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.

The 'Writeness' of Writing Journals in the Classroom

Secondary English teacher Theresa Gooda writes about the benefits of a writing journal approach, and why right now is a good time to introduce or relaunch them.

I am enthusiastic about the value of using writing journals in the classroom, and have spent time considering how to introduce and develop their role. These are ideas that have been built up over around a decade of experimentation in Key Stage 3, 4 and 5 classrooms (though what I was doing in terms of writing teaching for the first ten years of my teaching career prior to that is anybody’s guess). 

But I was recently asked by a PGCE student about where she might find out more about writing journals, and I was forced to confront what I think I ‘know’ about them - and where indeed I ‘know’ it from!

It turns out, of course, that my thinking is heavily informed by NWP writing, and specifically ideas in Introducing Teachers’ Writing Groups and Writer’s Notebook though there are some other influences in there, too. 

Choosing a notebook

I ‘know’, for example, that students should be encouraged to choose their own notebook to use, or make one, rather than being given an ‘ordinary’ exercise book as a writing journal. In part this is an initial signifier that the journal represents something different from other school ‘work’. It has an identity unique to its writer that denotes something about ownership of the writing it contains. It is the size and shape that the writer wants it to be, not dimensions that have been imposed on them. It is playful. It is the place where students, and teachers, can develop their writing voice and ‘where you can flex your muscles in many different ways’ (Smith & Wrigley, 2016: 52); it is ‘a conversation with yourself’ (Ibid., 53).  

Resistance

I ‘know’ that it is hard to set up initially, and needs to be used regularly if it is to be habit forming. It is sometimes hard to coax students into a new way of working and a new way of writing. Some students are resistant, and not ready to see its usefulness (Ibid., 53). But it is always, always, worth the effort in the end. 

No marking

I ‘know’ that this book should not be marked. If it really is a journal then it is private, and can’t be subjected to the same kind of scrutiny that other school exercise books would. If the writing is truly to be free, then students have to know that I am not looking over their shoulder. I can’t ‘perform’ writing if I am being watched at each stage of the process - my internal editor would kick in before anything really fluent or creative arrived on the page. If I can’t do it, as someone who gets paid to write, how can they? Elbow (2000:134) describes the need for what he calls ‘blurting’ that may, or may not, lead onto something more surprising and interesting. I therefore explain that it is a place where students can ‘blurt’. They can freewrite, brainstorm or do anything else related to writing.  It is informal and no one else has to read it - ever.  There is no need, therefore, to focus on grammar and spelling, unless they are important and you want to. There is no need to be concerned with what are merely ‘secretarial’ aspects of writing (Cox 1994 : 169).  The emphasis is on the ‘writeness’ of the writing, not the ‘rightness’ of the writing.

But I also ‘know’ that this approach is controversial. Students may potentially make disclosures in their writing that challenge safeguarding responsibilities. I therefore have a sticker that students put on the inside cover which looks like this:

Choice

I ‘know’ that choice of writing is important (Nagin, 2006). In order to develop their knowledge about writing, students also need opportunities to explore their meta-cognitive thinking in relation to the processes involved in learning to write. It helps then if I write with the students, alongside them in real time, and model mistakes, wrong turns, dead ends. But I also show the bits that I am pleased with, that might develop into something more, modelling that metacognitive dimension.

Sharing

And I know that, after a while, as they grow in confidence, students will want to share their writing, so as indicated on that sticker, I encourage them to share verbally when they are ready, but also to regularly choose something that they have written during one of our writing sessions to develop further and submit as a polished piece - an idea that builds on Graves (2003) who foregrounds the importance of ‘publishing’ during the process of writing, suggesting that for younger pupils this should be one in every five pieces, and for older students one in two or three.  He conceives of publishing as some form of binding which can be checked out from the classroom or school library, but remote teaching has opened up the technological possibilities in far more dynamic and less labour-intensive ways.

