Poetry, because lives matter

Secondary English teacher Theresa Gooda reflects on why poetry is such a powerful way of teaching writing.

As a younger teacher, I remember being quite terrified of teaching poetry. I think I’d always found it difficult at school at university, and, until a few years ago, I certainly wouldn’t have dreamed of sitting down to read a collection of poetry. Now I’m as likely to pick up a book of poetry as I am a novel when I’m gathering together reading for, say, a holiday, but it has taken decades to reach that point.

Gradually, I came to enjoy some poets and poetry, probably through coming to know individual poems well from teaching them. Slowly it became pleasurable rather than a chore. For the classroom, I like that often there is a small amount of text so it feels manageable, but that words on the page are much richer and more playful when part of a poem. 

It’s rewarding to use poetry as part of an English lesson. A student ‘getting’ a poem is great, but even better the other way round: I love it most when a poem ‘gets’ a student.

But I think that what I really enjoy is the way poems ‘teach’. I don’t mean that they do so in any moralistic way. I simply mean the way that they ‘teach’ writing, without me having to do very much at all. 

Poems often offer structures and ideas that students can borrow and try on for size. Giving a student a copy of Great Expectations and expecting them to write like Dickens is more than intimidating. Sharing a copy of  ‘This Is Just to Say’ by William Carlos Williams gives students a form they can emulate and be inspired by.  I rarely ask students to write ‘poetry’ as a result of reading poetry, but their writing will be richer for reading it and experimenting.

Although it was published forty years ago, I’ve only recently come across Richard Hugo’s ‘The Triggering Town ', a collection of lectures and essays on poetry and writing. It’s billed as being full of excellent advice for beginning writers, and, while I’m always a little bit wary of ‘advice for writers’ lest it become too formulaic, much of Hugo’s advice is heartening and relates to exploring process rather than outcomes.

In school we seem obsessed with the outcomes, and spend a great deal of time telling students ‘how’ to write. Yet so much happens during the act of writing that it’s almost impossible to be told ‘how’ to do it: you simply have to ‘do’. As Hugo puts it, ‘ultimately the most important things a poet will learn about writing are from himself in the process’ (1982, p. 33).

Hugo begins with a disclaimer. He isn’t hoping to teach readers how to write, but ‘how to teach yourself to write’ (1982, p. 3). He is speaking to ‘those of us who find life bewildering and who don’t know what things mean’ (ibid. P. 4), suggesting that it is through writing that we might at least get closer to some understanding. Life is bewildering for most teenagers moving through secondary school, and writing offers a negotiating tool.

Once you have a certain amount of technique, Hugo argues, ‘you can forget it in the act of writing.’ This is the stage that we want our students to reach as writers: not to be stuck on the steps before, forcing a sentence to begin with a fronted adverbial, or including a simile because the teacher told them to. 

But, the idea that most resonated was this one: 

When we are told in dozens of insidious ways that our lives don’t matter, we may be forced to insist, often far too loudly, that they do. A creative-writing class may be one of the last places you can go where your life still matters. (Hugo, 1982, p. 65)

Writing matters, because the lives of our students matter.

References:

Hugo, R. (1982) The Triggering Town. New York: Norton.

A Writing Plea

Secondary English teacher Theresa Gooda makes a plea for greater opportunities for ‘low-stakes’ writing opportunities at KS4.

As a writing teacher, NWP member, and former head of English, I'm concerned about the decline in the amount, status, and scope of writing opportunities for KS4 students that I've witnessed over more than twenty five years in the profession; a devaluation that I think has been exacerbated in recent years by the removal of coursework and the 2015 English curriculum changes .

Teachers in my own school (and colleagues I know about elsewhere) deliver the GCSE Literature and Language curriculum simultaneously. The literature includes Shakespeare, poetry, modern prose or drama and a pre-1900 novel. As a result, far more than 50% of teaching time is taken up with ‘delivering’ these texts, simply because of the cognitive demands they make on students. 

Moreover, since the exam-required response to these texts is formal criticism, there are increasingly limited reasons for teachers to playful, creative responses to those texts as we once did routinely when there was a coursework element.

English Language should be split 50% reading and 50% writing. However, the demands of the different kinds of reading questions, and the complexity of the associated assessment, mean that a significantly greater amount of lesson time is dedicated to reading than writing. 

Anecdotally, only about 10% of classroom time is spent on narrative, exploratory or personal writing, when in fact, it commands half the language marks, and 25% of the overall marks across the two GCSEs. 

For the OCR GCSE Language papers, for example, students complete two writing questions; one is likely to be a story or non-fiction writing rooted in autobiography; the other is likely to be more 'transactional' writing to argue/persuade: a letter, blogpost, magazine article.  Perhaps this latter kind of writing is perceived by teachers to be somehow easier to 'teach'; at least some aspects are attainable in more formulaic ways. I don’t know, but it does seem as if more lesson time is devoted to it, and it is often taught through tick-box techniques. Story and personal writing are perceived as unimportant, and must happen by osmosis, or magic.

Thus, simply in terms of the amount of time that students spend on writing, it has become, in the years since 2015, the poor relation of reading and literature. 

The problem is not confined to GCSE and KS4, since, as Gabrielle Cliff-Hodges argues so eloquently, because KS3 is seen simply as a 'waiting room' for GCSE examinations (2017), lessons in Year 7-9 follow a similar pattern of practice.

Given the issues outlined above, by the time they reach Year11, many students not only have low confidence in their writing ability, but also see free and creative writing as unimportant. If it isn't prioritised in classrooms, then why would they view it any other way?

Yet personal writing is often a route to understanding, reflection and self-awareness, regardless of its percentage significance in examination terms. When last year's Year 11 class lost one of their number in tragic circumstances, I gave over longer than usual lesson time for free-writing, with no prompt. Weeks later, students explained how thankful they were for the time to begin to process in writing what had happened. One told how his emotions were complicated by not knowing this person well but watching others grieve. He claimed that he ‘didn't know how he was supposed to feel’ until he tried ‘talking privately to the page.’

Perhaps, as those senior secondary students navigate the pressures of that examination year in an emotionally-fragile post-pandemic world, opportunities to write in this way should be a bigger priority than ever.

