Acting on information about your learners’ writing:

next steps

Melanie Winthrop

Overview of the webinarKey ideas:• Individual learner profiles help to clarify learners’

strengths, their areas to build on and appropriate learning goals.

• Knowing the demands of tasks and texts is an important part of planning for teaching, along with knowledge of your learners.

• Exploring quality texts makes the demands of the text and task explicit to learners.

• Deliberate acts of teaching help learners to develop skills, knowledge and strategies for their own writing.

• Reflecting on the impact of your teaching is an important aspect of improving learners’ writing achievement.

• Every learner has strengths, no matter where their writing sits in relation to the progressions.

• The information you have about your learners’ writing competence helps you to identify their strengths to build on and areas to work on.

Knowing the learner

Learner profiles

• Individual learner profiles are a good way of collating and comparing a learner’s strengths and areas to work on. They take a little time to complete at first, but are well worth the effort.

Example of a learner profile based on the exemplar ‘Biyansi’ from the ‘Assessment Tool for Adult

Literacy and Numeracy’

Strengths to build on Areas to work on

Ideas: Uses own ideas - some extension and elaboration

Cohesion: correct use of pronouns, ideas flow

Basic spelling: Correctly spelt common words and some difficult words

Improving sentence structure: no correctly formed sentences

Develop audience awareness: Some attempt to orient audience, but tone too friendly

Develop correct use of punctuation:Inconsistency in use of sentence punctuation

Next steps:Write correctly formed and punctuated sentences. LP 2

Learner goals

• Learners need to have ownership of their next steps.

• Share and discuss your learners’ next steps with them so these become their goals.

• Help learners to frame their goals into achievable actions

Questions and answers

• What would you choose as a next step if the writer of ‘Biyansi’ had just one strength -spelling?

• What questions do you have about the key ideas discussed so far for ‘knowing the learner?

Knowing the demands of tasksMapping a task helps you to pinpoint:• the contexts in which learners

will be expected to write,• the demands of their writing

tasks- the types of texts that they will have to write, how complex the text needs to be, and how they are expected to carry out the task.

Knowing the demands of texts

• Sharing good examples of the texts that learners will be expected to write is a powerful way of making the demands of the task and the text explicit.

• Analyse the text with your learners to demystify its characteristics- purpose and audience, language choices, structure and vocabulary.

A shared approach to writing

A shared writing approach involves the educator and learners co-constructing a text together. This approach:• involves exploring quality

models, developing the criteria and modelling how to use these criteria to construct the text,

• requires educators to be quite deliberate in their teaching.

Developing criteria for writing

• Working together to develop a set of criteria for quality writing helps to ‘unlock’ the text for learners. The criteria you develop serve as guidelines that learners can refer to as they compose their own text.

• The criteria guide learners to make sure that their writing has the language and text features, appropriate tone and relevant vocabulary that is demanded by the task.

What do the criteria look like?

• The criteria should contain no more than 5-6 bullet points . An example for describing how to apply mouth- to-mouth resuscitation:

• Introduction - why and when • List of actions described in the

correct sequence• Imperative verbs used to introduce

each action• Present tense used throughout

Questions and answers

• What questions do you have about exploring quality texts?

Knowing what to do: deliberate acts of teaching for sharing quality work

Sharing quality work involves:

• Modelling (thinking aloud, demonstrating),

• Asking questions, • Prompting, • Giving feedback, • Explaining, • Discussion.

Frameworks for writing

• A writing frame or template outlines the structure, key vocabulary and prompts for ideas and information to help the writer meet the purpose of the writing.

• For some learners, a framework is a vital support in the process of creating their own texts.

Reflecting on Learning

At the end of every session, ask yourself:

• Did my learners achieve what I planned?

• How do I know? If not, why not?• What do I need to build on?• What do I need to differently?

Take time to record your evaluation

and the steps you need to take.

Questions and answers

• What questions do you have regarding the last section about knowing what to do (and what to do next)?