Norwich Group Meet, March 2023

Lin Goram reflects on a supersized Norwich Writing Teachers’ Group March Meeting

Date: Saturday 23rd March 2024

An unusually big group met at Norwich Cathedral this week – snagging and completely filling a big corner table. Before we started writing we all shared news and a lot of this centred on change – Sarah’s move to a rural school and successful writing workshops, my new job in teacher education, Rebecca’s recent circus workshops for home-education groups, Caroline’s first time writing with us.

Today’s writing was centred around the theme of time – we began with words and phrases associated with time. Lots of interesting words and phrases popped up, including ‘every nob and his dog’, ‘witching hour’, ‘the sun’s over the yardarm’. This led to some free writing using one of our words and phrases as a starting point. A long queue for coffee meant that we had started late, so carried on with writing with plans to share at the end.

Ann Patchett says: ‘There is no such thing as an old book; if you haven’t read it yet, it’s always going to be new to you.’ Jeni’s ‘new book’ is Niall Williams’ This is Happiness, in which he captures small moments – precise memories – in just a few words; and tells rambling stories that focus on the teller as much as the story in long, unwieldy sentences. We had a go at doing both, inspired by Le Guin’s writing exercise: write your story in one sentence. Some of our sentences were short moments, others were long stories. Moments shared included the birth of two of our children, a childhood memory of running downhill with Grandad at Framlingham Castle, wandering through Portobello market just last week. Stories shared included an early, silent commute to work, a trip to Mount Everest, young cousins fighting, a memorable trip to Israel.

Sandwiched in-between our Niall Williams writing, Jeni read two poems called ‘Today’, by Billy Collins and Frank O’Hara. I do love the Collins’ poem: I chose to read it at my niece’s naming day. ‘A spring day so perfect…so etched in sunlight’. There was spring in the air as we wrote – though some rain too! Suzanne shared her ‘today’ and captured our moment of writing.

We talked about time and the things we had chosen to write about: we’d recalled moments from our childhoods, from our younger days, from our current lives: from last week, last year, last century. Some of the things we had chosen to write about were one-off, treasured moments. Others were the repeated, habitual experiences of our lives, memorable because they are woven into our days and nights. As well as being rooted in a particular time of day or time in our life our memories were also rooted firmly in a place, so that remembering a particular place took us to a particular time. It seems that time and place are hard to unweave.

I wonder which times and places you could write about in one short sentence, and which would be long, wandering tales?

Next Norwich Group Meeting: Norwich C of E Cathedral, Saturday 27th April 2024 from 10:30am

Developing approaches to writing in the secondary English classroom: Reflect.

Lin Goram  

In my recent article ‘Developing approaches to Writing in the Secondary English Classroom’ I made some recommendations about starting points for teachers who want to focus on becoming more comfortable and confident with writing – both in and out of the classroom. I want to take some time to unpick the recommendations I made.  

This is the first of four blog posts, each focusing on a different area: reflect, plan, talk, write. In this blog post I’ll look at how reflection can help you develop confidence in writing and become more comfortable with being a writer. 

Here’s what I said in my article about reflection: 

‘Reflect on your experiences, confidence and attitudes to writing. It is important that we do this: as teachers who model the process of writing and draw out key elements of effective writing, we are expected to be competent, but “this is potentially problematic if [we] lack self-assurance and positive writing identities” (Cremin and Baker, 2010, p.9).’   

Since the main thrust of my argument is that to teach writing well we need to develop a personal writing identity, this blog post is going to focus on reflecting on ourselves as writers. 

Each of us has different experiences as a writer and a different relationship with writing, so I’m mostly going to ask questions. It’s up to you to think about your responses and what they mean for you as a writer and a teacher of writing. 

Personal reflection 

We’ll start with an activity: 

Put your pen to paper (or fingers on your keyboard!) and write continuously about your feelings about writing. You might want to respond to my original advice as a way in: ‘Reflect on your experiences, confidence and attitudes to writing’. 

Set a timer and write for five minutes without stopping. 

