Helping Students With Their Writing Skills - Geoff Petty

Writing assignments, essays, and reports is a challenge for students at every level. Differentiation requires that we break down the difficult task of writing extended pieces of work, giving students a 'ladder' up to this high-order skill.

Other high-order tasks can be dealt with in a similar way, for example writing computer programmes or designing experiments, but we only deal with writing here. You could however think of how to apply similar principles to other high order tasks that are important to you.

There are a number of ways of assisting students with their writing, including: . Breaking the writing task down into a series of tasks. This is covered in the previous section . Help sheets . Planning clocks . Writing frames . Showing students exemplar work and asking them to grade this and learn from it . Making your assessment criteria and grade descri ptors explicit and clear . Assessment proformas

Task 1. What strategies could help students' writing in my subject? Participants work in teaching teams if possible of about 3 - 5 people. This task will take at least 30 minutes and could take much longer. Optionally participants could work for half and hour on this, and then reconvene at a later time to complete the tasks.

a) Take a maximum of about ten minutes for the following two bullet points very briefly examine the writing frames, help sheets, and planning clocks below. Discard any that are clearly not interesting, or adaptable to your subject. You may decide not to discard any!

b) Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of those you find most interesting or relevant from the students' point of view from the teachers' point of view

c) Decide whether you could make use of any of these approaches, or of a similar approach

d) Discuss the strategies you already use to assist students' writing, and consider how these could be improved or augmented.

e) Write a teaching team action plan to share out any development work and piloting