February 1, 2025 • 18 mins
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Jocelyn (00:00):
Hello there, my name's Jocelyn and I'm so pleased to
welcome you to this episode ofthe Structured Literacy Podcast,
the place where we talk allthings literacy and the nuances
of bringing structured literacyto life in our classrooms.
This podcast episode isrecorded in Burnie, Tasmania, on
the lands of the Palawa people.
(00:21):
It is a really common worry forus to be concerned that our
students aren't writing enough,and I recall very clearly times
in my own teaching when I hadthis worry.
So I'd like to start thisepisode by sharing a little bit
of a cringy story about what Idid when I was worried that my
(00:44):
students weren't writing enough,and this was before I came to
understand about a structuredapproach to writing.
Now it's worth noting that Iwas Mrs Structured Literacy for
reading, absolutely.
We had ditched the PMbenchmarks in my school.
We had a systematic syntheticphonics program happening.
(01:07):
We had really robust text-basedunits focused on reading.
But for writing, I personallywas still living in a little bit
of whole language balanceliteracy land, where I just
didn't know what to do, I kindof knew that just immersing
children in writing experienceswasn't going to get it done, but
at the same time I didn't knowwhat to do instead.
(01:30):
So when I was concerned that myyear two to six students
weren't writing enough, we wentfor a visit to a local school,
and what that school was doingat the time was they had this
daily writing procedure wherethey'd put a prompt up on the
board and the students had thesewriting books and they had
(01:50):
manila folders that were sort ofstuck together to be a bit of a
visual barrier between eachchild.
But also it contained sightword lists and word banks and
all sorts of apparently usefulthings.
And when we went to visit, allthe children were very
enthusiastic and the teacherstalked about how amazing this
was.
And of course, as we all are,we're a little bit dazzled by
(02:11):
what we perceive to be amazingpractice in another school.
So we went back to our schooland implemented what we called
30 days of writing, because Ithought, wow, if we give
children motivation by givingthem something they're
interested in writing about,then if they just practice
(02:32):
writing about what they careabout, their writing will
improve.
So we printed out literallyhundreds of pictures from the
internet.
We had the children make alovely cover in art for their
writing book.
I bought them sparkly andamazing pencils because
apparently that helps you be abetter writer.
And even as I share this withyou, I know how ridiculous this
(02:55):
sounds, but I want you to knowthat developing pedagogy,
developing understanding,happens over time.
So every day we had thestudents choose an image and
stick it in their book, that wastheir writing stimulus, and
they got to write about whateverthey wanted that related to
that image.
Now the students who werealready strong writers, the
(03:17):
students who already lovedwriting, they thought it was the
best thing ever.
The students who couldn't write,who didn't know what to say,
who didn't really know how toget sentences onto the page
properly, for them, 30 days ofwriting was 30 days of torture.
And my hypothesis that havingsomething to write about that
(03:40):
they cared deeply about wouldimprove their writing?
Well, guess what?
That didn't work.
So the kids who could writethey were writing more.
And the students who couldn'twrite well, guess what?
They didn't get any better atwriting after this 30 days.
And so I looked at the resultsof this and evaluated the impact
(04:01):
of the instruction and realisedthat it was kind of a bit of
nonsense.
And then the thought struck me: what if we teach writing with (04:05):
undefined
the same rigour and approach aswe teach reading?
I wonder if that will make adifference?
And guess what?
It did.
So sometimes you have to gothrough these experiences of
trying something out andrealising that it didn't get me
(04:27):
where I wanted to go, so it'stime to adjust course.
One of the things that wastricky for me to overcome in
this whole my students aren'twriting enough journey was that
I had a perception that it wasonly quality writing if they
were writing multi-paragraphgenre pieces.
(04:48):
And so I didn't see, becausethat was my perception of great
writing I didn't see theopportunities that were in front
of us all through the day,every day.
Before we get there, I wouldlike to just take a pause for a
second and talk about thenecessary prerequisites for
(05:10):
strong writing.
Now, research is really clear onthis point that students need
to have automatic, effortlesshandwriting or letter formation,
and spelling also needs to beautomatic and reasonably
effortless.
If every time I go to write theletter D, I do it in a
(05:33):
different way, and every word Iwant to write, I have to sound
it out and give all thisconscious thought to what the
graphemes might be, then I'm notgoing to be able to produce
anything decent in my writing,because all of my cognitive
energy is going into that, andit doesn't matter whether you're
teaching year one, year four,year six or year ten, this is
(05:57):
true.