So, as many of us in the UK return to full face-to-face teaching from next Monday, perhaps now is the time to launch, or relaunch, those writing journals - after all, our students need a way to make sense of the challenges of lockdown and the trials of living through a global pandemic.

References:

Cox, B. (1994) Writing p169-178 in Teaching English edited by Susan Brindley. London: Routledge.

Elbow, P. (2000) Everyone Can Write: Essays toward a Hopeful Theory of Writing and Teaching Writing, USA: OUP.

Graves, D H (2003). Writing: Teachers & Children at Work, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Nagin, C (2006). Because Writing Matters. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.

Smith, J. and Wrigley, S. (2016) Introducing Teacher’s Writing Groups, Exploring the theory and practice.  Oxon: Routledge.

From the tap end of the bath

South Downs NWP Group Convener and NWP Website Editor Theresa Gooda shares what she has learned from visiting other NWP groups.

In these pandemic times I have managed to travel the country through writing, ‘attending’ meetings in East Anglia, London and Sussex in recent weeks. I have been guilty of repeatedly gatecrashing other groups - remotely of course.

Today marks Day 50 of Lockdown 3 in my part of the world, and writing has been my solace through this most brutal of years. Because I run a group myself, one that has continued to meet via Zoom since March last year, I find that during our meeting time I am not able to truly relax and write. It might be because I’m wondering how everyone else in the group is getting on, reflecting on how I’ve introduced a poem or prompt, checking on what comes next.

So it has been a wonderful privilege to join in with other groups, where I have found my fellow writers so welcoming. And it simply wouldn’t be possible in ‘ordinary’ times.

It has been fascinating to see how each group has its own identity and operates slightly differently. Some share words and drafts and thoughts frequently throughout their session; some save the sharing to the end. Some are asked to think about a theme in advance or bring something along to a Zoom meeting. Some go away from the screen to write, returning to the Zoom call after a certain amount of time. Some keep their cameras on all the way through. Some write one week and share the next. Some collate their drafted writing; others keep their finished work private. Some meet weekly, some monthly, some half-termly.

I’m also struck though, by some of the similarities between them:

Firstly, the warmth, humour and laughter. Is that writers? Teachers? Writing teachers? NWP writing teachers? It permeates everywhere.

Secondly, the recommendations - for books, memoirs, plays, poetry, resources, classroom ideas. There is a constant sharing as reference to one thing triggers memory of another. My ‘to be read’ pile grows and grows, and I am grateful.

Thirdly, the imaginative, creative responses where there are always, always, ‘diamonds’ to be found ‘in the dustheap’ of raw, unpolished writing - as Virginia Woolf might say. I wonder how tired teachers at the end of long days working under the toughest of circumstances pull off such magical images and ideas - but they do it without fail.

Last night, as we were writing ‘I’m from’ lists in response to George Ella Lyon’s ‘Where I’m From’ poem, one member wrote that they were from the ‘tap end of the bath’. The image resonated with me - as the oldest of three siblings, I too was saddled with the tap end. Those five words conjured a childhood world - scorching drips, protruding metal. No, insisted the writer - the tap end is the best part, the warmest part, in control of topping up the water when it’s needed.

So perhaps I can push it to serve as a rich metaphor for the project itself: as NWP members we are very much at the tap end, being ‘refilled’ with each visit.

No more guilt about carving out creative space

Whodunnit Group Convener Marjory Caine discusses her return to writing through NWP.

‘Yes, I used to write, too.’

This was in response to a chance conversation at a NATE session on writing led by Simon Wrigley. We had been asked to jot down our writing memories and then discuss. Was this current lack of writing present across the whole English teaching cohort?

I joined the Whodunnit Group and found many tentative writers – those of us who wanted to write but just did not have the confidence, the time, the incentive, the stimulus. You name it, we had the excuse – but yet we asked our students to write every day – and then judged them.

Simon and Jeni’s approach was a breath of freshness into a classroom practice stultified by assessment objectives and fronted adverbials. As a group, we learnt to write together and share, and appreciate the richness writing brings to us as teachers, and now, writers too.

