8 August 2022

Hear from 2022 Literacy Summit keynote speaker Professor Debra Myhill from the University of Exeter on the complexities of writing and how you can successfully teach all children to write. Plus find out who some of the other speakers are and the research and advice they’ll share about writing improvement.

Show Notes

• Literacy Summit (EDi - staff intranet)

Transcript

Teach is produced on the traditional land of the Kaurna people. The South Australian Department for Education would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land and pay our respects to all elders, past, present, and emerging.

Dale Atkinson: Hello, and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. I'm Dale Atkinson from the state's Department for Education.

Georga Tyson: And I'm Georgia Tyson from Largs Bay School. Today, we are talking about one of the most complex things that is taught in the classroom, the skill of writing, which is also a focus at the 2022 Literacy Summit that brings together international, national, and local experts in the field of literacy improvement.

Dale Atkinson: That's right. And we are lucky to be joined by a couple of those experts now in the form of the department's very own Bev White, our Assistant Director, Literacy and Numeracy Policy. And from the UK professor, Debra Myhill, who is Professor of Education at the University of Exeter and also keynote speaker at the Literacy Summit.

Welcome to you, Debra.

Debra Myhill: Hi, good to see you well, hear from you.

Dale Atkinson: Nice of you to make some time available to us. So, you are coming to speak to us about the dimensions for learning to write, which is one of the most complex things that can be taught in the classroom. Can you talk to us a little bit about why it's such a complex learning area?

Debra Myhill: Well, I think it's because it makes such a high demand on brain power, on mental processes, because you are trying to do lots of things at once. But at the same time, it's making high demands of your language skills and what you know about language. And at the same time, you have to understand what the expectations are about writing.

So, it is very, very challenging to manage. And unusually, writing stays challenging as we get better at it. So even experienced writers find writing a challenge, but they've changed the bar as it were. So, it doesn't get easier, the better you get.

Dale Atkinson: But does it get easier to teach, the better you get?

Debra Myhill: Yes, I think it does. I think because for very young children in particular, there is a stage where they're working very, very hard on simply managing to get words out onto the page, even at the level of, you know, the motor skills to shape letters, knowing how to shape words, writing lines, writing fluently, all of that for very young children means that they can't focus quite so much on the writing itself because you're so busy getting ideas out. Once you've got past that phase and that's become more internalised and automatic, it does free you up to think more about the text itself and what you want to do with it.

Georga Tyson: And what are some strategies teachers can try to support their teaching of writing?

Debra Myhill: Well, I think the strategies really rely on teachers having a strong grasp of these three dimensions of writing. What I was saying earlier about the mental process is that's a cognitive dimension. What I was saying about the language is the linguistic dimension and understanding expectations and being an also sociocultural, if you really want to bring in strategies to help children, you have to think about what is it I'm trying to help.

So, if you do have, just going back to those transcription skills, very young children who are still struggling to write fluently, you might want to play some games that really just get them doing lots of writing and shaping. You may be wanting to teach them how to hand write particular letters and give them practice at that.

So that would be targeting the transcription. On the other hand, if actually they were struggling more with thinking processes around planning, drafting, and revising, because they're older children, some of the explicit things that teachers can do is to explicitly look at how you revise or how you outline text rather than just giving instructions to do revision. And that would probably be looking at a very focused issue. So don't say, let's look at how we revise this story. We might say, let's look at how we revise the characters we've described in this story. So, I think the key thing about strategies in the classroom is that they match the learner's needs in the classroom and that they will draw differently on different dimensions depending on those learner's needs.

Dale Atkinson: So, one of the things we were speaking about in an earlier podcast about the science of reading in particular, was the need to be really deliberately sequential about how you build the learning in that child through an understanding of their individual needs. Does that go doubly, triply so when we we're talking about dimensions for writing?

Debra Myhill: Yeah. In general, I think it really does because you have to know where every child is at in order to know what it is they need to do next. I mean, one of the other reasons that writing is a challenge to teach, as opposed to a challenge to learn, is that writing is multidimensional in terms of the things that you have to learn to do. So, you've got the basic act of learning how to write words and how to spell them or learning how to punctuate. But then you've got learning about how to write argument or learning vocabulary or learning about sentence variety. So, there's so many things you could be looking at, at any one time. And so, it's really worth knowing what is the children need next. The one exception would be, is not to put a feeling on children's imagination or creativity, because I think even very young children who may not have wonderful spelling skills, can come up with wonderful ideas.