References: Cliff Hodges, G. (2017). ‘The Value of Studying Young Adult Literature at Key Stage 3: Coram Boy by Jamila Gavin.’ The English Association Journal for Teachers of English Vol. 68, No3, Summer 2017.

Professional development? Or enrichment for the soul?

NWP Whodunnit, Russell Square, August 2022

Secondary English teacher Theresa Gooda embraces the return to ‘real-life’ writing meetings with other teachers after thirty months of online formats.

The pandemic has a lot to answer for, but one of its (admittedly more minor) effects has been to make me lazy about convening meetings.

When everything suddenly switched online in March 2020, there was something invitingly easy about not having to ever leave the house to attend a meeting. It took me a while to embrace Zoom for my group’s NWP meetings, but how much less effort to click on a link, than jump on a Thameslink train to somewhere?

I convene the South Downs NWP group and our members are dispersed across Sussex in towns and villages many miles apart: Billingshurst, Storrington, Steyning, Fittleworth, Southwater, Loxwood, Horsham, Crawley, Hove and Brighton.

Getting everyone together, even in ‘olden times’ was tricky; NWP meetings for our group have always been moveable feasts; trying to accommodate clashes with parents’ evenings, open evenings, zumba classes, football matches and the rest means that we’ve always played around with different times and different days of the week, as well as meeting up in different places. How much easier, then, to keep it going online?

But we finally gook the plunge and met at a members’ house in Hove last week, for the first time since pre-pandemic days.

And I’m so glad we did.

We need this more than ever.

We had a new member joining us, so we went for a variation on an old, trusted NWP favourite, the floorplan exercise. As ever, it invited a great deal of raw memoir writing. There were tales of a teenage accident with hair-removal cream, a feminist twist on a game of hide and seek, memories of being served alcohol under-age in a local bar, a last phonecall with a loved relative.

But how much richer that writing was for the luxury of writing together.

The hair-removal memory, for example, was triggered, not by the act of drawing a floorplan, but because someone else shared a memory of another kind of hairloss. The incidental sharing offered as many ‘ingredients’ and stimulus for writing as the initial prompt.

Conversational turn-taking operates differently when you are in the room together. Pedagogic discussion is organic. Responses to writing are tangible in laughter, shock, shared understanding: communicated in myriad ways that simply don’t translate when one is ‘muted’ in order to listen in an online meeting.

And, dare I say that the writing itself proved somehow richer?

I love hearing that barely perceptible scratch of pen on the page, or a sigh as someone grapples with a thought or image. The tilt of the head as someone looks towards the window for inspiration. The best sort of pressure arises from that undisturbed, collective enterprise and endeavour.

I also tag along with the London-based Whodunnit NWP group, who got their act together far sooner than I did and started meeting in person back in the summer with a wonderful Mrs Dalloway-inspired session in Russell Square.

On both occasions I have been overwhelmed by the power of what happens when teachers write together, reminding me of why this is one of the central tenets of our National Writing Project.

One of the writers at our South Downs meeting got in touch the next day to say that they felt as if their ‘soul had been enriched’.

I can’t think of a better reason for joining a meeting.

Creative Mediation in the Teaching of Writing

Secondary English teacher Theresa Gooda reflects on negotiating some of the challenges of writing at KS3.

Once a fortnight, all KS3 students at my school (about 600 of them) are required to undertake a ‘200-word writing challenge’ as part of their English timetable.

They are given the following instructions:

• There is a new topic to write about every time. You must not go over 200 words and you only have 25 minutes to write!

• You are given a list of new words and techniques to get into your writing: that’s the challenge!

• You will have time to think and plan out ideas before the 25 minutes starts.

• Then, a partner will check your word count and ingredients. You will have extra time to improve your work.

Next, they are offered a centrally-generated prompt of some sort: perhaps to write in response to an image, or with a first or last line provided.

The task is well-intentioned: to invite regular, independent writing in a variety of genres and voices, and to encourage students to be experimental. I bridle a little at the notion of the ‘challenges’, however, not to mention the ‘checking’ of ‘ingredients’ and the restrictions which are imposed through such a rigid structure. Here is a typical example:

I know that as a writer I might not want to write ‘from the perspective of one of the moon’s on the floor’. I certainly don’t imagine that I would be happy thinking that my fifth sentence ‘must begin wtih a present participle verb.’ That’s just not how writers operate.

But, with a little creative mediation of the task and a tinkering with department slides, it’s easy to represent this in more permissive and genuninely exploratory ways.

I first came across the phrase ‘creative mediation’ a few years ago, and although Jeffrey’s (2003) research was in a primary context, I have found it a useful one in thinking about my interpretation of policy and curriculum demands.

So, in creatively mediating these particular lessons I tend to:

• invite students to create lists and wordhoards at the prompt stage, then encourage discussion, sharing and freewriting bursts before the main writing phase

• ignore the word count, reminding students that it’s a guiderope not a tightrope

• change the modality of all the challenges from ‘you must’ to ‘you might like to’, with the final challenge being that we (because I write with the students, of course) might like to ignore everything that’s on the slide

• answer any questions that begin, ‘Can I…?’ or, ‘Am I allowed to…?’ with my own question of, ‘Who is the author…?’ or ‘Who’s decision is that to make…?’

• read and respond to everything that students write, and invite small numbers to share at our next session, rather than having students ‘check’ each other’s writing. It doesn’t take long, and it is enormously appreciated.

Educational reforms in recent years have tended towards an emphasis on raising achievement levels. This emphasis can mean that teachers become increasingly restricted in the approaches that they are able to take; there is a danger of ‘de-professionalisation’ as opportunities to make judgments about individual classrooms are removed in the drive for homogeneity. Creative mediation of policy and curriculum occurs with teachers’ iterative synthesis of knowledge, in knowing what’s best for their students. In the current climate, perhaps we could all do with more permissions and some creative mediation.

References:

Jeffrey, Bob (2003). Countering student ’instrumentalism’ through creative mediation. British Educational Research Journal, 29(4) pp. 489–503.

The Riddle of the Writing Sphinx

Secondary English teacher Theresa Gooda explains why writing frames and rigid structures have limited scope to help develop ‘real’ writers.