At the same time, I had started a doctorate investigating the creative writing of my A Level English Language students’ creative writing coursework (yes, in that brief flowering of creative opportunity in the classroom). What I had researched I found in the community of practice of the NWP meetings. 

And I found my voice.

It was a thrice trepanned skull in the Wellcome Collection. And that was where I found a way into the Neolithic world of my character, Rhia. Each writing session would end up with another appearance by her. And then I started writing at home. I made time. I thought about plot and structure. I shared my writing fears with my students. And wrote alongside them. Confidence improved both in the students and in me.

Writing retreats were made possible. I no longer felt guilty about carving out creative space. Here were members from other NWP groups who were willing to share and support. I felt like a writer. I thought like a writer.

And there was always another session with Simon leading our group with exciting and varied prompts. Then came the time when Simon asked me to lead the group. Since then, I have enjoyed the termly challenge of sourcing my source material. The venues are always stimulating because the group members are keen to write. We have been walking writers through Roman London, stood by the River Thames and heard its song, gazed into the faces at the National Portrait Gallery, toured the many stories in Westminster Abbey and many more. Always, I am amazed by the variety and breadth of writing that emerges from a Saturday morning in London.

In the seven years I have been with NWP I have changed from being someone who used to write, to someone who writes regularly, because it is part of who I am. I enjoy the creation of a poem, a piece of prose. I write fiction and non-fiction. I respond to my environment, to the people I know, to new experiences. Having my work valued by the group has given me the right to say that I am a writer who writes. Playing with language, working at finding the best phrase, figuring out a poetic rhythm: these are challenges that enrich my writing life.

Yes, I write. I am a writer.

A lifeline for poetry

NWP Free Spaces Group Convener David Marshall explains some of the challenges of running an NWP group - and why it’s worth it.

I run the London ‘Free Spaces’ group, which meets once or twice a term in different museums and galleries around London. Recently, we’ve been moving towards twice a term, as one didn’t feel quite enough. There’s around 5-7 people who regularly attend and there’s quite a lot of ‘silent’ members, who are on the email list but never attend or participate. I give people the option of being removed from the list, but few ask to be removed. I’d like to think that, though some don’t attend, they like being part of the group nevertheless. The way I see it, it’s important that the group meets regularly so that everyone knows that it’s meeting. That way, there’s always the option for people to come along one day, even if they never have.

One of the challenges is getting more teachers interested. I try to spread the word, but my network is quite limited. The other thing I’m aware of is that most of the regulars are either retired teachers or work in private schools (like me). It is very important for anyone in either of these two categories, but sometimes, I feel like I want it to reach more teachers on the front line of education. But something I remind myself is that the people who come are those who want to be there, and it must be important to them for them to give up their time.

I’m very committed to the group and to running it, even though I’m a full-time teacher. I took over when I returned from living abroad about 3 years ago and found that the group hadn’t met since I left. I emailed round and we started up again. We go to a range of places but find it’s easy to rotate to some of the same ones, particularly places that are central and have big cafes!

For me, the NWP is important because it’s a writing community. I’ve taken writing workshops and courses, some lasting several months. But there’s something great about a community because you’re there for each other over a long period of time and can build relationships. The meeting up for a chat is as important as writing together, sharing work and giving feedback. Often we find the writing leads on to a discussion about world events, politics and other things. It’s like it’s a catalyst for having important conversations that we don’t often have at home or with our colleagues.

It’s also important to me because it’s how I started writing poetry. I attended a workshop run by Jeni Smith and Simon Wrigley about 10 years ago at the British Library (during the NATE conference). Someone mentioned that it was important for English teachers to write in order to be able to teach writing. After this, I started writing regularly and set myself the challenge of writing a poem a day for a year. This got me into it, and helped me to improve. I continued writing regularly, sometimes taking classes and entering competitions or sending work to publications (very little was published). In Shanghai, I was part of a poetry group that produced a home-made zine and hosted open mic nights.

