Writing is as much a skill as sport or music, but we don’t have the same rigorous approach to practice. Learners engage in a complex process of exercises and drills punctuated by recitals and games. In a skill-based domain, such as piano or soccer, learners get lots of practice between performances. In our rush to reward original expression, we under-emphasise the importance of copying and scaffolding from existing texts. But talk to any artist or craftsperson-writer, painter, programmer, composer, musician, dancer-and you’ll find they’ve all spent time copying other creators. With writing, more than any other skill in school, we prize originality and punish plagiarism. But when students begin to write, the strategies go out the window because they don’t have the basic clause or sentence-level fluency needed to apply the strategy. We tell students to use PEEL and TEAL structures, dramatic arcs, five paragraph essays. We might provide a template, a summary of text features, and maybe an exemplar or two, but is this enough?
#IWRITE LIKE HOW TO#
We ask students to write all sorts of authentic texts including ads, essays, short films, stories, editorials, poems, plays… In doing this we try to provide real-world tasks, but in some ways we are providing students with briefs that would challenge an experienced professional, and then we don’t give nearly enough instruction in how to do the job. We don't give enough instruction relative to the complexity of the tasks we assign.
#IWRITE LIKE CRACKED#
So we need to be more efficient in our writing instruction, but clearly we haven't cracked it yet-maybe someone somewhere has the solution, but it's not working at scale. Our good students are good because their families put in extra time and marinate their children in text and speech. Of course that's a glib statement and a wild generalisation, but there are definitely some systemic issues in our writing instruction. There’s no quick fix.īut one problem we have is that we tend to teach writing the same way this picture teaches drawing: Not everyone needs to be an author or a journalist, but it would be great if everyone could write in a way that entertains, informs and persuades the various people in their lives. Of course, we have great students, but their success is more often a function of local conditions-family background, personal temperament, school culture, an excellent teacher. If you’re a teacher at any level-from primary school to university- you probably see students struggle to write fluently in the major school genres you likely receive garbled stories and essays that sound like Lucky’s monologue in Waiting for Godot. (Note: That's 2011 data the 2017 study had a methodological problem and results haven't been released-but it's not likely to have improved.) In the US, about one quarter of 8th and 12th grade students are proficient in writing. In Australia, standardised writing scores steadily decline from grade 3 through to grade 9. In the English-speaking world, we do a pretty good job of teaching students to read and write, but we don’t do as good a job developing their ability to create complex texts, such as stories, reports, analyses and arguments. Many, many students struggle with advanced writing! What problem is Writelike trying to solve? Writelike has been developed with grant funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in the US and the Queensland State Government in Australia, and incorporates advice and guidance from Professor John Sweller at UNSW and Professor Steve Graham at ASU. It takes a craft-oriented, text-modelling approach to writing instruction which will be recognisable to teachers experienced in mentor-text methods, genre-based pedagogy, or cognitive load theory. Writelike is a platform designed to help students develop advanced creative and narrative writing skills.
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