The Great Sphinx, surrounded by scaffolding, during restoration work in 1990 Barry Iverson / The LIFE Images Collection / Getty

I was fortunate to visit the pyramids at Giza and the Sphinx many years ago. It was the trip of a lifetime to see one of the wonders of the world. I must confess to being disappointed, though, that the Sphinx was undergoing a process of restoration at the time, and was mostly hidden behind scaffolding frames. I lamented that I couldn't capture the perfect shot of this magnificent sculpture. My own photographs are more suggestive of a building site than one of the world’s largest and most famous monuments.

Writing is another wonder of our world. It is a complex process that draws on all sorts of writer’s resources, requiring far deeper foundations than the end result of squiggles on a page might suggest. Enabling students to create texts involves tapping into their knowledge of all sorts of linguistic structures and patterns via multiple routes and genres. Who wouldn't be grateful for a helping hand?  It is no surprise that novice (and experienced) writers welcome guidance, pointers, and frameworks along the way, seeking a leg-up wherever it is offered.

This perhaps explains why writing frames for genre writing and PEE (POINT, EVIDENCE, EXPLAIN) and PETAL (POINT, EVIDENCE, TECHNIQUE, ANALYSIS, LINK) for written responses to reading can, in some circumstances, be attractive for novice writers and teachers of writing. But it is worth remembering that they remain scaffolding outside the ‘building’ of the writing. They do not amount to an end product. We definitely don't want to ‘see’ them. Such scaffolding needs to be removed, as soon as possible, so that it doesn't spoil the picture.

PEE, PETAL and their other, sometimes elaborate incarnations may, if not used judiciously, ultimately end up spoiling the writing. As soon as writing becomes formulaic, it ceases to be a wonder. The helping hand becomes the very thing that ends up restricting students. If paragraph after paragraph of writing follows an identical pattern, there is no opportunity for novelty or surprise, no space for originality or flair - in critical or creative writing. As Peter Thomas writes, frameworks such as these ‘support a discipline of Lego Linguistics but do little to develop a humane version of the English curriculum or improve students’ real writing.’ Simon Gibbons also notes the resulting marginalisation of student choice, voice and personal response in Death by PEEL.

Perhaps the answer is to provide those supports when they are necessary for ‘stuck’ writers, but to remove them at an early stage; and to encourage students to see PETAL and its counterparts not as rigid but as amorphous. Not only do the petals of even a single flower assume many variegated shapes and forms, but individual petals can be scattered in the air as confetti, landing any which way, or being carried off by the wind.

Additionally, we have a responsibility to find multiple routes to support ‘stuck’ writers, by modelling different approaches, rather than restricting students to a single thoroughfare. This will allow teachers to open up the creative possibilities of writing, including critical writing, rather than narrowing them down to a single way. Writing requires careful induction into a community of practice, ‘borrowing the robes’ of writers that have gone before by exploring plenty of texts and trying out their rhythms. It is liberating for students to find their own patterns within texts and explore them, rather than particular patterns being imposed on them.

The English & Media Centre have long been advocates of this kind of more playful, exploratory approach to writing, reflected in such resources as Just Write, an illustrated workbook for KS3 students designed to ‘harness pupils’ enthusiasm for writing and to develop their writing “muscles” ’.
Like the NWP, the emphasis is on empowering students to reach a point where they can trust that, as writers, they can afford to take a risk with writing. 

Writing is, after all, a risky business.

To return to the poor Sphinx, I have no doubt that some sort of scaffolding structure was necessary while the Egyptian colossus was first being carved in limestone 4500 years ago, but it did seem a shame that I had to see it that way, with its true power and beauty hidden. 

Let's not keep our classroom writers hidden beneath confining frames, stuck on a building site, but allow them to carve out their own wonderful forms.

What a line can mean

Early Years teacher and NWP social media manager, Rebecca Griffiths, writes about developing talk and writing in EYFS through journeys and familiar places.

Exploring familiar places is a great way to encourage and inspire writing.

This week my class have explored journeys they take each day and their homes. Inspired by Pat Hutchins’ Rosie's walk, and Carson Ellis’ Home, the children discussed leaving their homes to travel to school, to see family, or to on an adventure.

We began with an unfinished, simple road drawn on the reverse of some repurposed wallpaper. During the discussion, I asked children where they would like the road to go and provided pens so they could draw as we talked.

After our class discussion, children chose to dip in and out of this activity throughout the day, adding homes, places that hold special meanings, transport, pets, and a dolphin bus!

They named their contributions and labelled some features. After a while, a conversation emerged about travelling to and from each destination on our road. I drew a line from my house to Albert's and said, "I'm coming to visit you". This ignited a huge interest in what a line can mean. Soon children had drawn trails across the map, in and out of windows, under houses, around cars and beneath the sea.

Sometimes scaffolding can be the simplest of interactions. The children will make the learning their own, meaningful and purposeful to them, if we just give them time.

If you'd like to learn more about developing your writing pedagogy, join our FREE monthly writing group on zoom and connect with like minded practitioners.

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Festive writing fun after new writing group launch

Rachel Booth, Primary English Lead, and Emma Barker, Secondary English Lead at London Metropolitan University, write about the recent launch of their new NWP group.

This Autumn, we launched the National Writing Project NWP with our PGCE trainees at London Metropolitan University. The simple premise is that writing and reading our own words aloud, for pleasure, helps us to become better teachers of writing.

This is an exciting opportunity to meet online once every half term, to read, write and share together.

It has been a privilege to work alongside NWP director, Jeni Smith. Jeni has been writing with teachers for decades, and even longer in schools. She believes that writing is fundamental to our emotional, social and intellectual well-being and to the ways in which we think and grow.

what did the trainees say?

“Excellent session inspired me to do a creative writing class. Wonderful how a few short pieces of prose can spark the imagination with skilled guidance”.

“I am a lover of words, and all that comes with it. It gives us the freedom to share our dreams and worries with others publicly or privately. 

Scaffolding this passion to primary school children is one of my first goals. This is what Jeni teaches us in her sessions. Highly recommended!”

“I really enjoyed the first session, I found it really emotional - in a good way - as I was conjuring up lots of nostalgic memories of family. It was great having such a small group too, as I appreciated hearing everyone’s work. I’m really looking forward to the next one!”

