What can the recommendation to break down complex writing tasks look like in practice?
I don’t know about you, but I always feel in more comfortable territory teaching my students the material they need to know rather than how they are actually going to transform this material into clear, well argued paragraphs that stay focused on the question. After we’ve discussed the topic using new vocabulary, linked ideas together and I’ve checked knowledge with plenty of retrieval practice along the way, it’s time to do the thing that ultimately will determine their grade: write about it. This seems to be the most difficult part for many students. And I wonder if this partly related to teachers’ high confidence in using direct instruction to teach the content of their subjects but a comparative lack of confidence in using it to teach writing. Teachers of essay writing subjects in particular will be very proficient writers themselves and so to identify the key parts of the process they undertake in order to produce good writing and to unpick what actually makes it ‘good’ is difficult. But if we want to allow our most disadvantaged students to achieve their potential and reach a point where their insightful ideas are displayed in a coherent argument for the examiner, then this is precisely what we must do.
I recently attended an EEF workshop on teaching writing and found the focus on teaching writing explicitly and in stages a useful reminder that all our good practice around using direct instruction to teach content can be applied to teaching writing too. This ties in with the EEF’s Guidance Report on Literacy and particularly recommendation 4 which advises that we should break down complex writing tasks. It was the impetus I needed to plan a lesson on writing good paragraphs with my A Level English Language and Literature students. In a nutshell this lesson involves clear modelling of what a good paragraph contains, providing students with the material you want them to use in their paragraph and pairs of students working together to write their paragraph. What struck me most about this lesson was how seriously the students grappled with the structural and language choices they had to make in order to get to that ‘good’ end result. Ultimately, we want students to be able to use ‘self talk’ as they make these choices independently, but by discussing the process of writing in pairs with a concrete goal in mind, the process becomes demystified and transparent.
Here is a step by step…
Prior knowledge This is a lesson to do when the students know their material well and recall it quickly at the beginning of the lesson. I began with a brainstorm of relevant ideas and key vocabulary, checking every student had a good understanding of the material.
WAGOLL with a list I showed the students what a good paragraph looked like for this topic, highlighting the key components on the board. I then made a numbered list of all the elements I had highlighted, making it clear that these elements must be included in their paragraphs.
Paired work I carefully chose the pairs for this task and had students working with someone they don’t always work with. For this lesson I paired similar levels of ability but also had some pairs where one student’s strength was ideas while the other student was a more proficient writer. I gave the students the quotations and the language terms for these quotations I wanted them to use in their paragraph. This was because I didn’t want their cognitive load taken up by making decisions around quotation choice and language terms. This lesson was about the writing process and I wanted that to be the sole topic of their conversation. I gave students 30 minutes to write a ‘perfect’ paragraph using my list from the beginning of the lesson. I stipulated that both students must write down the paragraph but very importantly, THEY MUST WRITE EXACTLY THE SAME THING.
Celebrating our success After 30 minutes, the students really had produced some excellent paragraphs! We swapped them around, read them to each other and I reiterated why they were good. I made it clear to the students that this writing proved they could do what was required in an exam; I wanted them to remember the process the next time they were required to write in timed, exam conditions.
“The complexity of writing means it can place a heavy burden on working memory, which can be thought of as the part of the brain where information is processed and combined. Students’ working memories can become overloaded if any of the processes involved in writing
become too demanding.”
Final Reflection
The conversations the students had in their pairs were a pleasure for any English teacher to listen to! They discussed the pros and cons of certain vocabulary choices, the exact wording of their topic sentence and the ways to connect their ideas together. I think stipulating that both students must write and write the same thing is important in encouraging this to happen. The list of key components of a good paragraph was a useful exercise for me to think about and something I can refer back to. Conversations with co-teachers and curriculum teams could be usefully spent discussing lists like this as part of our endeavour to teach clear and impactful lessons on how to write well for all our students.