Since returning to London, I haven’t been doing as much writing. It’s been harder to find the time and so the NWP group has been a bit of a lifeline for poetry, keeping it going at least once or twice in a busy term. My aim is to get back to writing little and often. I think I’ll need to set myself a challenge like I did before.

However, there’s no doubt it has affected and improved my teaching of writing. I think the most important change is that it’s helped me to understand how difficult writing actually is. It has given me much more empathy, because I know that I would struggle with certain tasks just as much as the children do. Thinking a bit like a writer also helps me to spot where improvements could be made in a child’s work. It means I’m more able to see, not just what the child needs to do, but how. I can show them the way to make a change in their own writing.

Dip your pen in; writing's lovely

Alison Jermak, secondary English teacher, NWP secretary and NWP Wembley convener writes about her NWP journey and and the value of belonging to a writing group.

I have become quite determined to make space for my writing in my life, because it is one thing that I do for me – that was why I started writing independently at home again really, to make some time for myself between teaching and raising my children.

I write for many reasons: to gain clarity and perspective, to calm myself, to challenge an idea, to connect with people, to throw something out there and gauge the reaction.

Our NWP Wembley group grew from the Whodunnit group that I am a member of. I started the group because I was leaving my first teaching job and before leaving, I wanted to introduce my colleagues to NWP. Meeting regularly once a half term has turned out to be a good way of keeping in touch.

I value the support, the attention, the wisdom and the experience of my fellow NWP writers. We all bring so much enthusiasm for writing, the conversations are always rich and the reading recommendations are good. 

I write in a notebook – I normally have two on the go so that I write in one and then redraft in the other. I reread my writing a couple of days later and highlight anything that interests me. Some of it will then make its way into a piece that I type up. On my laptop I have collection of short stories, life writing and poems that I like to think are fermenting. I then revisit pieces that jump out at me and I will redraft and redraft.

Currently I write for at least ten minutes every day. I’m better in the morning, but I will squeeze it in where ever I can. I write in whichever room in the house I can be alone in; noise at home bothers me, family members – they normally want something.

There have been times where I have taken a short break from writing – a couple of weeks when nothing really calls to me or I’m stuck in a piece and I can’t see where to go next. When I come back to it, the muscle memory kicks in and I’m off again. Once you start, I think you can’t help but think like a writer. I have a notebook by my bed and phrases in the notes section of my phone that have floated in when I’m out and about.

I enjoy the process of coming up with ideas, the unpredictability of it. I like researching and coming up with new ideas for prompts to try out with the group. If it excites me when I try it out, then I know it will work. I’m curious to see how the writers will respond. The variety of writers’ responses is also interesting. I’d like to do some research into the benefits of writing as a group in this way.

Students I teach know that I teach writing differently. Some get excited when I introduce free writing, they enjoy the freedom of it and ask, “When are we going to do free writing again?” Some are confronted by the blank page: “Tell me what to say.” Individuals like it when I talk to them about pieces that they have written.

Being part of the NWP has kept me in teaching. It’s the type of learning experience that I had growing up and that made me want to become a teacher. It’s something that I have a genuine interest in, I can practise writing, begin to master it by myself and together with the group. There’s plenty about writing groups to delve into research wise, it’s unexplored territory. 

I would like to encourage more of the teachers in my department to give writing with NWP a try. There’s so much else that’s in the way, but I would say, “Dip your pen in; writing’s lovely.”  

Writing by hand during online teaching

Theresa Gooda, South Downs NWP convener and secondary English teacher, writes about the value of writing slowly with a notebook and pen.

‘I still like writing things out in longhand, finding that a computer gives even my roughest drafts too smooth a gloss and lends half-baked thoughts the mask of tidiness.’

This appears on the first page of Barack Obama’s preface to A Promised Land, the recently-published memoir in which he has attempted an ‘honest rendering’ of his time in office as president of the USA.

It resonated with me straight away.

I too am a fan of the humble notebook and pen, and I encourage fellow writers at NWP meetings to join me in ‘physically’ writing, even while we are meeting virtually during lockdown. Some, of course, prefer technology: a laptop, or even tapping into a mobile phone, but I love the sound of writers writing together, the scratchy noise on paper.

