjoyment declined over the past year in all children and young people regardless of background, but boys on free school meals (FSM) showed a particularly pronounced decrease.’ This was conducted in early 2021 around the time of the third national lockdown. We might think about the possible impact of the pandemic on this although it’s important to recognise that, ‘Writing continues to support children and young people’s mental wellbeing, with 2 in 5 (38.3%) children and young people agreeing that writing makes them feel better.’

Making visible the views of multilingual young people is also essential. According to the Literacy Trust’s 2021 Annual Literacy Survey, ‘39.5% of multilingual young people said they enjoy writing compared with 29.9% of their monolingual peers.’ A higher percentage also said they wrote more frequently and found writing ‘cool’. 

If we consider how young people write outside of school, we can uncover more about motivation. The Literacy Trust report finds the most popular forms of writing to be, ‘text / direct messaging (92.4%) followed by in-game communications (84.2%)’. So let’s acknowledge that writing is a versatile tool and many young people will use it for social purposes outside school, more often via technology.

With this big picture in mind, the challenge of how we facilitate and sustain writing motivation in secondary students should be at the forefront of our practice and instructional decisions. 

4. Teacher attitudes towards writing

Writing is a hard skill for us all and it’s useful to consider teacher-writer identity. These were my opening questions to staff at our September INSET 2021.

While many of us read for pleasure, far fewer of us will write for pleasure. In fact, it’s a question we don’t really ask of our colleagues. It might be interesting if we sought out our teacher-writers to use as role models. Who are the staff who write poetry, compose song lyrics or blog? 

On a daily basis, we’re all teachers of writing and need to be writer role-models whether that’s by ‘live’ writing alongside students, establishing meaningful contexts for tasks or presenting positive attitudes. However, it’s worth noting that some of us may not be confident in our own ability as writers, we may not have had any training on how to teach writing and we may not even think that the ability to write well matters in our subject. All of this can impact our willingness to teach writing and model the writing process for our students. 

‘vomit on the page’

We could start by asking ourselves how well our students can write, or how well they can plan their writing. When I ask teachers these questions, I often encounter responses which refer to ‘vomit on the page’ or ‘they can’t plan anything independently’.

If anything, the process of teacher assessed grades (TAG) in summer 2021 magnified the issue of how much students can struggle with writing. Through this high pressure process we were applying mark schemes stringently, willing our students to succeed, yet forced to account for their writing quality by allocating marks and grades. One colleague remarked despairingly, ‘they just can’t write it down.’ 

‘Being able to write well isn’t important in my subject’

A quick dip into GCSE mark schemes dispels this idea as those higher tariff questions make explicit reference to good writing in all examined subjects.

Here is a mark scheme descriptor from a GCSE Physics paper.

It’s clear that we may need to challenge ourselves, our beliefs and current practices in order to forge a way forward. 

5. Teaching the writing process

A key takeaway from the research about teaching writing is this,

This visual shows the various stages that make up the writing process (often viewed as a set of processes).

From the What Works Practice Guide  Graham et al., 2012   

Looking at this model, we might ask ourselves how much time we give to teaching these different stages in our own lessons. 

Do we understand writing as a process that requires explicit teaching and modelling at each stage, or do we focus on teaching our content, then expect students to complete an end of unit assessment, perhaps with some useful phrases or sentence starters to support them? 

Studies point out that the skills of planning and revising (editing and redrafting) are often neglected in the classroom. With this in mind, we might want to reflect on how we can give learners regular opportunities to practise them. 

Each stage of this model is a mini-process in itself. If our goal is to foster students’ self-regulation, then we need to take time to teach each one. 

For most of us, the optimal time to slow down the teaching of writing is in the early years of secondary school. Our curriculum is not constrained by exams and students can start to internalise different writing strategies which will pay off in later years. 

Crucially though, writing is a powerful tool for learning, allowing students to think through disciplinary content, explore ideas and develop arguments. So let’s see improving writing as a method for improving disciplinary thinking –  it’s much more than an assessment tool.

We also need to recognise the uniqueness of writing across the curriculum, remembering that it will look different across subjects, and even between tasks within a subject. 

Since subject experts communicate their knowledge through different disciplinary text-types, by teaching students how to write we commit to teaching them how to communicate their subject knowledge effectively.

6. Writing pedagogy

How are students enabled to make above average progress in writing?

What do excellent teachers of writing do?

To gain an insight into evidence-informed practices, a good place to begin is with the work of researchers who have set out to answer these questions by scrutinising large scale reviews (meta-analyses). In my opinion, there are two excellent starting points. 

‘Changing writing instruction’

One is with the work of Graham and colleagues whose work, ‘draws on empirical intervention studies and qualitative investigations with exceptional literacy teachers.’  Graham (2019)

From their synthesis of this research, they outline these factors as important elements of an effective writing curriculum.

1. Writing frequently for real and different purposes;
2. Supporting students as they write;
3. Teaching the needed writing skills, knowledge and processes;
4. Creating a supportive and motivating writing environment;
5. Connecting reading, writing and learning.

They go on to develop a framework for establishing the objectives of a writing curriculum. 

This overview is a useful tool for considering what we might already do well, and what we might need to develop. Leaders can also use it as a basis for shaping strategy around improving writing across the secondary curriculum.

