What is the best way of reporting assessment information to students & parents? This is a question I hear all the time, and it isn’t easy to answer. What we all want is an assessment system that is (a) accurate, (b) easy to understand, (c) not too time-consuming for staff, and (d) motivating for students. But these principles are all in conflict with each other.

Do you accept that correct sentence structure is the building block of quality writing? Then you possibly have entered into a journey with grammar that feels like a road map of rules, terms, symbols and arrangements that are blasting cognitive load. While we know to teach grammar in context, we have to also understand that parts of grammar are sequential. We advocate for taking the time in your writing scope and sequence to focus on small aspects of grammar, cement it in working memory, practice it, retrieve it and then drop in opportunities for reference or application among all the other moments when students are writing. Read more and come along to writing network discussion! 

As a new year begins, with it is the promise and hope of uninterrupted learning in 2022. One of the findings from lockdown that has brought so much clarity to our writing instruction, is the understanding of what explicit teaching can actually achieve. Despite two years in and out of online learning we have made some important discoveries about the building blocks that boost learning in writing and the tools to measure it.

One of the questions we have had from members of the TFE Writing Network has been related to genre teaching. Teaching writing in the context of genres is a common practice in Australia particularly due to our curriculum progressions that specify across several year levels: an expectation that students will be able to produce ‘imaginative, informative and persuasive’ texts. In Victoria this is first mentioned in Year 1.

This was highlighted when a friend recently called me during one of our lockdowns, frustrated at watching her Year 2 daughter cry during an online writing lesson where she was required to come up with a problem, solution and list of characters. Why was this so hard for her and why was I not surprised having seen this many times in an early years classroom? An understanding of genres is important. We know it makes a difference and students need to be able to write about different topics and create specific compositions. So perhaps the problem lies in the way we teach it.

I once had a student who loved rhinos. After all, what's not to love? During ‘free choice’ writing sessions (the opportunity for students to engage and communicate across genres of their choice), this student continued to write about rhinos in several formats. There was the narrative on rhinos, the persuasive, the poem – both Acrostic and Haiku.

His writing was engaging, passionate, showed an awareness of purpose and audience, but what niggled at me was that I wasn’t teaching him anything.

Actually, what I found was that my competent writers avoided authorial risks. They wrote texts where the topic was the focus, while writers who found writing challenging, continued to find it so. The struggle to engage was confronting.