So, there's a real thing about don't limit what they can do because often that demotivates children, so let the imagination and the creativity flow, but then what they produce really look at closely in terms of explicit teaching and incremental learning. So, I think the learning is often incremental. The one thing where it differs from, I think from reading, I wouldn't want to make too big a claim on the reading side, on the writing side is that learning is incremental, but it's also spiral or recursive. So, you know, your six year olds can be really good at creating a story, particularly they might do it orally and then write it down. But you know, you have great novelists who are still working on creating a story. Learning about writing is both incremental and spiral or recursive.

Georga Tyson: And what is the connection between learning to read and learning to write?

Debra Myhill: Symbiotic. I think the thing about learning to read and learning to write is they really do go hand in hand and, sometimes there's a bit of a myth that you learn to read first and then you can learn to write, but there's a lot of research that shows that as we learn to read, it improves our capacity to write. But likewise, as we develop as writers, it improves our capacity to read, they're really interrelated processes. So, I would always say, you know, when you are teaching, reading, think about how you might involve writing with the teaching and reading.

And likewise, when you're teaching, writing, draw on excellent reading texts and children's own reading experiences in order to help them think about being a writer and being an author.

Dale Atkinson: That's great advice. What, what advice can you give us about engaging children in the writing process itself?

Debra Myhill: Do you mean the writing process? The planning, drafting writing? Or do you mean writing generally?

Dale Atkinson: Well, all of it. Yeah.

Debra Myhill: Well, I think one of the things that we know from talking to a lot of children and young people is that sometimes they really dislike writing in school, because we make it a little bit dull even though some of them love writing outside of school.

So, I think absolutely at the heart of being able to do all this incremental explicit targeted teaching is also creating a classroom climate, which is conducive to writing. So, we often talk about creating a, a community of writers. In the classroom. And that might involve things like using writing workshop approaches, where children are given plenty of time and space to write, using things like free writing, where you just sort of effectively dump ideas on the page to get going is very motivating.

And that free writing of course is not drafting. It's just getting ideas out. Sometimes, I mean, certainly in the primary schools here where we've worked with the primary schools, having what the teachers here called messy books, where they've got space to write about what they want to write about prior to writing it in a more perfect form for an audience that can really, really work.

So that sense of valuing children's ideas, desire to write alongside, they're being explicit about teaching them things. And I think part of that is also about a community of writers where you create lots of opportunities for collaboration and conversation about writing. One of the wonderful things about collaborative writing and that could be collaborative writing as a whole class where the teacher leads it and, and does joint composition collectively, or it could be collaborative writing, probably in pairs. I think collaborative writing in bigger groups is slightly harder to manage. One of the real benefits of that kind of collaborative writing is that you have to offer ideas and justify why you're making those choices, which is a real learning conversation about writing.

So, if you have to rewrite a paragraph from a science book as a narrative, and you're doing that in a pair in order to do that rewriting, there's got to be a lot of conversations about the writing choices you make and the value is in those conversations. And I think the other thing that's linked to the collaboration and conversation is lots and lots of opportunity for sharing writing, not necessarily always in very formal ways of celebrating finished pieces.

But just regularly reading aloud, work in progress and trying to create that climate where children can say I don't like that sentence, or I don't like that word and can talk about it with others to seek peers’ advice. And of course that grows with age. You wouldn't expect necessarily your youngest writers to be doing that, but you start the habit early by having classrooms, which create that climate for being a community for collaboration and for conversation.

Georga Tyson: Why do you think teachers find teaching writing challenging?

Debra Myhill: I think, I mean, that's a, it's a difficult question to be absolute about, but I think there's two reasons. I think one is that teachers themselves may not be enthusiastic writers. Teachers are more likely to be enthusiastic readers than writers.

And of course in primary schools, we know that they're not always even enthusiastic readers. And I think if you don't write yourself, it's quite hard to understand that sense of being an author. That sense of power as an author you want to try and make your reader feel in a certain way or think in a certain way.

And also if you don't write, I think it's very easy to forget what the experience of being a writer is like. You know, when children get stuck or go off track, those are experiences that most of us have when we are writing. So, I think that's one whole strand of it is that teachers themselves don't have enough experiences as writers to share and be aware of what children are doing in the classroom as, as authors in the classroom and then contend to make it a rather formulaic approach. You know, you must plan your writing without understanding, for example, that, you know, not everybody plans in the same way, or some people have to write first and then form the plan.

But there's one thing I think the other thing though, is back to the thing I said earlier, that from a teaching point of view, when you're teaching writing, there's so many different strands of writing you could be teaching at any one time from, you know, how to shape your letters, to spelling, the punctuation, combining sentences, all the way through to paragraphing text structures. And all of that is what you might say is the form aspect of writing. But you've also got all the things about how do you create the right images for your reader? How do you express strong opinions in an argument? How do you write a scientific text that makes you sound like an expert? So, it's bringing together all the time, writing different aspects of being a good writer.