‘Writing for Pleasure’

Another excellent starting point is Young and Ferguson’s book, Writing for Pleasure, which presents a compelling case for a research-informed writing pedagogy that, ‘seeks to create the conditions in which writing and being a writer is a pleasurable, purposeful and satisfying experience.’ Their approach is derived from extensive evidence that high attainment in writing is linked to student enjoyment.

Delving rigorously into the principles and practices of a writing for pleasure pedagogy at primary level, it’s an inspiring read and there’s much to take away and think about in a secondary context. 

Here are some of the most effective classroom practices identified in their review of large scale studies (meta-analyses): setting writing goals; a contemporary writing workshop involving self-regulation strategy instruction; explicitly teaching the writing processes; purposeful and authentic writing projects. (Young and Ferguson, 2021, p76)

Perhaps the best thing we can do is spend some time reading these sources, and others, in order to fully appreciate the extensive knowledge and recommendations embedded within them.

Translanguaging is another valuable classroom practice but it’s often absent from discussions about teaching writing. This is a mistake because it’s a valuable tool for EAL learners and we need to understand the benefits of moving between languages when learning. There is an excellent introduction to translanguaging from Charmers (2016) here:  What is translanguaging? – NALDIC

Many of us will be familiar with specific pedagogical approaches to the teaching of writing such those encapsulated in Grammar for Writing, thinkSRSD, Writing for Pleasure, The Writing Revolution, Genre Theory, Talk for Writing. Some of these approaches are successfully used in secondary schools.

If we do already have expertise in our school around some pedagogical aspects of teaching writing, who has it and how can it be shared? Does it address all aspects of the writing process? If not, what needs to be done?

Undoubtedly, teaching writing will be enhanced by applying a rich array of pedagogical approaches to our own context. One teacherly superpower is to consider our own practice in relation to evidence bases. From this point, we can think about what can be improved and make some decisions about how. We need the support of school leaders and a robust CPD model to make this happen.

7. Writing is multidisciplinary

An ambitious secondary writing curriculum seeking to enhance student enjoyment could embrace the multidisciplinary nature of real-world texts. 

We might, for example, ask students to read and write science journalism; in doing this we can establish a specific audience and create an authentic writing project. Even better, we can publish these pieces and move away from the confines of teacher-as-reader.

Working with professional writers may be an excellent motivator. When a science writer delivered a workshop to year 7 students at our school, courtesy of the Literacy Trust’s ‘Science Writers in Schools’ initiative, it was received enthusiastically (well, it did involve melting chocolate) and culminated with students writing comic strips to showcase their favourite facts. There was an explicit grammar for writing focus embedded creatively in the task. Another local school worked with a science journalist to transform scientific research into newspaper articles. 

If we think imaginatively about the possibilities for creating exciting writing opportunities, perhaps we’ll move a step closer to igniting our students’ sense of purpose and pleasure.

8. Whole-school strategy: integrating reading and writing

Many UK secondary schools are embedding the teaching of reading across the curriculum but leaders might feel this is still a work in progress. However, we can turn this to our advantage and, as research recommends, connect reading, writing and learning more closely. 

It makes little sense to ignore the pedagogical sweet spot between reading and writing strategies; students should be reading texts with a writer in mind, then writing their own texts with a reader in mind. They are mutually supportive. 

A school’s vision for reading can build a bridge between both.   

At a national level, writing is invisible in the key judgements of OFSTED’s inspection framework. While I fully support the focus on a rigorous approach to the teaching of reading at secondary, I can’t help but feel the structural absence of writing is a significant oversight – it has repercussions for secondary practice. 

It’s interesting to consider whether our school’s favoured teaching and learning principles reference ‘writing’. Reading, memory, modelling and feedback will be key mentions but is writing also foregrounded? Or does it hover, neglected, in the background? 

Where to now?

There are plenty of considerations in this post to fuel our thinking about improving writing at secondary. 

On the ground, we might start with an audit of how writing is taught across our school. We can find out how much instructional time is devoted to teaching writing processes, how often students write and how much of that writing is extended. At primary school, learners receive daily writing instruction  – it would be interesting to assess what happens at transition and on through KS3. 

With our teacherly passion, we can put ‘improving writing’ in our school development plans, our teaching and learning documents, and, most importantly, our classroom practices.

We can ensure writing has its rightful place for the sake of our students’ confidence, pleasure and progress. 

We can choose writing. 

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All views are mine. Thanks to the authors below, whose wonderful work I have sought to represent faithfully. 

References:

Chalmers, H. What is translanguaging? Available from https://naldic.org.uk/what-is-translanguaging/ (Accessed March 11th 2022).

Clark, C., Best, E. and Picton, I. (2021) Children and young people’s writing in 2021 and their reflections on writing during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. London: National Literacy Trust.

Graham, S. (2019). ‘Changing How Writing is Taught’ Review of Research in Education, Vol.43, pp277 – 303.

Riad, L., Cole, A., Leon, Y., Clark, C., & TeravainenGoff, A. (2022). Multilingual young writers in 2021: Bilingual and multilingual young people aged 11 to 18 and their writing engagement. National Literacy Trust. 

Young, R. and Ferguson, F. (2021). Writing for Pleasure. Oxford: Routledge