It is widely accepted that wecan only consciously focus on
one thing at a time, and this iswhat the research tells us: one
thing at a time.
So if I'm wobbly on my letterformation, I'm wobbly on my
spelling, I don't quite know howto construct a sentence because
(06:17):
I don't speak the way thatschool language asks me to, and
most of our students don't, weknow that writing and speaking
are different, they just are.
So the sentence structures thatwe use, the levels of formality
in language, they changebetween speaking and writing.
So if all of that is effortful,I have no cognitive energy left
(06:39):
over to spend thinking aboutwhat I'm going to say and in
crafting great text.
So I'm going to say that again: handwriting and spelling must (06:46):
undefined
be automatic, and when it comesto sentences, Steve Graham says
that sentence production must befluent.
And we're not talking aboutautomaticity in sentence writing
, because the construction oflanguage is a cognitive process.
(07:08):
If it's automatic, you're notgiving any thought to it, but it
has to be fluid.
I have to be able to getsentences on the page.
But before I'm able to getsentences on the page, I have to
be able to produce it orally.
So if I can't say it, I can'tread it or write it.
And one of the missing pieces ofthis 30 days of writing that I
(07:29):
was asking my students to do wasthat there was no opportunity
for idea development.
There was no opportunity totalk with a partner and practice
the words that I wanted them towrite beforehand.
So that's one of my keytakeaways when it comes to
writing (07:46):
before you get children to write anything, have them
speak.
Have them talk to a partner,and there's lots of different
structures you can use aroundthis.
So close on the heels of thisautomaticity and fluency
business is that everything youwant your students to produce in
writing has to be explicitlytaught.
(08:08):
Saying, "oh, today we're goingto write a letter," that's great
, and if you have grown upwriting letters to people, that
won't feel like an issue to you.
But this generation of children?
They don't write letters.
They don't understand thegreeting at the start, Dear such
and such.
They don't understand that youthen drop a line.
(08:28):
They don't understand how tostructure a letter and the
language features of it.
So next time you think, oh,we'll get the students to write,
I would really, really like itif you would just pause and ask
yourself this question, do mystudents know how to do this and
(08:50):
how do I know?
When I'm working with teams andI'm coaching them and I'm doing
consultancy within the school,teachers will often say oh, yes,
yes, the students know that,and my number one question to
them is how do you know?
Now, very often, the answer iswell, it was in last year's
scope and sequence, so they knowhow to do that.
(09:11):
No.
There's a big differencebetween we did some lessons in
letter writing and the studentsknow how to write a letter.
So that's the first thing.
Just because we taught it or wedid it, it doesn't mean they
learned it.
So it's worth taking a momentto really have a look and make
(09:33):
sure that when you ask childrento do something on their own
that you know they know how todo it.
So I mentioned thismisconception that I had back
way when that the only valid,meaningful form of writing was
that multi-paragraph genre leveltext.
Well, there are other ways tohave children write, and this is
(09:56):
the one of the things that Ihave discovered in the years
between then and now.
So other forms of writing thatare perfectly valid and
important, that you can beincluding, are: writing a
response to a learning situationor prompt, summarising the main
points of a lesson or doing abit of a brain dump: what is it
(10:16):
that I now know about this thing?
There's strong evidence toindicate that writing about
learning does two things.
One of the things it does is itimproves the quality of
students' writing.
The second thing it does isthat it improves the recall and
learning of the content of thelesson.
So you get bang for your buckin that practice writing about
(10:40):
learning.
You can look it up and justGoogle "writing about learning,
Steve Graham.
So summarizing the main pointsof a lesson or a piece of text
you've just read is a great wayto improve writing and
comprehension and, of course,short answer questions are great
as well.
Now, this sits across thecurriculum.
(11:01):
So here's another key pointabout increasing the amount of
time that your students arespending writing.
Spread the writing across thecurriculum and across the day.
When we ask the literacy blockto do all of the heavy lifting,
we're setting ourselves and ourstudents up for failure, because
(11:22):
there is no way you can get anhour a day or 40 minutes a day
of writing time into everysingle literacy block.
It just can't happen, and whatyou end up doing is saying, well
, we have to do 40 minutes or anhour of writing, so let's just
set the timer and let them haveat it.
If you spread it acrosscurriculum areas throughout the
(11:45):
day, you're breaking thatwriting up into shorter chunks
so that students can increasetheir fluency.
The other thing you can do whenwe're thinking about writing
from a cross-curricularperspective is be really
intentional about how you usethat precious instructional time
within the literacy block.
