On how to make any teacher an expert in writing
Implementing a secondary, whole-school writing approach
The writing of Australian students has been in dire straits for several years now. Most Australian Year 9 students write at the level of a Year 4 student. There are gaps in quality of writing between the wealthy and the disadvantaged, and gaps between students’ past and current selves. A student 20 years ago was a better writer than a student of today.
Some progress has been made, with some Australian schools taking up the simplicity of the Writing Revolution methods. The Writing Revolution presents language as functional, a way to consolidate and express knowledge in any subject. It’s metalanguage-lite, with fantastic training, and it’s simple to introduce in bite-sized chunks or as a whole school approach. It has its limits with secondary, but I like to think of the approach as a confidence builder.
No More Marking is another product that has gained traction. With this software, students are assigned a marking age with comparative judgement, a method much more reliable than rubrics. From here, remediation and targets can be set with greater accuracy. Daisy Christodoulou and colleagues have done the most rigorous work that I’ve seen to make AI marking work in a meaningful way for teachers and students.
Broadly, however, it’s true that until recently, students haven’t typically been taught to write. But rather than blame teachers, let’s pull this thread a little. Why has there been a commercial opportunity for these great providers to step into this space and have so much success?
We can add writing instruction to the list of things currently practising teachers weren’t taught as part of their initial teacher education. In one sense it stands to reason; New South Wales English teachers will know that sentence-level instruction didn’t even appear in the syllabus until a couple of years ago. The Australian Curriculum and its state offshoots are yet to catch up several years later. At the time the syllabus was drafted, the NSW English teachers’ association pushed back, saying, “Returning sentence structure and all of that kind of stuff purely to English I think is unfortunate.”
The idea that sentence structure would be “returned” to English assumed it was being taught somewhere. Australia has had a magical thinking philosophy of writing instruction for the past 30 years. Literacy until recently was meant to be a whole school responsibility. In this well-meaning spirit, some schools in this period made a point of assigning a non-English teacher to run whole school literacy. That’s not to say that writing shouldn’t be taught in all subjects—it should—or that any teacher can become an expert in writing—they can. But without training and expertise, we are left with the results we see today.
Today is a good news day for anyone who wants to seed, pilot or implement a whole school secondary writing approach. The Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) has launched the Secondary Writing Instruction Framework professional learning course, free for anyone to use, with specific training for leaders of literacy. It’s slick without being gimmicky, and incredibly user friendly. I can say this because the materials have been tested with real teachers, including myself.
I’ve been involved with this project since late 2022 when I joined the PETL advisory group, where I road tested some of the sentence instruction guides. I was then involved in the development of the Secondary Writing Instruction Framework, led by my colleague Kylie Holmes and continued under the leadership of Dylan Chalwell. I’ve seen non-English teachers turn expert, to the extent that they are presenting to their own professional orgs about how to embed writing into their subjects.
For what it’s worth, here is what I see as the keys to success:
Start with English. The Science teacher needs to know that when they reinforce and assess writing in their subject, the English teachers have laid the groundwork. There is less time for gradual release in subjects other than English and subject area content still needs primacy. The writing should be in service of the subject content in non-English domains, not the other way around.
Seed the professional learning with a small group of writing cheerleaders. We all have these people in our schools already. Train them up and give lots of recognition and reinforcement. They’re your local influencers and will infiltrate classroom practice and curriculum materials in their own departments. Social norms are a powerful thing.
Give it time. Professional learning doesn’t just happen. It needs time-resources, and it needs momentum. Likewise, curriculum and assessment materials with writing requirements don’t just materialise.
On this, evaluate how thinly focus is spread across various whole-school concerns. Dr Simon Breakspear simplifies the de-implementation science by talking about pruning. It’s only when we cut back all those messy, half-dead branches that schools can flourish. You’re adding writing, so what are you taking away to make space?
Writing is technical, but it’s not so technical that teachers can’t learn how to teach it. It’s normal for teachers to feel worried or exposed. But it’s not their fault. Now we have the tools to empower teachers to elevate their students’ writing, so that they can truly show what they know and can do in any subject.