I’m also convinced that there is something about the physical act of hand writing, the slowness of it, that makes my writing better. I’ve never been able to articulate quite why, but I think Barack is onto something - the illusion of ‘polish’ that typed words on screen bring can bring is problematic.

Part of that problem comes from the fact that writing, for me, is always exploratory in the first instance. Whatever kind of writing I am undertaking, whether it is poetry or prose, fiction or non-fiction, academic or creative (and what, really, does ‘creative’ mean - all writing is surely this), my first marks on paper are a form of ‘working out’. I never know quite what’s in my head when I begin.

What makes writing particularly powerful as a mediator of knowing is, first the possibility it allows for the writer to make an extended, fully worked-out contribution, and second, because of its slower rate of production, its facilitation of a more reflective and self-critical stance (Wells, G. 2001. Action, Talk, and Text: Learning and Teaching through Inquiry. p186)

I came across Gordon Wells’ words while researching something entirely unrelated, but like Obama’s they rang true.

I worry that in our online teaching world we are physically writing less, even if we are typing and tapping away at a keyboard more.

As I plan my ‘synchronous’ and ‘asynchronous’ online lessons, I am forcing myself to find more and more opportunities to invite students to pick up a pen during the course of a session. The chat functions and sticky notes are all great for interaction, but ‘jotting down’ and ‘freewriting’ are important too. I’m also encouraging my students to write in longhand on first drafts and upload photographs of their draft work alongside the final draft to emphasise the sense of process that is easily lost at the moment; to avoid ‘too smooth a gloss’.

After all, if it’s good enough for Obama…

Taking a selfish risk

Helen Atkinson, Convener of the London Free Spaces NWP Group, writes about a ‘selfish’ choice that led to the greatest change in pedagogy and practice.

It’s the end of June, 2008 and I breathe a guilty sigh of relief as I climb into a teacher friend’s car and begin the drive from London to Cambridge. It’s been another long academic year – when are they not? I’ve had by first taste of middle leadership with an Acting Head of English job in a tough North London school and I’m not certain that I have the energy to get through those final weeks. I’m on my way to Cambridge for the LATE summer conference where I should have elected for a useful weekend workshop on using digital sources when teaching Shakespeare, something that will provide a bank of activities that I can take back to the Department, proof that the CPD budget was a worthy spend. Instead, I have taken a selfish risk and ticked the box to attend a series of workshops called Teachers As Writers that will fill almost all of my time at the conference. The blurb promises that I will spend my weekend on my own personal, reflective and creative writing and this sounds both glorious and very self-indulgent. Ironically, at the end of this weekend, I have not only rediscovered my passion for writing but have experienced the beginning of the greatest and longest lasting influence on my pedagogy and practice.

For over ten years now, the principles of the National Writing Project have run though everything that I’ve done. It is a series of professional networks that explore the way that we teach writing in the best possible way: by writing ourselves and by discussing not only what we write, but how and why it was written. Against the backdrop of endless change and the barrage of ever-falling edicts from above, it has given me the confidence to state that I am my own expert, that I have the agency to change the way that things are done, to make the experience of writing better and more enjoyable for the children that I teach. It’s given me the confidence to argue (and win) the case with Head Teachers for some writing to take place that is not marked for SPaG and a snappy WWW / EBI, to build new ways of teaching and feeding back on writing into the curriculum.

There have been so many Saturday mornings where I’ve lain in bed, as tired as I was on the way to that first conference. It’s felt a super-human effort at times to drag myself to a museum, gallery or park in Central London for the half-termly writing group meeting, but I know that, by the time I leave in early afternoon, I will be wide-awake and brimming with energy and ideas about new things to write, new ways to write, new ways to teach writing.

And I know, from the positive feedback that has come from the NWP Conferences where I’ve run workshops, that I am not alone in feeling this way.