(12:07):
Teach about a text type withinthe literacy block.
That's your text-based unit,you're being really intentional
about what you're teaching.
And then plan for meaningfulapplication in the other
curriculum areas.
So if you want your students toconsider adaptations, say, that
(12:28):
plants and animals have withinthe world, and you want them to
write about that as part oftheir assessment plan, to teach
about the structure and featuresof information report in your
text-based unit.
We're not trying to teach thescience in the English and the
English in the science, butwe're being really clear about
(12:48):
where am I teaching studentsabout and to use and where are
the opportunities for meaningfulapplication?
Now that meaningful applicationwill strengthen learning
because they are consolidatingand applying.
It's almost a form of retrieval, if you like.
That's being used in a reallymeaningful, robust and suitably
(13:12):
complex way.
So we worry our students aren'twriting.
In the early years, this hassometimes been a top-down
expectation.
So we have had in the past, andit may still be a thing in your
school, that at the end of termone of foundation we're having
a writing moderation.
(13:32):
And my question around that ismoderation of what?
These students don't even knowall of their phonemes.
They don't have phoneme-grapheme correspondence and
probably don't have the phonemicskills to independently segment
and write a word.
What exactly is it that we aresupposed to be moderating?
(13:53):
So what do we do?
We have the children tell ussomething and we scribe it on a
board and we have them copy it.
It's just useless and we allknow this.
Us early years teachers who havehad to do that have thought,
wow, this doesn't make any senseat all.
So for me, the point at whichwe can expect children to
produce meaningful writing iswhen they are able to reasonably
(14:18):
automatically sound out andwrite words with three and four
phonemes.
Until they can do that theycan't write a sentence, and the
sentence is the first realmeaningful word kind of writing
they're going to do.
So until they're able tosegment and independently write
words, we're not expecting itfrom them.
And the same goes for thoseolder students, and I've
(14:42):
certainly met students in thesefive and six with virtually no
phoneme- grapheme correspondenceknowledge and very, very weak
phonemic processing.
Now what I will also say is thatwith some targeted teaching,
those kids actually picked upwhat they needed.
But they didn't pick it up, didthey?
They learned it.
They learned what they neededand away they went.
But if we do have olderchildren whose transcription
(15:05):
skills are weak, who are at avery different point from what
the student could produce orally, we do need to have an
adjustment for assessment.
And so you can use an iPad, acomputer, the students can use
speech to text and all of thosethings.
So just because the child can'twrite it doesn't mean we assume
(15:26):
that they don't know it.
So be realistic about the levelof transcription you're
expecting for the age group ofyour students.
Be mindful of what thecurriculum is asking for.
Now, frustratingly, theAustralian Curriculum and the
Literacy General Capabilitiesare not detailed in how much
(15:48):
text is expected at differentages.
So that one, I think, go to theteam, have a discussion, what
do you think?
It does tell you how many ideas.
So three ideas, and it'ssensible to think that that's
three paragraphs.
But get consensus amongst yourteam about what level of text in
terms of the length that we'relooking for.
But we have to provideadjustment for students if
(16:10):
they're not able to transcribeor get words onto the page in a
way that matches their grade.
So let's have a recap of whatI've talked about in this
episode.
The first thing is that textlevel or multi-paragraph text
level, genre writing is not theonly meaningful piece of writing
(16:32):
that you're going to ask yourstudents to do.
Right across the curriculum youcan be asking them to respond
to learning, to summarise, torecord ideas.
So don't make the literacyblock do all the heavy lifting.
Be intentional about whatyou're teaching in the literacy
block and how you are going tohave students use what you're
(16:56):
teaching in meaningful contextto produce those multi-paragraph
genre level texts in thoseother curriculum areas.
You can expect it if you'vetaught it.
And finally, remember, forgreat writing to happen, the
students need the prerequisiteskills of automatic spelling,
(17:16):
automatic handwriting and fluentsentence production.
I hope that today's episode hashelped ease your worry about how
do we increase the level ofwriting that students are doing
or the number of minutesstudents are spending writing.
It is a common worry.
Let's just get Mildred, thatvoice that lives in our head and
(17:36):
tells us we're not doing enough.
Let's just tell her, Mildred,it's not time for you to help
now.
We're going to take a commonsense approach to getting our
students spending more time inwriting and getting better at
their writing as we go.
Thank you so much for listeningto this episode.
I hope that it's been useful.
I will see you next week.
(17:58):
Thanks everyone, happy teaching.
