Student Writing: a focus for improvement

We have just completed a whole pupil free day looking at our instructional practice on student writing. Anne Hammond, our resident literacy coach had us look at persuasive text for most of the morning: where you would find it, how it comes in different text forms [e.g. editorials, songs, advertising, and letters to the editor], its purpose, the social context surrounding the text and the possible world view of the author. She encouraged teachers to let go of the view that longer text pieces were better, that students needed time to practice and refine a particular piece, that in the gradual release of responsibility to students they needed to be able to select the text form and not be told to all write e.g. poems that rhyme and that the purpose was all important.  In the afternoon we looked at the place of spelling or word study. Anne took us through what I would term a constructivist process where after children had listed words with a particular sound from a text the teacher was reading and had grouped them according to some letter pattern they then developed a hypothesis or a rule. They went inquiring in other texts for words with the same sound and then regrouped and retested their original hypothesis. This appears to me a far more powerful practice than telling students a spelling rule and then giving examples from a text book to use the rule. We finished the day making some common commitments to each other to change our practice e.g. teach the craft of writing and not focus on the surface structure quite so much [lateral accountability] and wrote one personal goal for ourselves in our reflective journal. A good day.