On the teaching of writing

Part 1 in a series of posts about the state of writing instruction in Australian schools

Because I love a metaphor: the state of writing instruction in Australia

---

I have been quite literally waiting months for Emina McLean’s literature review for AERO on the teaching of writing in Australia. This is a really neglected area of professional development in Australian schools, with very little emphasis and still less guidance in the Australian Curriculum. I’m speaking here as a teacher who has only thought explicitly about the teaching of writing in the last few years. It just wasn’t on the collective radar before now. To be fair, we all probably thought we were teaching writing. This review signals a huge shift in focus and it’s about time. I’m going to be diving deep into this review and to do that, it might take me about a week to do it justice.

On pedagogy

The review makes the trends in the teaching of writing really visible and distinct. Her explanation of writing as a process looks familiar to me. It’s the kind of balanced literacy approach where students ostensibly learn to write simply by doing, as though exposure to quality texts will enable them to write by osmosis. As recently as a few years ago, I heard a very prominent English teacher speak of writing as a ‘muscle.’ It’s all a bit romantic and hippy dippy. But we still see this kind of attitude reflected in the emphasis on text choice as a proxy for engagement, and engagement as a proxy for literacy. Just a few weeks ago I saw a well-known organisation offering professional development in ‘literacy’ with the main offering being diverse and therefore engaging texts. It’s incredibly rare to come across actual professional development in the teaching of writing. Sadly, as an industry, we’re not quite there yet.

The research on genre writing looks promising and also familiar. I have also found this to be effective because teachers are forced to explicitly teach conventions, structures, diction and vocabulary, along with generic trends in sentence structure and paragraphing. The problem for me is the senior years syllabus in NSW, with compulsory modules like Reading to Write in Year 11 and The Craft of Writing in Year 12. We are seeing teachers create great genre-based programs in the junior years, but it feels like any gains we make are ironically brought undone by a confused approach to creative writing in Stage 6. If you need evidence of confusion, NESA responded to widespread teacher frustration a few years ago by publishing a FAQ on this module and only this module.

With a focus on ‘mentor texts’ the approach does share features with the mimicry approach of genre writing. The rubrics are so open-ended that teachers could choose a genre based approach in Year 11 and improve writing in a fairly specific and evidence-supported way. But there is nothing in the rubric that requires or even guides this kind of effective instruction. It really depends on the teacher expertise, and as I said, research has been thin in this area, at least the kind of research that gets into schools.

And while the prescribed Year 12 mentor texts are undeniably quality writing, the rubric is again so vague, and the exam specifications so unpredictable, that the best we can hope for is a kind of process approach in the examination itself. A genre based strategy may not pay off in an examination, with students having to respond to seemingly random formats and stimuli, so teachers generally approach it in a haphazard way - or maybe that’s just me! It’s a really inauthentic process and doesn’t reflect the ways that writers hone their craft. The state average for this paper last I checked is around 11/20 in English Advanced. So perhaps I’m not alone in feeling a bit hamstrung.

Reading this as both a secondary English teacher and literacy leader, I can see the disconnect between the pedagogies of the past and the kinds of pedagogies like cognitive strategy instruction that underpin programs like the US-developed The Writing Revolution. It’s really apparent that pedagogies like this have sprung up out of a gap in the professional development available. Until now, all the available pedagogies seem best suited to the English classroom, more focused on language and literature, not so much the literacy strand of the Australian Curriculum. I use aspects of The Writing Revolution and while I wouldn’t lean on this for imaginative, attaching writing to content knowledge and developing student ability to express complex things like causation and evaluation has transformed my practice.

It’s a bit of a shame that there isn’t a discrete literacy syllabus in the Australian Curriculum. We seem to be emphasising literacy as a cross-curricular priority but then not doing very much to support it. The paucity of direction in the syllabus reveals a lack of cohesion in the ways we envision pedagogical approaches and that lack of vision unfortunately thwarts students at the final hurdle.

I’ll be chipping away at this review bit by bit. I recommend that all literacy leaders read this digest of important research, but for those of you who are time-poor, I hope you enjoy the rest of the week of bite-sized posts.