If you can’t think of anything to write, write that! Try to keep the words coming, even if it feels challenging. 

Don’t worry about the rules of writing: this is personal and just for you.  

(Side note: When I started writing creatively as part of a teachers’ writing group, it was during a Covid lockdown, so we met remotely. I wrote on my laptop, though I could see from everyone else’s Zoom screens that they were using pen and paper. I now favour a notebook and pen, as it makes the act of writing feel more deliberate, more concrete. It allows me to embrace the messiness of changing my mind and keeps a record of where I have made such changes through scribbles and crossings-out. You might want to think about how you prefer to write, and how writing on a keyboard or with pen and paper can affect the way you experience writing.) 

Congratulations! You have written something: you are a writer. 

Seriously though, my first point is that it is important to consider what ‘writing’ (as a noun) means to you. Cremin and Myhill’s work on the UKLA ‘Teachers as Writers’ project uncovered the fact that teachers often have a very specific idea of what constitutes ‘writing’ and this tends to be print, narrative writing with clear authorship: a book, a play, a collection of poems – all things you can borrow from the library or buy in a bookshop. 

So how do you feel about your reflections on your own writing experiences? Would you consider it to be ‘writing’? Is there anything that would have to happen for you to feel qualified to call it writing, and yourself a writer? Does writing always have to be for other people? Does it always have to be a finished product? 

Here's an activity which will allow you to explore Cremin and Myhill’s ULKA research more personally: 

Keep a list of all the writing you do in a 24-hour period. Include everything you write, with a pen and paper, on your laptop, tablet, phone. Remember to put the list you are writing on the list!  

Now look at your list:  

• What kind of writing did you do most often?  

• What was your most common method of writing?  

• Who were you writing for or to?  

• Which pieces of writing did you worry most about getting ‘right’?  

• Did you write on a weekday or a weekend? How might your writing differ in each case? 

• Have you changed your mind at all about what ‘writing’ is? How?  

You can use this activity to reflect more broadly on what ‘writing’ is to you, and your own writing habits: how you like to write; how writing helps you to think, process, remember; what you feel most confident about in your writing; when and where you choose to write.  

Back to today’s reflection. Peter Elbow calls himself a ‘cheerleader’ for private writing: writing which we do not share but is done ‘to pursue a train of thinking all by oneself’. When I asked you to write, I told you that you weren’t expected to share. So why did I ask? I wanted to give you the chance to think, process, articulate – to pursue and develop a train of thinking in a safe way and to feel that you could be completely honest. Writing can be perfect for that – especially when we want to focus on our own thoughts and feelings as a starting point.  

Let’s think now about what you wrote. Perhaps you wrote about a teacher who inspired you. The journal you kept when younger. A lack of confidence in your ability to write anything which is ‘any good’ (I do hope you didn’t write this, but several years ago I would have!). Can you see anything in your writing which is contributing to how you feel about yourself as a writer – any barriers to feeling comfortable with a writing identity? Any experiences which have made you feel confident about calling yourself a writer? In a sense it is just as interesting to reflect on what you chose to write about, as a starting point for ongoing reflection. 

Lastly, let’s about what I meant when I said, ‘Don’t worry about the rules of writing’. What did you understand by that, and where did you get your ideas about ‘the rules of writing’ from in the first place? Earlier I said that as teachers of writing we are expected to be competent – did you write about that in your reflection? What do you consider ‘competence’ to be in this context? Does it make a difference that you are a teacher of writing? I’ll return to this in later blog posts. 

Now what? 

Now that you’ve reflected on yourself as a writer, how do you feel? What did you think about that surprised you? Were any of the things you wrote about unexpected? Is there anything you’d like to think about more? Anyone you can talk to or ask questions of? 

Most importantly, you are probably reading this blog because you are interested in reflecting on and possibly developing your own writing identity. So what does this mean for you as a writer? Here are some thoughts: 

• Write regularly, with a focus. You might want to respond to something you have read or seen, or explore an experience you have had. This might mean setting time aside to develop the habit. It might even mean writing when you don’t feel entirely comfortable with it. But think about what the writing is for – you’re likely to keep this writing private, so what do you have to prove?  