The Christmas Session

Jeni read Little Tree by E.E. Cummings and we created and shared cinquains from our winter words lists before creating wish baubles.

Inspired, the following day, one of our trainee teachers put it straight into action in school with their primary class:

Festive cinquains

Inspired by ‘Little Tree’

Another tried out a different part of the session with her class and shared the following reflections about her experience:

Today, I had year 4 complete the angel wish baubles idea. I printed off bauble templates and lots of images of angels. I was really impressed with some of the wishes the children wrote on the back:

“I wish that everybody would be kind”

“I wish everybody would show empathy”

“I wish that other children around the world get education”

Others wrote wishes for Christmas presents..! It was a really lovely lesson and I so enjoyed helping with the designs and then the final act of tying them onto the line in the classroom.

I also printed off Christmas Tree templates for children to produce word art texts, using words relating to Christmas. I have attached a picture of one of these.

A big thank you to Jeni for the ideas, it was a thoroughly enjoyable lesson.

What next?

Our next session, in the New Year, will involve origami!

Climbing into Writing

Bertie Cairns, of NWP Islington, writes about stairs as stimuli for writing.

Stairs. They’re everywhere. But it was not until we watched Simon Wrigley’s video on making origami stairs that we thought about them in stories, films and dreams and used them for the Islington NWP meeting in November 2021.

So: stairs as stimuli for all sorts of writing.

Stairs as metaphors: journeys to different places, from enlightenment to social climbing. Journeys to the underworld, slow emotional descents. Sitting on stairs in moments of indecision or slowly walking like Prufrock. They are bridges between places, offering goals, dilemmas, surprises. They hint at change and status and struggle. Hope and despair.

Film, of course loves stairs: https://nofilmschool.com/2016/07/learn-how-stairs-can-be-used-visual-metaphors-films

Simon suggested non-fiction uses for stairs: lists of animals with their adverbs or adjectives, stairs as steps to create essays, stairs to show how characters have changed. We thought back to back stairs, so, as Pip climbs, in Great Expectations, we see how he feels before meeting Miss Haversham and then how, going down, he feels afterwards.

And then we wondered what a staircase would say. What voice would it adopt? Does it like your steps, does it mind that we pay it no attention, does it trip up the unwary, the nasty, the arrogant? Our free-flow writing produced some staircases you wouldn’t want to climb!

We then used these initial thoughts to make poems on the stairs and used the space on the stairs as limitations: small step = few words, large step lots of words. We liked the way the poems could be written going up or down or have different poems on different faces depending on how you hold the folded paper. We loved the fact that they fold and will pop up out of our books but also when they are flat, they look like more conventional poems.

Concrete poetry with a licence to roam.

Location, Location, Location

South Downs NWP convenor and secondary English teacher Theresa Gooda remembers the power of space after lockdown and restrictions.

During 2021’s October half term I was lucky enough to escape west in my very rusty, old camper van for a few peaceful days in Dorset (we won’t talk about the alarming noises the engine made on the 350 mile round trip from Sussex). What a forgotten pleasure after repeated lockdowns and no travel for so long.

Each morning I woke up green hills and pheasants crowing, and was able to fling open the doors (on the non-raining days at least) and the luxury of writing my morning pages from bed - with the landscape in touching distance. It was awesome, in the old-fashioned sense of that word, and got me thinking about the importance of space and location in writing once again.

The South Downs NWP group has always favoured environment and landscape. Our very first meeting, back in 2013, took place on a busy summer’s day in the Pavilion Gardens in Brighton. Since then we have written along the banks of the Arun, on beaches, in museums, in tea shops, pubs, and once in a lifeboat rescue centre. Location seeps into the writing, sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes slipping in quietly like the gentle chatter in a cafe. I’m fascinated by the ways that the character of writing changes depending on where we are.

Each NWP group has its own way of working, and most of us are enjoying remembering and rediscovering those ways as we revert back from more than 18 months of online meeting and writing. For now, South Downs NWP are continuing to meet via Zoom, but I’m looking forward to planning our next adventures in different spaces.

Gathering the Clans

NWP secretary and Wembley group convenor Alison Jermak explores the different ways that writing can be performative.

Reading Rebecca White’s poem ‘Dear Gavin’ makes me think about the performative elements of writing as a member of a writing group, or as a member of a class in which everyone (including the teacher) is writing together. Why is it important that the teacher is writing with the class? Because they become a participant, not a judge or a critic.

When starting to write we enter an ‘uncertain space’. This can appear as the blank sheet of paper, or when writing in a group or class, we are also conscious of the people in our writing environment. What characterises the kind of writing that NWP UK practices is the spontaneity of the writing (unplanned) and the performance of sharing this writing by reading it aloud to the group.

Although Rebecca’s poem is addressed to our current Education Secretary, she is really writing to her group in her time: herself and her colleagues. Through writing together, she is able to redefine who teachers are in our current context of politicians using the media to try and manipulate public opinion of teachers. Upon reading her writing aloud to her teachers’ writing group for the first time, it’s dramatic, disruptive, it’s being right in the middle of the action. In my experience in a classroom, when children begin to write together for their audience and read it aloud, this is when writing really comes alive for everyone present.

Sharing writing aloud within a group or class is also the importance of being listened to and acknowledged; not only that the meanings that you are communicating matter, it is also the meanings that you are reaching for, for this is culture in the making.

Let’s also consider the performative element of teachers repeatedly gathering in public places and writing together:

What teachers are doing is practising writing in the way that they would like to teach it.

Celebrating the Spread

South Downs NWP Convenor and secondary English teacher, Theresa Gooda, shares her experience of writing as part of the UKLA Teachers’ Writing Group.

As we pass ‘Freedom Day’ and the heightened messages about ‘stopping the spread’, it has been wonderful to welcome a different sort of spread: the proliferation of teachers’ writing groups. It is heartening, in these troubled times, to know that the practice of teachers writing, the opportunity for personal reflection about writing, and the possibility of changing practice through regular dialogic conversations with colleagues about writing, continues to spread.  Because we know, of course, that voice (in writing as well as speech) is ‘created’, both unconsciously but also deliberately constructed, in dialogue with other voices (Bakhtin, 1986).