Bye.
Hello there, my name's Jocelyn and I'm so pleased to
welcome you to this episode ofthe Structured Literacy Podcast,
the place where we talk allthings literacy and the nuances
of bringing structured literacyto life in our classrooms.
This podcast episode isrecorded in Burnie, Tasmania, on
the lands of the Palawa people.
(00:21):
It is a really common worry forus to be concerned that our
students aren't writing enough,and I recall very clearly times
in my own teaching when I hadthis worry.
So I'd like to start thisepisode by sharing a little bit
of a cringy story about what Idid when I was worried that my
(00:44):
students weren't writing enough,and this was before I came to
understand about a structuredapproach to writing.
Now it's worth noting that Iwas Mrs Structured Literacy for
reading, absolutely.
We had ditched the PMbenchmarks in my school.
We had a systematic syntheticphonics program happening.
(01:07):
We had really robust text-basedunits focused on reading.
But for writing, I personallywas still living in a little bit
of whole language balanceliteracy land, where I just
didn't know what to do, I kindof knew that just immersing
children in writing experienceswasn't going to get it done, but
at the same time I didn't knowwhat to do instead.
(01:30):
So when I was concerned that myyear two to six students
weren't writing enough, we wentfor a visit to a local school,
and what that school was doingat the time was they had this
daily writing procedure wherethey'd put a prompt up on the
board and the students had thesewriting books and they had
(01:50):
manila folders that were sort ofstuck together to be a bit of a
visual barrier between eachchild.
But also it contained sightword lists and word banks and
all sorts of apparently usefulthings.
And when we went to visit, allthe children were very
enthusiastic and the teacherstalked about how amazing this
was.
And of course, as we all are,we're a little bit dazzled by
(02:11):
what we perceive to be amazingpractice in another school.
So we went back to our schooland implemented what we called
30 days of writing, because Ithought, wow, if we give
children motivation by givingthem something they're
interested in writing about,then if they just practice
(02:32):
writing about what they careabout, their writing will
improve.
So we printed out literallyhundreds of pictures from the
internet.
We had the children make alovely cover in art for their
writing book.
I bought them sparkly andamazing pencils because
apparently that helps you be abetter writer.
And even as I share this withyou, I know how ridiculous this
(02:55):
sounds, but I want you to knowthat developing pedagogy,
developing understanding,happens over time.
So every day we had thestudents choose an image and
stick it in their book, that wastheir writing stimulus, and
they got to write about whateverthey wanted that related to
that image.
Now the students who werealready strong writers, the
(03:17):
students who already lovedwriting, they thought it was the
best thing ever.
The students who couldn't write,who didn't know what to say,
who didn't really know how toget sentences onto the page
properly, for them, 30 days ofwriting was 30 days of torture.
And my hypothesis that havingsomething to write about that
(03:40):
they cared deeply about wouldimprove their writing?
Well, guess what?
That didn't work.
So the kids who could writethey were writing more.
And the students who couldn'twrite well, guess what?
They didn't get any better atwriting after this 30 days.
And so I looked at the resultsof this and evaluated the impact
(04:01):
of the instruction and realisedthat it was kind of a bit of
nonsense.
And then the thought struck me: what if we teach writing with (04:05):
undefined
the same rigour and approach aswe teach reading?
I wonder if that will make adifference?
And guess what?
It did.
So sometimes you have to gothrough these experiences of
trying something out andrealising that it didn't get me
(04:27):
where I wanted to go, so it'stime to adjust course.
One of the things that wastricky for me to overcome in
this whole my students aren'twriting enough journey was that
I had a perception that it wasonly quality writing if they
were writing multi-paragraphgenre pieces.
(04:48):
And so I didn't see, becausethat was my perception of great
writing I didn't see theopportunities that were in front
of us all through the day,every day.
Before we get there, I wouldlike to just take a pause for a
second and talk about thenecessary prerequisites for
(05:10):
strong writing.
Now, research is really clear onthis point that students need
to have automatic, effortlesshandwriting or letter formation,
and spelling also needs to beautomatic and reasonably
effortless.
If every time I go to write theletter D, I do it in a
(05:33):
different way, and every word Iwant to write, I have to sound
it out and give all thisconscious thought to what the
graphemes might be, then I'm notgoing to be able to produce
anything decent in my writing,because all of my cognitive
energy is going into that, andit doesn't matter whether you're
teaching year one, year four,year six or year ten, this is
(05:57):
true.