• Thinking is messy, and if you’re going to write what you’re thinking, your writing will likely be messy too. The more comfortable you get with the messy process of writing, the more self-assurance you are likely to have about being a writer. 

• In my original article I said that people who identify as writers are more likely to enjoy writing. This can of course become a circular idea where you might feel you would need to enjoy writing in order to identify as a writer. Becoming comfortable with writing is a good first step towards enjoyment. 

• Think about writing as a process: the writing I have asked you to has not been about producing a final, finished product, but rather a record of your developing thinking. If writing is a process, a ‘good’ writer is someone who can explore ideas through writing.  

• Remember that writing more isn’t a silver bullet for developing a writing identity. It might, though, mean that you are understanding of how others might feel when you ask them to write. It might help you find the words for talking about the process of writing, and how it feels. It might help you feel confident in writing and sharing your own words. 

• If you want to write something that is more of a final, finished product, perhaps to share, or to use as a model in your classroom, be realistic about what you want to achieve and how much time you have to achieve it. It took me several hours to write this blog, drafting and redrafting – and I could have taken several more. And just get writing: Free writing is a good way to start. As Anne Lamott says in ‘Shitty first drafts’ (note the title!) from Bird By Bird, ‘You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something – anything – down on paper.’ 

• Join a writing group. This might be one in which you focus on the skill, the experience or the wellbeing benefits of writing. I’ve been in groups where we have given constructive criticism on each other’s writing, where we have just listened to each other’s writing, and where we haven’t shared our writing but instead shared how it felt to write. There has always been the option not to share, to keep our writing private. I’m a real joiner, so for me the shared act of writing – initially on Zoom but now in the beautiful surroundings of the Refectory at Norwich Cathedral – is what I prefer, and I’ll always read out what I’ve written! But that might not be for you, and that’s fine. 

Next I’ll be turning to how we might plan to teach writing. It won’t surprise you to know that I’m going to set out why a strong sense of your writing identity is essential when planning to teach writing!  

References 

Cremin, T., and Baker, S. (2010), ‘Exploring teacher-writer identities in the classroom: Conceptualising the struggle’, English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 9(3): pp.8-25.  

Cremin, T. and Myhill, D., (2018), ‘Teachers as Writers’, ULKA report. Available at https://ukla.org/wp-content/uploads/View-Teachers-as-Writers.pdf. Accessed 13.4.24. 

Elbow, P. (n.d.), ‘THE IMPORTANCE OF AUDIENCE AND RESPONSE IN WRITING’. Handout available at https://peterelbow.com/pdfs/Four_Audiences_for_Writing_Responding.pdf. Accessed 13.4.24. 

Goram, L. (2023), ‘Developing approaches to Writing in the Secondary English Classroom’, Impact 22, Chartered College of Teaching, pp.20-22. 

Lamott, A. (1994), ‘Shitty First Drafts’, from Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, New York: Random House. 

Fuel for the writing mind

English lead and Year 2 class teacher Sam Brackenbury writes about the rich rewards of his most recent NWP meeting.

In March, four of us met on a corner table amongst the comings and goings of the busy refectory café at Norwich Cathedral. There was a girls’ choir rehearsal taking place nearby so there were plenty of hurried hot chocolates and, moments later, a clutch of returning parents clearly enjoying the moment of inner exhalation that comes after arriving somewhere just on time and the promise of a warm drink. As always, this beautiful space provided fuel for the stomach in the form of cinnamon swirls, cardamom knots and good coffee, as well as fuel for the writing mind.

We began with lists inspired by the here and there, invited to explore both the physical and metaphorical. Naturally, the meeting of modern and old found around us was a starting point  - cobblestones, cut glass panels, stone arches and architraves - but we all quickly moved towards a sense of ‘being’ whilst here. This had flavours of the reverence that religious spaces inspire but also the joy in honouring a time for ourselves in a busy half term, to write and to discuss our teaching of writing. 

