Few teachers would teach writing in primary or secondary classrooms without using a WAGOLL to model writing for novice pupils. The language of ‘WAGOLL’s – or ‘What A Good One Looks Like’ – is common, but there may be less shared understanding about how to use them most effectively in the
There are few simple solutions in education. If you are being promised one, it is at best a hopeful fib, at worst a deceptive sales-pitch. But there are some helpful principles that can guide our actions. A useful one I think could help improve literacy in primary and secondary schools:
We can take the brilliant complexity of sentences for granted. Each sentence written in the classroom is a distillation of a near-infinite number of complex moves. For pupils, practising one sentence brilliantly may be worth a hundred sentences written in haste. Too often, in the classroom, sentences are modelled, but
This is not another moan about the perils of ChatGPT, or teeth-gnashing about the inexorable takeover of AI. It is a quick expression of a genuine concern about the potential losses to learning that could attend useful tools like ChatGPT if it becomes a classroom mainstay. I suspect that ChatGPT,
Do our pupils need support for bolster their writing development? In my last blog, I posed the question about whether there was a hidden problem with the damage wrought by the pandemic on pupils who have joined secondary school. The evidence of a dip in national date at both Key
Is ‘instructional coaching’ the next big thing? Maybe I should be a little clearer: by ‘next big thing’, I wonder whether a nation-wide wave of enthusiasm for this particular professional development vehicle will soon wane, and the promise of coaching will quietly fold into mass of unshared failures in schools.
Are pupils new to secondary school this year prepared for the challenges of academic writing? After a couple of terms of secondary school, it becomes clearer whether pupils are getting to grips with the academic demands. As they write narratives in English, essays in history, notes in science, or annotate
A vital factor for inclusion in schools is pupils’ literacy skill. Put simply, reading, writing, and communication are the cornerstones of school success and prerequisites for inclusion. Consider the inferences and implications of the following: ‘Only 14% of adults in the prison population have GCSE level or equivalent in English