Filling in the small spaces and finding that the sky doesn't fall in

Primary teacher Gillian Pearson reflects on her NWP experience and how writing in a group seems to be an island of support in the frenetic waters of a busy working life.

I had wanted to join a NWP group for many years. I had loved the creative writing course that Jeni Smith had run while I attended my PGCE course 17 years previously, but I kept putting off joining up again. I was busy learning my teaching craft, and battling life’s battles, and all that business seemed all consuming for many years. Gradually, I started to see small spaces in my life that could be filled with other stuff- fun stuff-life outside of my work, my worries, my family and friends. 

NWP sits very nicely indeed alongside work. The sky didn’t fall in from leaving work early once a month, and joining a lovely little group. I feel a bit sorry for all my friends who haven’t got a Jeni in their lives, as a very special writing mentor. Some people might know lots of people like Jeni - there may be a whole army of these wonderful people out there - but I only know one, and for that I am happy.

The NWP for me is a small gateway into a surprising corner that has special powers, and is almost hidden from everyday life. It is like the school (I love the way many small primary schools are often hidden from the road) and like a book (there is a small perfectly formed world constantly unfolding inside).

Anyway, the group is there. I always go. I never dread going, or feel uneasy about going, or just can’t be bothered going. I go. 

The other teachers there are lovely. I really like them. I feel their struggles and I admire that many are juggling so many things. I like listening to them and sharing with them and making and folding mini books with them. We talk a lot about teaching and writing and life and books.

And in between we write.

We write differently: some in small neat careful handwriting; some after much internal thought and some, like me, all in one go. Get it out, that misspelt scruffy scrawl and read it through later. I see my entire class reflected in our styles. How do I help those writers like myself, and those not like me? These are questions I often ponder.

I quite like writing. I always write with the kids. If I expect them to write something, then I need to feel what that feels like too. What kind of language might be needed? How to engage our audience? What techniques can be drawn upon? If I’m writing with them, then we can have a proper dialogue about the work and share what we have got. My writers aren’t always the best in the world, but they write unhindered, and at length, and are usually very happy to share their work.

I think I am re-learning the importance of sharing from the writers group and from Jeni; to help the children find their voice, to make a mark and create and discuss.

I still have much work to do in learning how to inspire my young followers. My work here is not done. My journey is a long loop. I forever re learn what I have forgotten with new twists and shapes and ripples.

Jeni’s leadership of our group holds slippery answers and golden nuggets. Her flickering inspiration is part of many flickering lights that help shape my teaching, twinkling stars which I dart to and from like I’m forming a dot to dot puzzle of how to teach writing. My little followers might sense this frenetic dance from time to time but that is fine: we are on a journey and NWP is a calm island of support along that long and winding road; one that never judges or asks for evidence or has a success criteria.

It just is - and that for me is enough.

Curriculum Constraints Can't Stop Creative Minds

Rebecca Griffiths, an Early Years teacher at a Norfolk primary school, writes about belonging to an NWP writing group and the impact it has had in her classroom.

Attending the NWP Writing Teachers group at the University of East Anglia for the last 8 years has provided me with a network of educators who share a passion for writing. The group consists of EYFS practitioners to A level teachers, and everyone in between. The groups change monthly, with some attending regularly and some coming when they can free themselves from school life. This provides an ever changing dynamic; supportive yet challenging, always inspiring.

The group has taught me so much about the way children write throughout their journey in education. It enabled me to see beyond Early Years. NWP has provided many opportunities and supported my research for my MA Advanced Educational Practice. Each month we are excited to take the new ideas from the group back into school and to explore them in our own way. It is always refreshing to see how the same writing prompt can be explored across all age groups, and challenging to think about how you will make it work for your own class. This stimulates creative thinking, teaching and writing! We often overlook the feelings of young writers, we can easily forget the terror a blank page can ignite! When writing ourselves, we reconnect with the pressure, frustration and pleasure writing can bring. Therefore connecting us to our students and their barriers and successes as developing writers. 