Our next focus on luggage tags led to lots of ideas for the classroom. These were lists of a sort, explaining where something or someone may start 'from' and where it or they may head 'to'. Our collections ranged from conventional phrases, "from ashes to ashes", to stories of places where we had lived. This led to conversation about how such an activity may be used as a vehicle for exploring or introducing character, with talk of Shackleton's crew and upcoming units of work, but also how it may inspire journey writing. The rhythmic 'from' and 'to' seemed a great vehicle for a set of directions, either before writing a more lengthy piece or as a poetic alternative. 

I've always found this discursive, reflective aspect of writing amongst fellow teachers so valuable. Engaging with the writing process always unearths helpful reflections to apply when children come to write or ideas for how the task might be scaffolded as well as how it may lead to further writing. It also reminded us of how much we enjoy the autonomy to think and plan for our young writers, knowing them so well whilst also knowing that they are entitled to varied writing approaches and opportunities across their time at school. With this in mind, these shared creative, collaborative spaces are so important, both for professional development and, ultimately, how they influence the minds that are being shaped in our classrooms.

We ended by taking one of our luggage tags and expanding this journey to create a more extended piece before parting ways. From the cathedral back to our classrooms via a restful weekend, savouring the richness that all teacher-writing groups offer.

Creating in the Cathedral

Lin Goram shares her reflections on writing in public spaces after a recent NWP meeting.

It was busy again at the cathedral refectory. Lots of people coming and going, including a couple who shared our table for a while. We talked about the possibility of booking a private room to meet, and meeting in spaces created and designed for writers to write together. Meeting to talk, read and write together in public spaces feels important: it is a social activity and one which can be commonplace and unremarkable, in the mix with eating scones, drinking (excellent) coffee and chatting with friends or relatives.

In this session we wrote about nature, about the small but precise things we can notice and record in our everyday, outside lives. We warmed up our words, ironically, with words about the cold: monochrome, grey, fresh, crisp – and Mark’s lovely dialect words: hozzy nozzy, among others! As usual, Gilbert White’s observations in his diaries were a starting point. Our short diary entries for this morning inevitably focused on the current cold snap: crisp, frosty doorsteps and grey colours. Observing with precision, then distilling these observations into short but vivid descriptions is harder than it sounds!

The writing of Laurie Lee (Village Christmas) and Charles Dickens (Bleak House) led to writing about warm and cold places: Mark’s snow-covered beach and Helen’s unexpected encounter in Venice. It led us to talk about how we had written about places where things meet: home (a warm bed in a cold room), a wintery beach (snow and sand), Venice (British and American tourists), Romney Marsh – my choice (land and sky). I love to share what I’ve written, though for me it is always about making the words I’ve written real by saying them out loud. As we share our reading, there is the occasional nod of heads as we can picture the voices, the landscapes, an image or sound.

There is something about being in the cathedral – the natural light, the bustle – which contrasted with the quiet phases of writing. Another unexpected pairing.

Norwich Group Meeting, December 2nd 2023

Lin Goram reflects on all things festive

We didn’t get our usual corner table when we met on Saturday in Norwich Cathedral Refectory. It’s always busy there – we had to do some shuffling about to cram six of us, plus resources and coffee, round a small table. When I think about the activities we did, being crushed up together made it all the more fun. Today was about creating a small oasis of mess and stickiness and storytelling in an already bustling place.

It feels like a time of change for lots of us – some of us are looking out for a change in job, others embracing changes which have recently happened. We chatted about how we’d come to writing group in the first place – for me it was part of the activities in the writing pedagogies course I chose as part of my MA studies at UEA. I’m a relative newcomer – some have been coming to the group for over ten years! Despite my toddler status, the experience of writing together and sharing our writing makes me feel as if I know everyone well. I feel welcomed and settled.

We started with a shopping list of words and phrases about Christmas. My carols were from Kings; Mark’s carols were heard in Waitrose. A mix of warm and cold, anticipating the joy as well as the weight of expectation to make Christmas excellent for our loved ones.