It is widely accepted that wecan only consciously focus on
one thing at a time, and this iswhat the research tells us: one
thing at a time.
So if I'm wobbly on my letterformation, I'm wobbly on my
spelling, I don't quite know howto construct a sentence because
(06:17):
I don't speak the way thatschool language asks me to, and
most of our students don't, weknow that writing and speaking
are different, they just are.
So the sentence structures thatwe use, the levels of formality
in language, they changebetween speaking and writing.
So if all of that is effortful,I have no cognitive energy left
(06:39):
over to spend thinking aboutwhat I'm going to say and in
crafting great text.
So I'm going to say that again: handwriting and spelling must (06:46):
undefined
be automatic, and when it comesto sentences, Steve Graham says
that sentence production must befluent.
And we're not talking aboutautomaticity in sentence writing
, because the construction oflanguage is a cognitive process.
(07:08):
If it's automatic, you're notgiving any thought to it, but it
has to be fluid.
I have to be able to getsentences on the page.
But before I'm able to getsentences on the page, I have to
be able to produce it orally.
So if I can't say it, I can'tread it or write it.
And one of the missing pieces ofthis 30 days of writing that I
(07:29):
was asking my students to do wasthat there was no opportunity
for idea development.
There was no opportunity totalk with a partner and practice
the words that I wanted them towrite beforehand.
So that's one of my keytakeaways when it comes to
writing (07:46):
before you get children to write anything, have them
speak.
Have them talk to a partner,and there's lots of different
structures you can use aroundthis.
So close on the heels of thisautomaticity and fluency
business is that everything youwant your students to produce in
writing has to be explicitlytaught.
(08:08):
Saying, "oh, today we're goingto write a letter," that's great
, and if you have grown upwriting letters to people, that
won't feel like an issue to you.
But this generation of children?
They don't write letters.
They don't understand thegreeting at the start, Dear such
and such.
They don't understand that youthen drop a line.
(08:28):
They don't understand how tostructure a letter and the
language features of it.
So next time you think, oh,we'll get the students to write,
I would really, really like itif you would just pause and ask
yourself this question, do mystudents know how to do this and
(08:50):
how do I know?
When I'm working with teams andI'm coaching them and I'm doing
consultancy within the school,teachers will often say oh, yes,
yes, the students know that,and my number one question to
them is how do you know?
Now, very often, the answer iswell, it was in last year's
scope and sequence, so they knowhow to do that.
(09:11):
No.
There's a big differencebetween we did some lessons in
letter writing and the studentsknow how to write a letter.
So that's the first thing.
Just because we taught it or wedid it, it doesn't mean they
learned it.
So it's worth taking a momentto really have a look and make
(09:33):
sure that when you ask childrento do something on their own
that you know they know how todo it.
So I mentioned thismisconception that I had back
way when that the only valid,meaningful form of writing was
that multi-paragraph genre leveltext.
Well, there are other ways tohave children write, and this is
(09:56):
the one of the things that Ihave discovered in the years
between then and now.
So other forms of writing thatare perfectly valid and
important, that you can beincluding, are: writing a
response to a learning situationor prompt, summarising the main
points of a lesson or doing abit of a brain dump: what is it
(10:16):
that I now know about this thing?
There's strong evidence toindicate that writing about
learning does two things.
One of the things it does is itimproves the quality of
students' writing.
The second thing it does isthat it improves the recall and
learning of the content of thelesson.
So you get bang for your buckin that practice writing about
(10:40):
learning.
You can look it up and justGoogle "writing about learning,
Steve Graham.
So summarizing the main pointsof a lesson or a piece of text
you've just read is a great wayto improve writing and
comprehension and, of course,short answer questions are great
as well.
Now, this sits across thecurriculum.
(11:01):
So here's another key pointabout increasing the amount of
time that your students arespending writing.
Spread the writing across thecurriculum and across the day.
When we ask the literacy blockto do all of the heavy lifting,
we're setting ourselves and ourstudents up for failure, because
(11:22):
there is no way you can get anhour a day or 40 minutes a day
of writing time into everysingle literacy block.
It just can't happen, and whatyou end up doing is saying, well
, we have to do 40 minutes or anhour of writing, so let's just
set the timer and let them haveat it.
If you spread it acrosscurriculum areas throughout the
(11:45):
day, you're breaking thatwriting up into shorter chunks
so that students can increasetheir fluency.
The other thing you can do whenwe're thinking about writing
from a cross-curricularperspective is be really
intentional about how you usethat precious instructional time
within the literacy block.
