In Term 4, 2016, the school decided to embark on the journey of L3 into Stage One. In preparation for this, Stage One, the Instructional Leader and myself (Leanne) attended Lansvale Public School to view how they run L3 within their Stage One classrooms. The lesson we observed was based on writing and the writing process. This inspired me and my colleague (Emily) to begin our journey in teaching the writing process effectively to our students at Thomas Acres Public School.
We began our journey in 2017, not really knowing what we were doing. Throughout Term 1, our school implemented a differentiated professional learning whereby teachers could choose their own journey for action learning. We decided to make writing our focus for our action learning. As such, we researched best practice in regards to reading and writing and embedded this new knowledge into our teaching practices through our Read It, Talk It, Write It program. Thomas Acres Public School’s focus in 2017 was to embed a range of Formative Assessment strategies within our teaching practices. We decided to utilise Formative Assessment strategies as part of our program.
The Read it, Talk it, Write it project began by experimenting with a program that focused on teaching students the writing process (Plan, Compose, Revise, Edit, Peer Check, Publish) using quality literature in order for students to become authors. The program ran over a one week cycle whereby each week focused on a new quality text and each day the students would complete one part of the writing process for a single piece of writing.
As time went on, we encountered some issues with this model. The first being that some students struggled to complete their writing in a week, especially the students who could write pages and pages of writing during the composing stage and therefore each step in the writing process was not always completed. The second issue was some students did not have enough background knowledge, comprehension, vocabulary or grammatical knowledge to complete each step in the writing process.
We participated in further research and professional learning. We continued to experiment with the program and changed it to suit our student’s needs in both a Stage 2 and a Stage 1 class. By the end of 2017, we had adapted our program to incorporate a range of activities to cover more than just the Creating Texts part of the syllabus and the Literacy Continuum. We changed the program from being a one week cycle to a two week cycle whereby the first week would cover a range of comprehension, vocabulary and quality discussion activities based on the quality literature we were focusing on. The second week covered the writing process whereby students responded to the focus texts by writing an imaginative, persuasive or informative text following the steps of the writing process.
In 2018, we continued with this model focusing on one purpose for writing each term. The program today incorporates a range of activities for comprehension, grammar, speaking and listening and writing. One of the most effective parts of our Read it, Talk it, Write it program is utilising quality WAGOLLs to model the expectations of each step in the writing process. As the students write their own piece, we pre-plan our model to incorporate the vocabulary from each text that we are reading, the grammar focus for the teaching cycle and the continual teaching of practices within the writing process.
As a result of the program, we have seen our student’s writing improve immensely. Last year alone students in both our classes showed more than 12 months growth in their writing ability. Some students even showed 2 years growth. We truly believe in our Read it, Talk it, Write it program and have seen evidence to suggest that it really is an effective way to teach students the skills for being authors.