We moved on to reflections on the rituals of Christmas, using Dylan Thomas ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’ as a starting point. We decided not to share as it was much more exciting to get going with the next activity. Jeni shared some fantastic picture books with us, including Jon Klassen’s ‘How Does Santa Go Down the Chimney?’ and Neil Gaiman’s ‘What You Need to be Warm.’ Even the staff were enjoying it!

Then we really got into it: Jeni’s incredible three-inch hole punch meant we had perfectly sized pieces of card to make baubles – complete with heart-shaped holes to thread ribbons through for hanging. We did plenty of cutting and sticking: choosing angels and birds to create our baubles, with messages for loved ones on the back. Writing a short message means you have to be so sparing with words – not easy for me! – and having a loved one in mind makes the message all the more meaningful. There is so much power in just two or three words – at points it felt very emotional as we thought of the people we were writing to.

From baubles to boxes: we then spent time creating tiny Christmas boxes, with room for concertinas of paper telling Christmas stories (how does Father Christmas get down the chimney?). Since getting home I’ve bought reams of glittery paper and made boxes for everyone I can think of – some with chocolates in, others with stories.

What messages do you have for yourself and for loved ones at Christmas?

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The next Norwich Writing Teachers’ Group meeting has been set for Saturday 20th January 2024 in the Refectory of Norwich Church of England Cathedral. Scroll down to the previous blog entry for venue details or please email/message us via the website or social media for more information.

Norwich Group Meeting, Saturday 11th November 2023

Finding our voice, words we relish and remembrance

Stephen Pearson-Jacklin reflects on the Norwich WT Group Meeting.

The refectory at the Anglican Cathedral in Norwich is always a busy, bustling place. Especially on Saturdays; and even with a cool wind whipping up the Fine City. Today was no exception and it was only hearty waving arms from Jeni Smith and Mark at the furthest table that caught my eye and helped me find my seat with the group. Three of us made it this month, with others either delayed or waylaid by teaching and other commitments. Before we could begin proper, all fell silent for the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. The dozen-strong queue for coffee and cake stood still. People outside and in, amidst conversation and everyday life, paused to reflect on conflicts past and present. Some stood at their tables. Of course, afterwards the three of us then shared stories of ancestors and living relatives who served, or are serving as well as our awareness of the world around us: conflict, change, upheaval and turmoil. Once the hustle and bustle resumed, the little minute’s peace and quiet seemed all the more poignant. All the more important.

Of course, Jeni always arrives at WT events armed with a plethora of ideas and activities. We almost always start by writing words - I’d been thinking of these in the car and on the walk up from the multi-storey - but the theme this time was words you frequently use, words you relish. Occupation, sleep, kitten, place, journal were some of those on my mind: the first relating to Remembrance and teaching. We wrote more, full sentences this time, on the theme, ‘I am from…’ Jeni and I keeping mostly to the structure of starting sentences in that way. Mark made a list. We told of links to other parts of the country, the influences family and friends have had upon us. The effect that teaching has had upon us. Our own occupation, it seemed, had taken a heavy toll on us and we pondered on the flux of people either leaving or thinking about leaving teaching.

After much ruminating, we pondered a ‘What if…’ - what if we had led a different life? Had a different name, a different career, what if we or our ancestors had made different choices? There was the writer who had not pursued teaching, but had become an author and journalist instead. Highs and lows, of course, humour and horror but an adventure and a vignette of another life. There was James (aka me) who was rally driving through an Alpine forest, as far away from teaching and education as perhaps one can be. There was the grandmother who had led another life and not married grandfather. A more romantic, dreamy story than crashing through woods at breakneck speed or the (mis)adventures of said journalist. We reflected on how we’d written the stories, just as we had on the different ways all three had approached the ‘voice’ activity beforehand. On hearing the story of the grandparents who had not married each other, I reflected back to my own grandfather who I always understood had wanted to stay in the army and not return home after the War. In that scenario, my own grandparents may have not married each other either. An entirely different ‘What if,’ and a different voice I would have had, had I been here at all! WT often serves up curve-balls like that, as inevitably one thought arises from another or from the way in which someone else has approached their writing. As unnerved as I was by the realisation that there are probably millions of circumstances by which I would not be here today, and again millions more by which I would not have my present voice and identity, there is always comfort in Writing Teachers sessions in hearing the words of others and in knowing that there is freedom in what we compose. No pressures from the curriculum or from ways of doing things.

