Monitoring Shared Writing at Key Stage 1

Monitoring Shared Writing

Monitoring the Teaching of Writing

VIDEO EXTRACT 1: SHARED WRITING AT Key Stage 1

Writing: areas of weakness identified:

Key Stage 1

-  Inconsistency and inaccuracy in the spelling of initial, medial and final phonemes

-  Limited use of sentence structure and inconsistent punctuation

·  the school has identified writing as a priority and the curriculum target for Year 1 involves developing the children’s ability to know more about what a sentence is and how to punctuate it appropriately

·  the focus of this observation is to evaluate three important teaching ‘moments’ against the stated teaching objective and school priority for this class of children

WHAT MAKES THIS A GOOD SHARED WRITING SESSION?

·  clear structure and teaching sequence

·  quality of teacher and pupil talk

·  the careful composition of one or two sentences

·  choice of an appropriate text type to meet the stated objective

·  effective use of the teaching assistant to secure maximum inclusion

VIDEO EXTRACT 2: SHARED WRITING AT Key Stage 2

Writing: areas of weakness identified:

Key Stage 2

-  writing using an appropriate and effective style

-  structuring individual paragraphs within a piece of writing

The teacher is encouraging independence by expecting children to:

·  work from examples of written text to explore how grammatical features are used to create particular effects

·  investigate grammatical features through a range of tasks, cloze activities, transforming sentences, collecting and classifying words and phrases

·  apply this knowledge when composing text during Shared and Guided Writing

·  apply this knowledge when composing texts independently across the curriculum

WHAT MAKES THIS A GOOD SHARED WRITING SESSION?

·  children understand the writing objectives in the context of their previous reading

·  ‘targeted’ grammatical features are investigated in different ways and at key points to strengthen confidence and understanding

·  children see explicit and focused modelling of successful writing behaviour

·  children are supported by their teacher and peers as they experience how to compose an appropriate text