I write with my class daily and in Early Years, this writing takes many forms. Too often the monotonous struggle toward ‘becoming a writer’ overshadows the enjoyable process of developing emerging writing skills creatively.

As a practitioner, I find myself immersed in the world of progress with little time to observe the multi modal forms of writing which flourish in the classroom. However, it is apparent that the curriculum constraints cannot stop the creative minds of our youngest writers.

Through drama, role play, drawing and making marks, writing takes it form in ways that are purposeful to the individual child. It is through these experiences that I most enjoy writing collaboratively with children; finding and utilising writing opportunities through play. The classroom provides a unique research environment, a place to explore new ideas and experiment with ideas based upon current research. It is also a place to celebrate the accomplishments of all writers! This is where I write most, and this is where I love to write.

Membership of an NWP group has shaped me as a writer and a teacher of writing. I am honoured to be part of it.

The future of the NWP belongs to you, the teachers of writing, the lovers of writing! Are you interested in writing CPD? A writing retreat? Or joining or starting a Writing Teachers group? You are in the right place.

Giving voice to the things inside

Teacher Writer Katie Kibbler shares her NWP journey - and tips for curing a hangover…

I joined NWP’s Whodunnit group towards the end of 2017. I had known about NWP since I was a PGCE student in 2014, when Simon Wrigley had been to give a workshop on book-making at the Cambridge Faculty of Education. I hadn’t attended a group because I’d always found an excuse: I’d start when I’d completed my NQT year; I’d never be able to make 10am meets on a Saturday morning; I didn’t have time, I didn’t have energy, Friday evenings in the pub poisoned all my creative juices and I couldn’t write on a hangover. After three years at my first school, in 2017 I had decided to leave and join the Children’s Hospital School at GOSH and UCH. The move gave me the freedom, time and sleep that I just hadn’t had as a newbie teacher in a high-octane inner London academy. 

A few weeks into my new job, I stumbled onto the NWP website while trying to find some creative writing prompts for a student and found the list of teacher writing groups. I emailed Simon, the group leader for Whodunnit. This wasn’t the first time - I’d emailed him a year before, and chickened out of attending. Apparently forgiving my previous flakiness, Simon was very warm in his reply, and gave me the joining details: I was very welcome, writing expertise was not a prerequisite, and in a lovely twist of chance, the group would next meet in the Wellcome cafe - a twenty minute cycle from my home, purveyor of excellent cakes, and promisingly friendly in name. I told myself I’d just turn up, do one session, and if I was terrible I could just abandon it on the pile of my other failed whims, along with rocket yoga, jam-making and knitting giant snoods. 

I arrived sweaty and windswept, slung my bike up on Euston Road and pushed through the revolving doors into the shiny calm of the museum. Saturday sluggishness became a nervous fizz, as I found most of the group already set up, cafe tables pulled together, hands wrapped around frothy coffees in thick turquoise cups - and my new colleague, Emma, perched on a stool. We hadn’t discussed the group together - neither of us knew the other would be there - and the coincidence was confirmation that I had come to the right place, both in terms of the group and my new school. The session ended with the group sharing our morning’s writing upstairs in the reading room and being told off for too much giggling. I had approximately zero regrets about attending, and since then I’ve tried to attend every meet (even during a hiatus in Uganda last year, I used the prompts remotely). Completing my journey from scared, sheepish, semi-coherent-on-a-Saturday starter to fully-fledged NWP enthusiast, I jumped at the chance to double my writing group attendance when Alison, a Whodunnit stalwart, invited us to join her Wembley group too. 

