I’ll never forget my first week as a teacher. I’d trained in Nursery but was now starting in Year One and there was a lot I didn’t know. For example, I was given the English plan for the week, which was about ‘The Lighthouse Keeper’s Lunch’ and was non-plussed by one of the day’s instructions which read ‘SHARED WRITE’.
I sheepishly asked my partner teacher what exactly a ‘shared write’ was and was surprised when he explained that it simply meant modelling a piece of writing to your class, incorporating their ideas as you go. Right from the start, I felt that this was a flawed strategy for developing writers, but it seemed to be a ‘thing’ that teachers did and who was I to argue one day into the job? Were the children meant to copy my writing into their books as we went along or to sit there and watch? “Different teachers do it differently,” said my partner teacher. I decided that the children ought to be copying my writing, at least they’d be doing something.
It reminded me of the American writer Hunter Thompson, author of ‘Hells Angels’ and the notorious ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’. As a young, budding writer, Thompson copied entire novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway on his typewriter “to get a feel for the rhythm of their writing.” It seemed like a big waste of time to me, but perhaps it paid off for Hunter. Should I get the children to copy out ‘The Great Gatsby’?
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.'Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,' he told me, 'just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.'
As the years went by, I would always groan when I saw ‘SHARED WRITE’ written on the English plan. It meant bored children’s faces, and if anything, it seemed to demotivate the children to write. I gave up getting them to copy my writing too. Sorry Hunter. As I see it, the main flaw with a ‘shared write’ is that you can only use one child’s idea for each sentence, which you usually change anyway. So you’re constantly rejecting children’s ideas. What kind of message is that sending to them? Then there’s the children who don’t contribute anything. They just sit there.
And then, a couple of years ago, I was introduced to ‘supported sentences’, and straight away, my English lessons were transformed. Just as I’d instinctively rejected ‘shared writes’ on my first day in the job, I immediately embraced this new piece of pedagogy. For the uninitiated, ‘supported sentences’ are a kind of fluid writing scaffold in which you model sentences and then remove small or even large parts of those sentences, allowing children to transform them and make them their own by filling in the gaps. Let’s look at The Great Gatsby again.
I might verbally model…
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
Then I might write the following on the board…
__________________________ my father __________________ that I've __________________________
The children then discuss their ideas for filling in the gaps with a talk partner and feedback verbally to the class. I would then pick a child’s ideas to fill in the gaps using a different colour pen. (This helps children who might be completely stuck and still in the Hunter Thompson phase.) Then, all the children would write their own version of the sentence.
An example might be…
When I was a young boy, and didn't really know much about anything, my father shared a piece of wisdom that I've never forgotten and often find useful now.Or...When I was little my father told me something that I've often thought about.
The beauty of this is that every child is expressing their own ideas; nothing is rejected and yet you are still modelling the writing process and teaching sentence structure. Quick finishers can, of course, write more than one sentence before, as a class, we move on to the next sentence(s). You don’t need any special differentiated sheets to do ‘supported sentences’ either. Children are copying the scaffold as they write. It is effortless adaptive teaching that allows you to respond to the needs of the children in the moment.
The Education Endowment Foundation’s guidance report ‘Improving Literacy in Key Stage 1’ emphasises that children need extensive practice to write meaningful sentences with purpose, and multiple opportunities to draft and redraft, which is exactly what ‘supported sentences’ provides. The London South Research School is currently delivering the ‘Supported Sentences’ programme in Year 5 classes across 12 schools as part of the EEF’s programme development pipeline. We look forward to finding out what schools make of it!
