The Writing Revolution Mapped

Having gorged on The Writing Revolution and loved every page of it (where has it been all my teaching life?), I was still left wondering how this would fit in with the National Curriculum requirements for writing in primary schools in this country.

A quick note about the excel file. I fine-grained many objectives for my own diagnostic purposes as a class teacher and as someone who has not taught for a few years and therefore wanted to see the progression across KS1 and KS2. This sheet was never designed for assessment of all the objectives or to be used to track pupils (because that would be insane). You would need to translate this back to the original objectives if that is what you are using but this should be easy enough.

Bearing in mind that I haven’t planned and taught with it, simply read the book, here is the current coverage I envisage:

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However, I know that in practice this would need to be revised in terms of whether objectives are covered or even if they are covered if they are met fully by following the programme.

As excited as I am by it, I realise that there are some key points that need to be thought through by teachers and more to the point, SLT, before putting any of it into practice.

1) The Writing Revolution is all about non-fiction, and while I think some adaptation is possible, the objectives of fiction writing will need to be addressed separately. This raises the issue of parallel teaching of fiction and non-fiction writing. It will be imperative to ensure that mixed messages are not being given out to children with regards to the construction of sentences.

2) While they do suggest introducing the activities with generic contexts that are part of the children’s everyday life (such as holidays, school, etc), they expect all further teaching to be in the context of a curriculum activity. The assumption is that the school is teaching a knowledge-rich curriculum that can be drawn on in order to consolidate and apply the writing skills being taught to the children.

However, if like the past teacher me, you have a rough medium-term plan outline of the curriculum and are fleshing these out week to week, then I’m not sure how easy it would be to make the best use of the Writing Revolution. It is the content of the lesson that should drive the selection of writing activity not the other way around, hence knowing the exact content of each lesson is important.

While it is always necessary to adjust plans and lessons, it needs to be the exception not the rule. Like Expressive Writing there is an order to the programme and a pick and mix approach will not work.

As such it does require medium-term mapping out of the programme in advance alongside the knowledge-rich curriculum. This should make the weekly planning less time consuming as it would be known what is being taught and what writing activity you will be teaching. However, if you are still required to hand in weekly or daily planning that is highly detailed, I envisage this will simply add to this. It is imperative that if SLT want to implement this whole school that they consider the front loaded workload implications as well as what time they will give to teachers to do this, given the other expectations placed on them in terms of planning.

3) The Writing Revolution is a long-term solution, not a short-term fix. You will need to hold your nerve in KS2. The Writing Revolution is ideal for KS1 teachers as, without the SATs, they will be free to focus on sentence construction. However, Years 3 – 5 do have the space to be able to take this on.

While pacing guides are available (that take into account a different starting point other than the child’s first year of schooling) the first half term of teaching is sentence heavy. There is no point in the children producing reams of writing when they are insecure about writing a basic sentence. Unless they are secure, they simply will never have a firm foundation to build on. Even as I write this sentence, I know that I have a basic version of it to fall back on. One that I know will communicate what I want. It is this basic sentence that so many children, especially disadvantaged children, lack and need to practice daily and repeatedly so that it is embedded.

4) The Writing Revolution marries well with my own beliefs about writing, i.e. that it should primarily be about communication, with self-expression as a product of that. This is at odds with all the other writing programmes and schemes of work I have taught from in the past.

It will jar those who want children to be creative writers first and foremost and see the technical aspect as boring and likely to put children off writing. Of course, there is nothing quite like not knowing how to write to put a child off writing.

For every child who is inspired by creative environments to produce the odd piece of amazing writing, there are many more who simply don’t have the knowledge to be able to write well. To keep ignoring this fact and hoping secondary can fix this is to abdicate our responsibility as primary teachers. The inconsistency and insecurity among even among the so-called “high ability” children I have taught is not something that can simply be ignored. There is a reason why they cling to basic sentences when I wanted them to expand and extend them. The amount of modelling, scaffolding and practice needed is far greater than has been taken into account previously. The main barrier to this has been the dizzying number of genres that were taught to children in a haphazard fashion which I have blogged and talked about at ResearchEd.

In the end, whether one chooses to use The Writing Revolution or not, it certainly calls into question the teaching of writing as has been the norm. I have looked at this purely through the eyes of a primary teacher. For secondary school, the implications would be far more wide-reaching, not just in terms of mapping it out against the curriculum but in terms of coordinating efforts within and across departments. Ultimately, this is not a pick of the shelf and implement by yourself solution for teachers. The potential for improving the teaching of writing is matched equally by the challenge of implementing it.

* Please do let me know if you disagree or spot any mistakes I will update these.