Why Kids Can't Write

That’s a pretty clickbaity title, isn’t it?

But follow through any student answer at grade 5, 6 and even 7, and you will be surprised at what students just can’t do.

Spelling and punctuation will be an obvious horror show. But the crafting of sentences, the use of language for effect, or indeed any sense of pleasure in writing, will be a ghost at the feast. Never shake thy story words at me.

David Didau touches on this in a brilliant post on systems.

His premise is that we can’t judge a system by the intention and thought behind it, only by the results it produces. His examples are compelling. The purpose of the railway system is to make people travel by car. Schools are full of these sorts of systems. Here’s three from me:

1. The purpose of the detention system is to punish teachers for setting homework.

2. The purpose of the uniform policy is to tell students that all school rules are negotiable.

3. The purpose of languages lessons is to ensure that students never become fluent speakers of the language.

Extended Writing

David Didau only touches on one curriculum system. I was waiting for it. Surely, I thought, he’s going to relate this to English. Here is what he says:

“For instance, I regularly encounter the notion that students need more practice at extended writing. This leads to putting in place systems to ensure teachers give students more opportunities to write extended responses.

While this may sound innocuous and well-intentioned, we need to look at what happens when such systems are enacted. What I overwhelmingly find is that students produce pages and pages of poor-quality writing. We know that what we practice we get better at but practice doing something badly does not lead to the kind of improvements we want.

If students fill up books with poor quality writing they get better at writing badly. The purpose of the system is to make students worse at writing. Obviously enough, this outcome is in no one’s interest.”

What is Extended Writing?

When I develop curricula and assessment in schools, this is my favourite question:

Imagine that GCSEs are no more. We are setting up a school, and I need you to teach your subject. Your only requirement is to make your students as brilliant as possible in your subject. You define what brilliant is - I have no preconceptions.

Write down 6 things you want all students to be as brilliant as possible at.

No one ever answers this question with ‘extended writing’. They answer with stories, poems, persuasive and argumentative pieces, autobiography, blogs, satire, non-fiction, journalism and on and on.

There is no such thing as ‘extended writing’ there are only writing tasks and texts we value.

And guess what, students who rarely read a story won’t get much better at story writing by just writing lots of stories. If you practise what you don’t know, you’ll still end up not knowing much.

But (taking stories as an example of the many forms of writing) my next question to teachers is:

How many stories would students need to read before they understood what good stories looked like?

And how many stories would they need to write before they really improved as story writers?

The answers to these are subjective, but every teacher gives me a number far larger than the number of times students actually write stories in their curriculum. Often it is 5 or 10 times larger.

Instead they probably drill students in lots of practice writing beginnings, and then lots of practice in character description, and then lots of practice in direct speech, and then lots of practice in describing setting, and lots more in using figurative language, and on and on and on. This will not make them much better story writers.

Unless we read and write whole stories.

Let’s take beginnings as an example. We compare the beginnings and see if students are getting better at that. Or we can get them to write two different beginnings to the same story before they finish it. Or they could write an alternative beginning to someone else’s plan for the story.

But they must still write the story.

Why?

Because every student in the class will know different things about stories. They will have a whole hinterland of different reading, film watching, story-telling. Each will have a different schema.

When we just teach the part of story writing we want to focus on, only a small amount can be added to the schema.

But, when we also get them to write the whole story, they update lots of parts of the schema. And for each student it might be a different part, a different skill they are practising, and a different piece of knowledge they are testing out.

When we only focus on the beginning, students might only learn 4 things, 2 of which they might already do competently. But when we also add the whole story, they might learn 20 or 30 things, 15 of which might be poorly practising what they don’t know. But another 5 or 10 might be things they genuinely get better at.

So, this is my plea.

Stop getting in your own way. Read lots of great texts. Ask students to write their own versions, as best as they can. Focus on the parts you think they most need to improve. Then go again.

Review, redraft, re-imagine.

Write. Keep writing.

The purpose of your current curriculum is to make sure students cannot write stories, poems, autobiography, satire, argumentative essays, persuasive essays and literature essays.

You know this. Look in the books of your average student. Look at the rubbish they write in their mocks.