As the previous 9 entries in this series demonstrate, this has been a project on a huge scale that – perhaps ironically given its size and effort – has only focused on a few core aspects of writing. Unsurprisingly then, the strategy for Year Two is also very much a case of “drip-feeding” any new… Read More #10 Designing and Implementing a Whole-School Approach to Improving Writing: Setting Out in Year Two with “Not only…, but also…” (NOBA) sentences

As the academic year draws to its close, the latter half of the Summer Term is the perfect time to review areas of T&L strength and those that require improvement across the school. Heads of Department need time to chew over any feedback, and consider how things might be tweaked for September (especially in the… Read More #9 Designing and Implementing a Whole-School Approach to Improving Writing: End of Year Evaluation

As discussed in previous posts, I like to give staff the experience of the elements of lessons that we insist they do in their own teaching; in this case, the second carousel session began with this pre-requisite knowledge-recall ‘Do Now’ activity: All the staff in my carousel had submitted videos of their lessons, trialling this… Read More Small Group Staff Training #3: Reviewing Extended Writing In-Class – Sessions 2 & 3

The first ‘do now’ task for staff in carousel session one was to answer “What is challenging about reviewing extended writing in class?” with the following responses broadly covering what was said: Too much text in front of pupils; Too much feedback (trying to address too many errors); You ‘lose’ your audience (think and participation… Read More Small Group Staff Training #2: Reviewing Extended Writing In-Class – Session 1

This particular series of blogs isn’t part of the larger piece of work I’ve been leading on at my school (outlined in this sequence of blog entries), but they are connected. I’ll preface this by mentioning two things: I’ve described how a sequence of staff training sessions (called ‘carousels’) worked in practice (plus the context)… Read More Small Group Staff Training #1: Reviewing Extended Writing In-Class – Context and Session Pitch

To round off the training, I asked staff to compile a list of things that have worked, as well as lessons learned, in the process of implementing some of our central sentence-level strategies this year: Because, But, So Do Complete the stems yourself, beforehand; Ask for verbal responses to the stems; Ensure students copy the… Read More #8 Designing and Implementing a Whole-School Approach to Improving Writing: “Dos and Don’ts” Review

Below is a list of FAQs I made for staff as an accessory to my training sessions. These FAQs cover everything in my training: Do I have to change all my resources and scaffolds now? No – it will take time for you to work out how to integrate these sentence-level activities into your subject.… Read More #7 Designing and Implementing a Whole-School Approach to Improving Writing: FAQs

My final training session, to complete the suite of sentence-level skills that we wanted to focus on this year, centred on the appositive (also called an appositive noun phrase). This is a strategy that The Writing Revolution recommends as a way of boosting the quality of sentence level writing. The training sessions were only ever… Read More #6 Designing and Implementing a Whole-School Approach to Improving Writing: Appositives

Anyone who has read Reading Reconsidered will have encountered the section on ‘Stop and Jots’: an approach to making reading a more writing intensive process. It’s probably a strategy that lots of teachers use already, just in a different guise, but there was something so stark about the way it increases pupil accountability, information retention… Read More #5 Designing and Implementing a Whole-School Approach to Improving Writing: ‘Stop and Jots’