As well as being privileged to lead the South Downs NWP group, and recently been invited to be part of the wonderful UEA NWP group, I have also lately participated in a new venture at UKLA: their Teachers’ Writing Group, run by Ross Young at Writing 4 Pleasure. They share similar principles with NWP about being part of a community that promotes research-informed writing teaching, and about the importance of being a writing teacher generally. 

Like much of our lockdown and post-lockdown life, meetings are remote, via Zoom. In the first meeting, in early June, participants were invited to experiment with dabbling as an idea generation technique alongside the reading of a children’s book. 

In July’s meeting, the work of writer-teacher Peter Elbow was championed, and in particular the value of free writing. 

Mostly though, the group achieved that joyful, valuable thing we all need: of carving out space and time to write. I’m already looking forward to August’s meeting.

Different Kinds of 'Knowing' About Writing

South Downs NWP Convenor and secondary English teacher, Theresa Gooda, discovers more about what happens when teachers write together.

The model of NWP meetings is very simple: you meet somewhere, (mostly online at the moment) and you do some writing, along with other teachers. 

The benefits of NWP meetings are difficult to articulate - and I’m very appreciative of writing teacher colleagues who try to capture quite what is so special about them. There’s camaraderie, of course, and there’s something powerful about the collaborative creation in the writing process, and being part of a writing community seems to translate into classroom confidence.

Many teachers who participate talk about it as being ‘transformative’, and I’m coming to understand that the transformation comes through understanding more about the process of writing through the experience and the reflection. I asked my writers at South Downs NWP what it is that they really know about writing from regular ‘doing’ of writing together. This is what they said.

They understand more about:

• The importance of selecting experiences (in prompts and stimulus material) that students can draw on.

• The value of being able to anchor writing to memory to generate rich response

• The power of sharing words together and using them as building blocks, like Lego

• What a benefit there is from the process of hearing your writing read aloud: how it becomes a form of drafting

• How a greater focus on craft and metacognition in relation to writing leads to a far deeper understanding of how language works and richer writing results
  

We tried to go further and pinpoint ways that classroom practice has changed as a result of this different kind of ‘knowing’ about writing. A selection of the ideas:

• Increased empathy: It’s easy to forget what it feels like to write. Teachers could more readily see and celebrate ‘little wins’ with individual students

• Bringing more, and more diverse texts into the classroom to enrich the curriculum

• Introducing shorter bursts of creative writing more regularly: several times a week for most

• A greater use of freewriting, creating an environment where writing is relaxed and not pressured.

• Encouraging students to begin by writing lists of words (rather than starting with the dreaded ‘plan’)

I’m so grateful, as ever, for the experience of writing with reflective teachers - both for the joy of hearing their words but also for insights like these.

It was also uplifting to hear that NWP Islington managed to meet in person last month. Let’s hope that others can follow suit and meet ‘irl’ very soon.

On Morning Pages

Helen Atkinson reflects on how writing Morning Pages has helped her through changing jobs, studying part-time for her MA and surviving a pandemic.

For the past two years I have written (almost) every day. Mostly in a journal (though sometimes on my laptop), mostly a page long (though it can be as short as a few phrases, or a multi-page scrawl), mostly in the morning (but often in the afternoon or evening too).

I have been following the principle of Morning Pages, though, as you’ll see above – I am no great respecter of rules. The phrase was coined by Dorothea Brandt in 1934 and later reinvented by creativity guru Julia Cameron and technically they are three pages of stream of consciousness writing done first thing in the morning. Like the ‘free writing’ that many of us will have done to stimulate writing with our classes, they are personal, not to be shared, and Cameron claims that they are designed to ‘clarify, comfort, cajole, prioritize and synchronize the day at hand.’ Morning Pages are not fitted to an audience or purpose, they fit no mark scheme, and no planning grid. They are simply words, spilled out onto a page.

I was first introduced to the practice by writer and lecturer, Peggy Riley. Peggy’s ethos is that Morning Pages can be whatever we need them to be, to support our creativity and our wellbeing. At the beginning of a part time MA in Creative Writing, I needed the commitment to daily writing in order to guard against the inevitable takeover of planning, preparation and marking. I wrote on my short 10-minute train journey to school, documenting the landscape, the weather, the other commuters and my own worries and hopes for the day ahead. Much of the writing was just a release of feelings but some words and phrases were recycled into longer pieces of ‘proper’ writing at a later date. Most importantly, the pages allowed me to process my unhappiness in my job. They gave me the clarity and courage I needed to leave.

Morning Pages then bumped and scrawled their way on the bus to a temporary teaching job. Their soothing repetition helped me to settle in and provided an outlet for my thoughts as I met new students and colleagues, and began to teach new texts. Morning Pages could be about the lashing of rain on the bus windows or unformed reflections on a poem.

Just a few weeks later, the first national UK lockdown began and, like many teachers up and down the country, I made the transition to online teaching. Beginning my days with Morning Pages, helped me to make sense of the chaos in both the wider world and the little room where I was teaching lessons into a laptop screen. Fearful of the days blurring into one another, I began counting them in Morning Pages that untangled news reports and statistics, provided fictional escapes, and charted the development of the seagull chicks on the roof next door. 

Daily writing continues to help me balance my own writing with a rekindled love of teaching English. Sometimes, my Morning Pages are a free-form to do list or statement of intent, sometimes a draft zero of ideas, sometimes a wailed splutter onto the page. At times teaching pushes its way in, at others, it is writing just for myself. I let the pages be what they need to be on any given day. But some things are certain. I am more reflective because of Morning Pages, more secure in my own practice, both as a teacher and a writer, and a lot more resilient too.

Training to Teach, Forgetting how to Write

Secondary English teacher and NWP South Downs group convener Theresa Gooda reflects on her writing journey from childhood to teacher.

Like many English teachers, I’d always enjoyed writing as a child, and I was a prolific and enthusiastic producer of texts. I kept a diary, wrote play scripts that were tortuously rehearsed with siblings, and probably even more tortuously watched by elderly relatives. I think the first thing I ever said I wanted to ‘be’ was an author.