And I think the risk is that we could spend too much time on one end of it and not enough on the other. And depending on classrooms that can work both ways. You know, you can have classrooms that are brilliant at all the content side and the ideas and the thinking about what you want to say, but not enough explicit teaching about the text itself. Or you have it the other way around where there's just too much emphasis on the form, which just demotivates children about the purpose of writing, which is all about communicating ideas. So, a balanced approach, but it is challenging.

Dale Atkinson: Well, this is a challenging area and made a little less challenging thanks to the conversation with you, Professor Myle. Thank you very much for your time.

Debra Myhill: You're very welcome.

Dale Atkinson: Thank you. And we are lucky to be joined by the department's very own Bev White, our Assistant Director, Literacy and Numeracy Policy.

Let's talk a little bit about the Literacy Summit. What is the point of the Literacy Summit?

Bev White: The point of the literacy summit is really to bring the research to classrooms to actually support leaders and teachers to understand what the current research is and how that can really influence and support the choices they make in planning and teaching for writing and in particular in 2022, it's about learning to write and writing to learn. So, we've had a, a focus on reading for a number of years now, and we do know that people are really keen to learn more about writing. So, we are hoping that we are going to deliver a series of presentations that will support schools to learn together and to really develop their programs.

Dale Atkinson: Now it's a really comprehensive program with a number of speakers from right across the world, internationally, nationally, and locally. Who can come along? And, and what sort of experience are they going to have?

Bev White: We have 10 speakers. And the fantastic thing about it is it's on demand. Once they're loaded up onto plink, you can access them anytime you like.

You can access them during staff meetings, you can use them to support pupil free days. You can do independent learning if it's a real interest for you as a teacher. Anybody who has a plink account in the education department can access the presentations.

Georga Tyson: Who are some of the other speakers and what do they discuss?

Bev White: Well, we have three keynote speakers. So, as well as Debra, we have Steve Graham from the United States. He is a world-renowned leader in the teaching of writing, both reading and writing actually, and talks a lot about the things that really make a difference. The evidence-based strategies that teachers can use and because he and his colleagues have done so much research in teaching writing, he actually has the research data to support what he's saying. So, he's talking about evidence based practices for teaching writing, and he makes connections to reading and learning. So, a very powerful presentation from Steve Graham.

Our third keynote is particularly for the early years, so preschool and the early years of school and that's Iram Siraj. A lot of our preschool educators will remember Iram from, last year. And she's talking about the essential precursors to teaching, reading, and writing and talks about the meaningful conversations that you need to be having in those early years environments to build the language in preparation. Those are our three keynotes. The rest of the presentations are more focused presentations. So, we are looking at focusing on either a particular area in teaching writing, or a particular audience. So, we have Tutita Casa who talks about writing in the mathematics classroom. But how do you teach writing in Maths so that you're actually supporting children to reason and to explain their thinking in, in mathematics. So, it's like using writing to improve your learning of mathematics. So that's one of my favourites. If you're a science teacher, we have Gail Forey, he talks about teaching students to talk and write like scientists and really goes into how you teach the language of science to improve content knowledge and to improve writing and oral language in science. We have a presentation from Dr. Damon Thomas from the University of Queensland. Now, this is an extended presentation because Damon is talking about meta linguistic understanding.

So a lot of teachers are asking for support with functional grammar and Damon delivers. He talks about what you need to teach in the English curriculum in the early years of primary, the middle years of primary and upper primary in terms of functional grammar and the language features that are going to support kids to express their curriculum learning.

And it's pretty full on, but I'm sure that schools will love it. And it's the resource that teachers can go back to many times to really build their skills in that area.

Dale Atkinson: Wasn't an incredible array of speakers that’s available to us. What a resource for all the teachers and educators out there.

Now these can be accessed online. There’s a lot of different ways that people can get them. We’ll include links in the show notes and information on our website, to make them available to you. So, what would your message be to the teachers out here listening and thinking, oh, I should get involved in that.

Bev White:

I think you'll find it incredibly valuable. Like we say, it's all very current research. It really builds on what we've been doing in South Australia for a long time, but I think it really helps teachers understand why teaching writing is so complex. And when we look at all of those three dimensions and bring them together and you get the whole picture, it's almost like, ah, now I get it. Now I know what to look for in my students, and now I know how I can help each one of them to improve.

Dale Atkinson: If you've liked what you've heard from Professor Myhill or from Bev, with the excellent rundown of the keynote speakers and the presenters who are going to be at the Literacy Summit 2022. Please tune in, check the website notes and, get involved.

Thanks very much for listening.

Georga Tyson: Catch you next time on Teach.