Writing, remembering and reflecting always have an impact on me, and I’m sobered by that as much now as I was twelve years ago when I first began attending Writing Teachers’ meetings. As I sit here now, I wonder what we might have talked or written about if the date had not been 11.11 and the time not 11am, even if we’d had the same prompts. I’m pretty sure I’d have still written about wanting to be a rally driver, and would still have thought about my cousin who wanted to be a fire engine or a police dog (now there’s something to write about!). My cousin who is now, somewhere, out there in a submarine. Now that’s about as far from teaching as you can get!

Have you ever pondered what if…? Have you ever thought about where your voice is from? What are the words you relish, that you use frequently? Have you ever pondered on a why, or taken a pause?

>> The next Writing Teachers’/NWP Norwich Group meeting will be at 10:30am on Saturday, 2nd December 2023 in the refectory at Norwich (Anglican/C of E) Cathedral. Sat Nav = 65 The Cl, Norwich NR1 4DH.

Parking: St Andrew’s Multi-Storey (9 mins), St Helen’s Wharf (10 mins), Rose Lane Multi-Storey (10 mins). There is very limited parking within the Cathedral grounds itself.

By Rail: Norwich Cathedral is a 12 min walk (approx) from Norwich Railway Station.

By Bus: please use public bus stops in Magdalen Street and Tombland from Norwich Bus Station and other directions/routes. If arriving by Park & Ride, Norwich Cathedral is a short (6-8 min) walk from Castle Meadow bus stops.

Much More Poetry, Please

Secondary English teacher Theresa Gooda reflects on a week of poetry and shares some thoughts for classroom writing.

In the month of National Poetry Day, and in the aftermath of hearing wonderful poets last weekend at the Shelley Memorial Project Poetry prize 2023, I feel bombarded by poetry, and more inspired than ever to use poetry as a stimulus for writing in the classroom.

Roger McGough, photo credit: Allan Melia

The Shelley event included music-accompanied performances of some of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s most famous poems, including Ozymandias and To a Skylark, plus part of The Masque of Anarchy, and an original piece of music inspired by the latter, Rise Like Lions. It was a refreshing new way to meet old friends.

The prompt for this year’s poetry writing competition, judged by Simon Zec, was ‘the spirit of rebellion’ and the winning poems were suitably stirring and protest-themed.

The climax of the evening was a peformance by Roger McGough which included some of his best-loved poems from across his extensive career. He signed my copy of The Mersey Sound, and, although I didn’t know it then, along with Brian Patten, Roger McGough was probably one of the most important poetic influences on me as a child.

What was remarkable about the poetry across the evening, past and present, was the way that poems ‘spoke’ to each other. Roger McGough performed poems that were in conversation with Dylan Thomas and Allan Ginsberg, amongst others. One poem, which made me laugh out loud, had Dylan Thomas plagiarising lines for Under Milk Wood by eavesdropping on the punters in Brown’s Hotel. The prize winners had, of course been inspired by Shelley, some directly, others more obliquely.

Also over the weekend, Poetry by Heart’s poem of the week dropped into my inbox: Cottage, by Eleanor Farjeon. The email suggested ways of structuring a choral performance of the poem, but I was struck by the simplicity of the list, which involves counting up to 12 with lots of objects to that the speaker wishes to fill the cottage that they are confident that they will one day live in:

Four giddy Goats,
Five Pewter Pots,
Six silver Spoons,

for example. It struck me that it would be a great poem to use as a writing prompt across the key stages.