In the groups, we take time to reflect on the process of writing as a person and as a professional: a teacher, and a human. What I knew but didn’t understand was that I had always written (from painful teenage poetry to spoof features in a university newspaper to silly blogs about early-career car crashes in the classroom) - but nothing I’d regard as ‘proper’ writing. If I couldn’t be Dylan Thomas or Zadie Smith, what was the point? What NWP has shown me is that the point for us (as teachers, as humans) is the same as it is for our young people: to give voice to the things inside that we don’t always find the place or time to say; to do something we find creative, good and challenging; to feel part of a supportive community; to look closely at and set in context the small and extraordinary and banal and enormous things we don’t have time to in the rush of an ordinary timetable. Nobody cares if it is 'good' or 'bad', or agrees on what those qualities look like. Whenever I find the mean voice of necessity trying to stymie the pure, free-wheeling pleasure of a free-write, or the unpretty bloom of an idea, I speak to myself the words of reassurance I’d offer a student: writing is not self-indulgent, it is being alive to the world around you. It isn’t egoism to write; it is empathy.

It sounds dramatic, but being part of the NWP groups has changed my teaching and my life (and made me see how much of our life we put into teaching, and how much teaching gets into life - how porous that boundary is). I am now teaching in the mainstream classroom again, and credit our NWP writing groups with helping preserve my sense of self when I’m at home (or away, as I was last year), and when I’m standing firm about the type of teacher I want to be in school: the type who runs Creative Writing Club using the same format as our teacher writing groups (albeit in slightly less stately surroundings than a London gallery, with less caffeine and more crisps); who tries to model creative writing as a point about courage, process and spontaneity, instead of precision, assessment objectives and attainment. I have recycled whole NWP sessions as two-hour writing workshops for my Year 10s in a bid to avoid death by GCSE practice papers - the students’ writing was miles better than normal, and so was my lesson planning. And in a less soaring-strings orchestral epiphany kind of way, being part of NWP has improved my (wait for it) marking, feedback and analysis, too: it’s so much more natural and genuine for me to say what I think is interesting about a piece of writing, why it is working, how it is working and what it is making me feel and think, now that I’ve started to regularly get inside writing myself and drive the car - and now it’s not the sleek ride of self-reflexive non-fiction, but the honest, unfinished chaos of a soapbox racer. It’s made me simultaneously more rigorous about teaching writing, and more compassionate; speaking from a position of ‘I do this too, and we are in this together’ is so powerful for the students. The teacher gets to be the person who writes with us, not the master who presents the task of writing to us. 

Please, go and find your own NWP group - and if there isn’t one close, make your own! Whatever excuses you’re making for yourself, stop. For what it’s worth, I’m pleased to report that there’s no hangover a coffee and a communal writing session won’t help. 

Back to School: September Writing Prompts

Through lockdown and over the summer I have managed to establish some good writing habits. My journal is never far away and, consequently, is bursting full.

Every year, though, September hits me like a train and those writing habits evaporate - generally alongside taking in the first pile of marking. It really shouldn’t be so hard to find the ten or fifteen minutes in a day to sit, reflect and allow the pen to talk to the page, but somehow it always is. Even though I know that it is good me, not just for my energy and well-being but as ever-present, brilliant CPD that will make a difference in the classroom.

Because our month of lockdown prompts proved so popular, Jeni Smith has been busy putting together another series of ideas to carry us all through September and the start of the new year.

Jeni explains how important it is to find that space for our own writing:

Writing is often the thing that we set aside for other things, for other people. We make appointments for the dentist, to see an anxious A level student, to help a colleague. Make an appointment with your writing. If you have a calendar write it in there. Colour code it. Put it on your phone and set the alarm. You need only fifteen minutes. If that is all you have between one thing and another, set a timer just short of the time you have available and get going.

The prompts for September are a mixed bag. Most of them should just set you going for a fifteen minute workout. Some may grow into something more extended so you may not wish to do a new prompt each day, but continue from where you left off. Many of the prompts have your professional life as a teacher in mind. I am inviting you, if you are so inclined, to use writing to reflect on your teaching. You may find you use just a few prompts over the course of the month. Many can be revisited daily. In the end, they are only prompts. Use them however you wish. You may even find that you use them as children do when they tell you they are bored. After you have listed a number of things they don’t want to do, they suddenly say, ‘Oh, I know what I’ll do.’ Go ahead!

So, no excuses. Keep your writing habit going through the new term, or cultivate a new one.