(12:07):
Teach about a text type withinthe literacy block.
That's your text-based unit,you're being really intentional
about what you're teaching.
And then plan for meaningfulapplication in the other
curriculum areas.
So if you want your students toconsider adaptations, say, that
(12:28):
plants and animals have withinthe world, and you want them to
write about that as part oftheir assessment plan, to teach
about the structure and featuresof information report in your
text-based unit.
We're not trying to teach thescience in the English and the
English in the science, butwe're being really clear about
(12:48):
where am I teaching studentsabout and to use and where are
the opportunities for meaningfulapplication?
Now that meaningful applicationwill strengthen learning
because they are consolidatingand applying.
It's almost a form of retrieval, if you like.
That's being used in a reallymeaningful, robust and suitably
(13:12):
complex way.
So we worry our students aren'twriting.
In the early years, this hassometimes been a top-down
expectation.
So we have had in the past, andit may still be a thing in your
school, that at the end of termone of foundation we're having
a writing moderation.
(13:32):
And my question around that ismoderation of what?
These students don't even knowall of their phonemes.
They don't have phoneme-grapheme correspondence and
probably don't have the phonemicskills to independently segment
and write a word.
What exactly is it that we aresupposed to be moderating?
(13:53):
So what do we do?
We have the children tell ussomething and we scribe it on a
board and we have them copy it.
It's just useless and we allknow this.
Us early years teachers who havehad to do that have thought,
wow, this doesn't make any senseat all.
So for me, the point at whichwe can expect children to
produce meaningful writing iswhen they are able to reasonably
(14:18):
automatically sound out andwrite words with three and four
phonemes.
Until they can do that theycan't write a sentence, and the
sentence is the first realmeaningful word kind of writing
they're going to do.
So until they're able tosegment and independently write
words, we're not expecting itfrom them.
And the same goes for thoseolder students, and I've
(14:42):
certainly met students in thesefive and six with virtually no
phoneme- grapheme correspondenceknowledge and very, very weak
phonemic processing.
Now what I will also say is thatwith some targeted teaching,
those kids actually picked upwhat they needed.
But they didn't pick it up, didthey?
They learned it.
They learned what they neededand away they went.
But if we do have olderchildren whose transcription
(15:05):
skills are weak, who are at avery different point from what
the student could produce orally, we do need to have an
adjustment for assessment.
And so you can use an iPad, acomputer, the students can use
speech to text and all of thosethings.
So just because the child can'twrite it doesn't mean we assume
(15:26):
that they don't know it.
So be realistic about the levelof transcription you're
expecting for the age group ofyour students.
Be mindful of what thecurriculum is asking for.
Now, frustratingly, theAustralian Curriculum and the
Literacy General Capabilitiesare not detailed in how much
(15:48):
text is expected at differentages.
So that one, I think, go to theteam, have a discussion, what
do you think?
It does tell you how many ideas.
So three ideas, and it'ssensible to think that that's
three paragraphs.
But get consensus amongst yourteam about what level of text in
terms of the length that we'relooking for.
But we have to provideadjustment for students if
(16:10):
they're not able to transcribeor get words onto the page in a
way that matches their grade.
So let's have a recap of whatI've talked about in this
episode.
The first thing is that textlevel or multi-paragraph text
level, genre writing is not theonly meaningful piece of writing
(16:32):
that you're going to ask yourstudents to do.
Right across the curriculum youcan be asking them to respond
to learning, to summarise, torecord ideas.
So don't make the literacyblock do all the heavy lifting.
Be intentional about whatyou're teaching in the literacy
block and how you are going tohave students use what you're
(16:56):
teaching in meaningful contextto produce those multi-paragraph
genre level texts in thoseother curriculum areas.
You can expect it if you'vetaught it.
And finally, remember, forgreat writing to happen, the
students need the prerequisiteskills of automatic spelling,
(17:16):
automatic handwriting and fluentsentence production.
I hope that today's episode hashelped ease your worry about how
do we increase the level ofwriting that students are doing
or the number of minutesstudents are spending writing.
It is a common worry.
Let's just get Mildred, thatvoice that lives in our head and
(17:36):
tells us we're not doing enough.
Let's just tell her, Mildred,it's not time for you to help
now.
We're going to take a commonsense approach to getting our
students spending more time inwriting and getting better at
their writing as we go.
Thank you so much for listeningto this episode.
I hope that it's been useful.
I will see you next week.
(17:58):
Thanks everyone, happy teaching.
Bye.
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