I quite liked thinking about all the lovely things I’d put in my own dream shepherd’s hut of the future.

I think myYear 7s would enjoy the alliteration, and I imagine that students in KS1 and KS2 would appreciate the number structure.

I shall find a way to use it this week, and poetry more widely, in the spirit of rebellion against a rigid curriculum that doesn’t seem to allow much space for creative thinking at the moment.

New starts

NWP director Jeni Smith reflects on a recent writing workshop for student teachers.

It’s late September and we are well into the autumn term. I have always loved this time of year – a crispness in the air, new shoes and new pencil cases, a new start without all the portentousness of a New Year. Across the country, students are starting out on the voyage to become qualified teachers. This always seems to me a time of great promise. The commitment and enthusiasm that each new cohort brings to teaching is an important point of growth for schools and the children we serve. So it is always a pleasure and a privilege to be invited to run a writing workshop for student teachers. This week I zoomed into a class at London Metropolitan University where twenty-three student teachers were gathered at the beginning of their year of training. It is the third time I have visited. This group were as impressive as ever: willing to take part and mutually supportive. In teaching, our professional friends are worth their weight in gold.

They had already heard about NWP so we plunged straight in. Writing is learned from the inside out. Our own writing and reflections on writing can be a powerful influence for young writers. Our writing voices come from many places, from our family and community, from our reading and listening. Our own language is where we start.  And we began, as ever, with a list of words -always surprising, always a pleasure: words from languages other than English, words redolent of home and of a new term. ‘Barbie’ was in there. ‘Grubby’ wasn’t far away. Then I read Naomi Shihab Nye’s wonderful ‘Gate A-4’ (published by Bloodaxe in Tender Spot. 2008). You may well know it. You can find it here.

It’s such a wonderful story, one that touches us in many different ways. It led into us into making a list of familiar family stories: stories told in certain places; at particular times in the year; about parents, siblings, friends; stories they tell about us; stories we tell when we introduce ourselves; stories we only tell ourselves…. We give each story a tag –‘the story of the brass curtain ring’; ‘the story of Lucy and the stoat’; ‘the story of my grandmother’s wrists’. Our list of stories might become a poem. When we hear others read their story lists aloud our curiosity is roused. How we love stories! We chose one of our stories and free wrote. We made little origami books and tried out ways of representing our stories in the book’s six pages. We were together for such a short three quarters of an hour, but at the end of that time, writing had changed us.

Students spoke about the surprises inherent even in the writing of a list of words. They revelled in the detail that emerged as they wrote and the way that the writing had reminded them of forgotten events, reminded them of who they were. They will bring themselves to the lives of children in important ways. I feel sure they will find ways to make it possible for writing to touch children in these important ways. It is wonderful to know that there are teachers like Rachel Booth, who recognise the value of writing in this way and who encourage their students to travel hopefully.

Thank you, Rachel, and to all the students who are working with you this year. It is the voyage of a lifetime. Take your pencil and notebook. Write with the children you teach. Listen to what they have to say.

Writing Matters: NWP at the 2023 UKLA Conference

Secondary English teacher Theresa Gooda reflects on her experience of participating in this year’s UKLA conference at Exeter University, 23rd -25th June 2023

I feel the need to put pen to paper - or fingers to keyboard - before too much time passes and I forget about just how powerful the 2023 UKLA conference really was. Because I returned recharged, reinvigorated and feeling as if I had acquired reinforcements to help me keep fighting the good writing fight.

But the trouble is, the relentlessness of the battle against policy and curriculum pressure that currently denigrates authentic writing and celebrates ‘performing’ of writing means that, just as when I go on holiday and return relaxed and revived, some of the goodness wears off quickly with the stresses and strains of daily life. So, this opportunity to revisit ideas a couple of weeks after the event is as much for my own benefit as it is for anyone else who might read it.