Through adolescence I wrote terrible poetry, terribly earnestly. At university I wrote and reviewed for the student magazine, and achieved my first published pieces.

And then came the relentless business of surviving my PGCE. Only ‘academic’ writing for assignments happened that year. Even the diary writing stopped. And the first few years of teaching were so hard - there was no time to write anything other than lesson plans. All that writing stopped. And I didn’t even notice it had stopped.

Not only had I forgotten about writing for an audience, I’d stopped doing the more important thing – writing for me. I made students write all the time, but under what I now see were slightly ridiculous conditions - and I didn’t ‘share’ the writing process with them. Instead I imposed rigid frameworks and grids and mnemonics about writing.

What I’d forgotten about - because I wasn’t doing it - was the complexity of writing. I’d forgotten the way it pulled at me, and how it had helped me negotiate things about the world I hadn’t fully understood, even in the bad poetry. Perhaps especially in the bad poetry.

Because I wasn’t writing myself, my writing classroom was restricted to convention, rather than energised by insight and reflected experience.

And then, one Saturday morning, I wandered into a bit of free CPD at the British Library and all that changed. I’d never really heard of NWP., but the idea of a writing workshop had tugged at me.

The first little writing exercise that Simon Wrigley suggested was deceptively simple: a version of writing history that you can find in the Remembering area of the website. We were asked to write down five moments when the act of writing had felt important in some way.

We shared our lists with somebody nearby. I began talking to a teacher next to me that I’d never met before, and the hall erupted as people shared their writing moments - with wonder if my case. We paused again for more writing: this time to freewrite about one of those moments and tell its story, whatever delight or injustice or fear or sadness it provoked then and now.

What we found, certainly what I found, was that these moments all packed a pretty hefty emotional punch. There was some very raw writing, some things that I hadn’t thought about for years. Outrage at my mother looking through my diary. Letters to a first love. Shame at my early plagiarism. Pride in that published piece.

I noticed then that they were a long time in the past, all of them. And yet each retained an emotional punch that provided a timely reminder about the power of writing. A power that doesn’t lie in a framework or grid or mnemonic, but in the act of writing from the inside out. It was a lesson that I have never forgotten and one that I transferred immediately to my classroom, where I became like Keats’ spider, spinning ‘from his own inwards his own airy citadel’.

Flowers Escaping Through City Railings

NWP Whodunit group convener Marjory Caine writes about the evolution of her writing group over the last year of lockdowns.

Subject: NWP Whodunit 14.3.20
Dear NWP Whodunit Teachers,
We’re meeting this Saturday at the British Library…

Not many of us turned up to that session! The fear of travel on public transport was already infecting our lives. But it was difficult to know how to write during a worldwide plague. My next email began:

Subject: Teachers as Writers Whodunnit Saturday 6th and Saturday 13th June 2020
Hi, our next session is scheduled for Saturday 13th June. I suggest a bit of a change to meet the extraordinary circumstances we find ourselves in….We will meet on zoom…

By the time of our next scheduled meeting, life as we knew it had changed completely. I remember that first zoom. Yes, it was great to see fellow writers again after so long, but that was the same as the usual coffee pre-writing meet up. This time, it was relief to see us still here. And then, the personal worries and experiences of each of us could be put aside for the time of our writing.

I had chosen walking writers as the focus – and wow, was it amazing what the group came up with for
‘your street, your lane, your garden, your footpath’. The prompt was simply to jot down a few words, phrases to describe what you focus on. Trees, wild flowers growing in the cracks of pavements, a bird call, the clouds.  

I can still see Susie’s description of flowers escaping through city railings in their exuberance of colours, shapes and scents.

As a group, we decided that as we had few social engagements that we would prefer to meet up more regularly, rather than keeping to the termly sessions. So, we have found character from archaeological artifacts and sites; nature writing from detailed observation and research; landscapes real and imagined; description of months and what they can mean to us – and this took us back to Anglo-Saxon ideas which we meshed with our own experiences.

Theresa’s evocation of the past and present became ‘Bronze Age Sister in my Sussex Country’ – a powerful meeting across the millennia:

Only fifteen minutes’ away through green
tree tunnel towns
when I put my foot
down early till I reach
South Downs Way and I come to you,
wending upwards
via gentlest graduations,
then steep slopes.
Half an hour to the top
non-stop although that’s hard
to do because of your view that shouts to be heard

 Katie’s vivid, in the moment, description of snow in the turning point of the year –

When winter raged in a silent
Manic confetti of calm, and it
Smashed softly into our coats,
Latching, glittering, onto lashes,
Hitching lifts on the tops of our trainers,

As the leader of the group, I’ve enjoyed preparing material to share with others, and to build on their personal responses that take the topics in so many different directions – all at once – as multiple directions are possible, of course.

It is the variety of the responses of the group that has really got me writing. And, as we have begun an e-booklet of polished session writing, I look forward to reading the next set of contributions from my fellow writers.

First of all, I will have to polish my own piece!

Metaphoraging Memories

Another blogpost from the original archive - by NWP co-founder Simon Wrigley, originally published in December 2018. It links with Jeni Smith’s recent reflections from the Director’s Chair surrounding ‘metaphoraging’, as well as documenting some of the growth of the project over the years, and serving as a further reminder of the strengthening of professional agency that NWP group membership provides.

On November 5 2018, at the invitation of Alison Binney, PGCE mentor, I joined her group of student teachers in Homerton, Cambridge. Alison also runs NWP Cambridge and champions the virtues of creative collaboration in classrooms. Her student teachers were sharing their KS3 classroom approaches to the text and context of Frances Hardinge’s ‘The Lie Tree’.  The room hummed with ideas:

Their pupils would use writing 

• imaginatively to open up spaces in reading texts

• personally in their own notebooks

• collaboratively to grow a ‘tree of lies’ on the classroom wall

• reflectively in detective journals 

• evaluatively in exploring Darwinism and symbolism. 

Their expressive and re-creative writing would be informed by debates, role-plays, ‘rumour soundscapes’ and visits to Wimpole Hall. Their writing would be inspired by mock-trials and by researching gender politics in the 19th century.

This was a luminous example of how, by creating experimental and trusting writing classrooms, pupils develop confidence to use writing for learning - excavating, connecting, reframing.

My role was simply to ask student teachers to discuss the ‘rights of the writer’ – and the professional values that informed writing for learning beyond the tests  - before using the space to write. 

We wrote from remembered sounds, places and people. We used prompts, lists, diagrams. We plundered texts and made close observations of objects. We heard each other’s voices.  We wrote for restoration, discovery and empathy. 

Afterwards we discussed some of the benefits of teachers writing together and alongside students: a reaffirmation of creativity, a sharing of feelings, a new understanding of the process – and its ‘affordances for learning’, and a strengthening  of professional agency.   

Here is a student teacher’s perspective on NWP.

On November 10, Jeni and I ran a writing workshop at the NAWE (National Association of Writers in Education) conference in York. We called our collection of approaches ‘metaphoraging’. Together we foraged the hedges and woods of memory, language and literature for those seeds and berries – those discovered treasures  - that might sustain and fuel and fire our writing. 

The conference brings together a wide variety of professionals: published writers, education officers, lecturers, teachers and therapists – anyone who works with writing and education in schools, hospitals and the community. 

We spoke aloud our favourite words and enjoyed their collisions and resonances: espantapajaros (scarecrow), yee-haa, labyrinth, hoodjamaflip, boing, sellotape, nesh, hallelujah … We shuffled and invented compound words and defined them. We foraged folded paper shapes, sentences, texts and objects for new ideas. 

On December 1, I wrote with the Bedford NWP group. We explored ‘six-word stories’ – e.g. ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn’ -  how they provoke readers to imagine cause and consequence, to infer and to carry out, what has been implied or folded tight. They can be hors d’oeuvres (out-takes) ‘The murders of kings and sleep’ (Macbeth) or  re-constructions of well-known works: ‘Incineration. Invitation. Visitation. Transformation. Infatuation. Association.’ (Cinderella); 

On December 10, I visited the English team in Haggerston School in Hackney. By writing together, we opened up a discussion of how and why we might reorient classrooms for learning beyond exam results.  The English team wanted students, in addition to their work for exams,  to experience writing as a  safe place to approach uncertainty and difficulty, to release emotion and to take back control of their own stories.

No Cigarette Breaks

Jenny Corser, Head of Junior English at an independent boarding school in Norfolk, writes about her switch from facilitator to writing participant through NWP, the joy of writing outside the curriculum, and her group’s transition to Zoom one year on from the onset of the Covid19 pandemic.

In every other way, I consider myself to be a ‘facilitator’ of learning. I create situations, tasks and environments to enable my students to write.

But belonging to an NWP group has taught me about the importance of me being a participant in my own classroom. The importance of writing alongside my students in order to share their experiences. To experience the fear of the blank page staring back at you, and then sense of accomplishment when you have completed a piece of creative writing.

How can we justify asking students to write if we are unwilling to model it ourselves? Without that, teachers could easily become hypocrites: “write a poem, but I’m not going to write one” and “read your poem aloud, but I am not willing to share mine.” It’s a bit like the doctor who lectures her patient to quit smoking, and then goes outside for a cigarette break! 

Being an NWP writing teacher also replenishes me with inspiration.

Teaching is a rewarding, yet often draining profession in which we are constantly giving our precious time and energy to students. Belonging to an NWP group gives me time out of my busy week to be inspired with new ideas that I can easily adapt for the age groups I teach. Something else that NWP has given me is the permission and freedom to experiment with teaching techniques that are not necessarily on the school curriculum; for example, book or journal making. There is a real joy in watching students concentrate on sewing the binding of their book and then decorating the cover to make it their own.  

Last week marked the one-year anniversary of our NWP group being on Zoom once a week. At first, I must admit I was skeptical. I could not see how it could translate from our lively monthly meetings gathered around the table at the University of East Anglia - with paper, glue, scissors, gel pens - to being muted on a screen.

But I was wrong!

Whether it is because we meet more regularly so no one feels they are writing ‘from cold’. Or because we are a close-knit group some of whom have been on writing residentials. Or because it avoids that mad rush out of the school gates, driving through traffic and searching for parking. Or perhaps it is because it allows us to write in our homes (perhaps with pyjama bottoms on!) where we feel most comfortable and relaxed. Whatever it is, the formula works.

Over the course of 52 meetings, I have filled two books full of poems, lists, drawings all of which I intend on sharing with my Department. As one member of the group recently commented: “it’s tonic.” 

Elves in the Basement

In this post, a version of which was first published in Autumn 2015, following the launch of the 26th NWP writing group, NWP co-founder Simon Wrigley reflects on the power and peculiar workings of the imagination and the implications for writing.

Frazzled by the new term though they already were, Luton teachers talked and wrote about, amongst other things, a father’s memory,  the nervous rattle of cup on saucer in the hands of a straight-backed woman, and how a daughter could summon her mother to her bedside by running away. These images and ideas emerged from collaboration.  And there was pleasure, surprise and energy as the teachers overcame their fears and re-acquainted  themselves with the peculiar power of writing lives observed, remembered and imagined.

 ‘Elves in the basement’ was how the neuroscientist, Peter Tse, described the internal workings of the imagination.  This was part of a discussion of ‘ imagination’ on The Forum, Radio 4 29.8.2015.

Apparently brain scans show that some neuronal networks are more active when ‘day-dreaming’ than when the brain is ‘task-oriented’ , and that when we are busy imagining, our ‘elves’  hop about between our conscious and unconscious. So, encouraging imaginative play realises potential while too much ‘deliberative’ action may limit learning. 

Arundhati Subramaniam, who was part of this same discussion, spoke about the verbal choreography of poetry which provoked understandings beyond - and sometimes before - the literal.  It allowed you ‘to get from one point to another without realising how the dots had been joined.’ She also made a special claim for poetry being ‘the only verbal art that embraces silences – the high voltage zones from which a poem draws its life.’ 

She quoted the third of her ‘Quick fix memos for difficult days’,

Some nights you’ve seen enough of earth and sky for one lifetime
But know you still have unfinished business with both.

Six years’ of evidence from NWP groups shows that such a model of voluntary, collaborative creativity is valued by many teachers – and has measurable value to the pupils they teach.  NWP not only supports teachers’ sense of professional agency, but also introduces them to approaches which inform, engage and enrich their writing classrooms.