The conference was entitled Writing Matters. Before a word was uttered I liked the duality in inviting ‘matters’ to operate as both verb and noun. Because it matters very much indeed and there were plenty of associated matters to discuss. I can't possibly share them all, because that would incorporate, well, too much writing. So I shall identify a handful of highlights and reflections amidst what I found to be a beautiful plurality of voices drawing similar conclusions: that narrow, exam-focused writing was harming both teacher and writer identities; and engaged in a collaborative search for new methods of harnessing agency for all. 

I was delighted that NWP UK were amongst those voices and intend to write a separate, more detailed blogpost about our contribution to the writing conversation.

In the first symposium I attended, the research showed that pedagogy and assessment impact significantly on writer identity. Not rocket science. But it was a theme that echoed throughout the conference. 

I was saddened to hear, for example, of Australian pre-service primary teachers who saw their own writing as flawed and therefore operated within a deficit schema around writing and therefore experienced high levels of anxiety around the teaching of writing as well as the act of writing. When this is harnessed to the idea that highly apprehensive teachers tend to focus on grammar and punctuation, at the expense of things like form and creativity, (Daly et al.,1988), it is easy to see how a cycle of problematic principles about writing might emerge.

Lessons from the pandemic were interesting to ponder, and ways that teachers might validate and utilise student experience of writing during lockdown. I know that I was very conscious of this in the immediate aftermath, but have tended to quickly forget as curriculum demands returned to ‘normal’ post-pandemic.

Charlotte Hacking, of CLPE gave a keynote address reminding of the importance of visual literacy. She also presented writing as four stages - ideation, creation, reflection and publication - and, whilst they are by no means distinct or discrete, she argued that teachers tended to move directly from creation to publication when all four are equal and iterative. It certainly gave pause for reflection on some of my own classroom practice around writing. I was also heartened to see the work of Barrs & Cork (2002), and Graves (1983), with approaches that have been hugely influential in my own teaching career, cited anew.

Hacking shared a video of Ed Vere creating characters from shapes. It was one of those things that I took straight back into the classroom, with Year 7, where I used the interaction between pairs of characters that the students created to introduce a unit on script-writing alongside the reading of a play.

Poignantly, Hacking pointed to the numbers of teachers in the profession who are simply not enjoying what they are doing due to lack of autonomy. I am, of late, one of those teachers. Hacking reminded me of some of the possibilities for teachers of writing, arguing passionately for licence, volition and validity in classroom writing practice.

Given the principles of NWP, it's unsurprising that my selections of workshops tended towards those which involved plenty of participant writing.

The session from the British Library team was a wonderful example. We are no strangers to the affordances of writing within concertina and miniature books at NWP, as our making pages attest, but it was fun to revisit and play with these once more in fresh contexts. I came away with an idea for an introductory A-Level English Literature lesson where I will encourage the students to create a concertina book to explore their reading identities.

There was so much else. There was the joy of the UKLA book awards, and Manjeet Man’s wonderful acceptance speech in which she identified school as her ‘safe place’ and celebrating the kindness of teachers. There were the off-the-record conversations that offered so much food for thought. Like the colleague who recounted over dinner the shocking treatment of her institution at the hands of OFSTED, where inspectors demonstrated an almost unbelievable disregard for the welfare of trainee teachers on their PGCE course.

So, I have come away with new ideas for research of my own, inspired by areas of research that were presented at the conference. I have valued the privilege of being able to meet up with like-minded colleagues, old and new. But, most of all, I am grateful for the reminder that I'm not alone. That there is a national, nay an international, movement determined that writing in an educational context should be so much more than the restrictive (and punitive?) practices that macro and micro political factors have attempted to push it to in recent times. The call to creative subversion, of finding ways of working within the confines of curriculum to get at the heart of writing matters, a heart that goes way beyond the formula for passing examinations.

It’s easy to feel a little lost as an English teacher at the moment, compounded by the devaluation resulting from the impasse over pay and conditions, and the lack of autonomy created through homogenisation and academisation. Now, more than ever, students, and teachers, need the affordances of writing to harness their voices. Together we can create a choir to sing the song of writing, and I returned from the conference hopeful and recharged.

Here's to all the playful classroom writing encounters yet to come!

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.