The Little Books of Lockdown

Secondary English teacher Theresa Gooda makes a surprising discovery.

At last week’s UEA Writing Teachers meeting, Jeni Smith demonstrated how to make simple folded books. We used them to write gratitude lines and praise poems and reflected on how the spaces we had inhabited during lockdown had taken on new significance.

It was great fun, but I was a little disappointed. So often NWP writing meetings generate ideas that make an appearance in my classroom a few days later, but I couldn’t really see how to use this one. Great for primary colleagues, I thought, but not much use for my secondary students.

How wrong I was.

Cue Monday’s return to school and the staggered starts for different year groups - with even more staggered arrival at lessons due to covid testing. What to do with the students periodically appearing in small handfuls fifteen or so minutes apart?

Make books!

They seemed to love it. There were ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ of appreciation as the books came into being. It was engaging and engrossing but also seemed to provide the perfect route back to writing.

Firstly, senior students in particular were grateful not to be plunged back into exam syllabus material straight away.

Secondly, the students enjoyed the creativity in design, and, with their newly-acquired expertise, showing more recently-arrived students how to do it. Spines and bindings became more and more colourful and original and moved far beyond the original slit design.

Thirdly, and most importantly, they provided the private space in which to reflect on what has been such a peculiar experience for many of us. As Sam Brackenbury explained in last week’s blogpost:

The pandemic, and the subsequent move to home learning, has shown the value of the writing communities that we foster and nurture in our classrooms. Children need shared writing sessions, that almost palpable energy which comes from writing together. They need discussion with their peers to hear how they bring meaning when interpreting, describing or reflecting so that they can broaden and deepen their own command of language and ways of seeing the world.

My desk was briefly filled with a whole library of ‘little books of lockdown’ (though they were all gone by Friday afternoon with students desperate to take their mini publications home).

Now to master the origami box to keep my books in…

The Significance of Writing Communities in Post-Lockdown Schools

NWP Secretary and Norfolk Year 3 teacher Sam Brackenbury reflects on the challenges - and solutions - for post-lockdown writing.

Writing will be on the minds of many teachers as we prepare in England and Northern Ireland for March 8th, and follow the lead of colleagues in Scotland and Wales who have already begun their phased return.

It is the subject that has seemed to have ‘suffered’ more than most during lockdown and, in some ways, this is not surprising. Learning is often a shared venture, but for writing, the presence of adults and peers seems particularly important for children. To commit ideas to paper and to take enjoyment from doing so they need their writing community.

The pandemic, and the subsequent move to home learning, has shown the value of the writing communities that we foster and nurture in our classrooms. Children need shared writing sessions, that almost palpable energy which comes from writing together. They need discussion with their peers to hear how they bring meaning when interpreting, describing or reflecting so that they can broaden and deepen their own command of language and ways of seeing the world. They need teachers, writing teachers, as models of how to think and act as a writer.

But more than this, they need that unique connection that comes from writing creatively or reflectively together as a group of people. So, as we approach the next few weeks, perhaps we should consider how writing, and our writing communities, might be used to reconnect, catch up and process the past few months. In turn, they might also support academic recovery.

We know that many children may have written very little despite all the effort and thought that has been devoted to designing remote learning. I know this is true of certain children in my classroom. Equally, many children will have experienced writing through typing, either for the ease of teacher feedback as they write on live documents or because parents have found this the only way to engage their children in writing.

Therefore, we might need a means to get pens and pencils moving again!

We should consider how low threat, high investment writing activities would allow children to feel free to choose what they might like to write about. These might be lists or short burst writing opportunities and, as we know our children, we will be aware of what will be safe and appropriate and how much direction to provide so as they are not overwhelmed or limited by the prompt.

Carefully chosen stimuli surrounding concepts such as thankfulness; their home; or themes around hope connected with nature may also facilitate conversations that help to process the impact of being apart from their peers and significant adults. It might be that we decide something light hearted is needed – again we know our children best! At the very least, these could facilitate talk and an opportunity for children to begin to feel comfortable sharing ideas publicly or in pairs and practice essential speaking and listening behaviours that might not have been exercised for some time.

Equally, it is likely that children will have engaged in far fewer dialogic conversations over the lockdown period and such discussions could come from exploring choices of words and explaining a response to a piece of writing, likes, dislike and the connections that have been made. Perhaps we might find that these discussions are easier because the writing is personal to the child. As always, we should remember that when we write, and talk about writing, we bring a piece of ourselves so acknowledging this gift and the bravery of sharing will be essential. Also important will be to remember the right to share only a little or nothing at all, and partake through listening respectfully.

We might consider the role of journals and how they allow the children to invest in the writing process and provide a safe space for them to experiment, invent, make mistakes and, eventually, develop a their identity as writer. This might need to be rediscovered! It might be that we need to simultaneously address handwriting and spelling to help remove barriers that might interfere with writing. There is real benefit to such practice and we know that writing by hand leads to quicker generation of ideas and, for older children, more effective note taking. However, it could be helpful to consider how these might be focused upon discretely and where or to what degree such an emphasis might be placed on these elements so that writing does not become intimidating or stifled.

Throughout these experiences, we as teachers should write alongside our children and think aloud our own writing process and responses to writing. We should model vulnerability and uncertainty, being stuck and revising words, as well as how we are generating ideas and establishing these into phrases and sentences.

Writing has certainly been different over the past few months and it is important to recognise that for some there have been some really positive outcomes from writing at home. Some children will have had many fantastic life experiences and discussions with their parents that will enrich their writing and we might also find that certain children have developed learning behaviours at home that will make them more independent and self motivated. Inspired by the successes of the virtual NWP teacher writing groups, my colleague and I committed to holding one live session a week with our classes and considered how we might use Padlet for the children publish their work. This led to successful writing for many children. I told them how much I enjoyed writing with them and missed this time in class. They returned the sentiment, explaining how they loved the online sessions and wanted to write for longer so I am looking forward to this continuing in person next week.

It is not the entire answer but devoting careful attention to our writing communities could be part of how we appraise the emotional or academic consequences of the pandemic and help the children to reconnect with each other this half term and beyond.