To those of you at the start...

It is the time of year when student teachers begin their studies. I have met some face to face and others, rather strangely, on speaker phone. I hope that they will not be afraid of writing and that they will teach writing in the knowledge that being able to write is, essentially, something that is a part of who we all are.

I want them to know that writing is a language process that is, like listening, speaking and reading, available to all of us; that writing is for telling stories, for discovering what we know and understand, for defining who we are; that it is for celebration and lament;  for sorting out and getting going; intertwined with thinking and a place where we can play. It can  contribute to our well-being: it calms and reassures us; it allows us to untangle stuff; it affirms us and our place in the world. It is for imagining, dreaming, joking, investigating. It stays put. We can shape and mould it. We can use new language, and the older language that comes from our very roots. It can define who we are.

 Generally, we have been taught to be afraid of writing: that it is difficult; that we need all kinds of hoists and props and pulleys to help us. I am not denying that it is complex and that writing remains difficult throughout our lives, even when we have published scores of best-selling novels. Learning to swim is difficult. Developing a good fashion sense is difficult. Riding a bicycle is difficult. We just have to get in the water, make some really toe-curling choices about how to dress, get on the bike. We can ride with stabilisers, splash about with armbands, borrow a jumper to see how it feels, and all the time, something inside us is working out how that works for us.

 Writing is learned from the inside out. We must take for ourselves what we need to learn about writing and make it our own. We do that by writing in ways that are important to us. When we belong to a writing community we learn from everyone who is a part of it. Children learn from how we do things and how we seem to feel about it. Children need to gain a sense of what writing can do – for themselves and for others. They need learn how they can be in charge of their own writing. If we are not careful they may learn that we are afraid of writing or that we don’t like it or that their own ideas about what to write are not welcome. Or they can learn that you will write alongside them and sometimes make mistakes but that it doesn’t matter because you will try again and you love to hear what everyone has written because everyone writes differently and you will learn from them.

 A challenge for teachers is how to balance the necessary mechanics of writing – pencil grip, letter formation, spelling, grammatical structure – with the essence of writing, which is about exploration and surprise and entertainment and introspection and ….. Far too many children experience writing as something that is exterior, that it is all about dots and upper case letters; or that the quality of a piece of writing depends on how many adjectives they can squeeze into it. In our anxiety to teach those things, it becomes easy to overlook the things about writing that cannot be neatly packaged as learning objectives or assessment criteria but which lie at the heart of assured writing.

 I have a swimming instruction book first published in 1919 which begins with directions for land drills:

Breast Stroke

 ARM DRILL – STANDING

Ready. Arms raised, extended forward, palms down, thumbs touching, fingers together.

One.    Without bend at elbow or wrist the arms are swept sideways with some downward pressure, hands slightly turned and cupped, and taken to a position nearly in line with the shoulders, head gently raised.  (breathe in.)

Two.    With a slight twist of the wrists, the hands – palms downwards – are brought to a position in advance of the chin, the elbows bent and brought to the sides.

Three.  The hands and arms – thumbs touching, fingers together – are stretched forward to full extent, and the head gently lowered. (Breathe out.)

Four.    Pause

But only when you get into the water do you learn what it feels like and what your body can do in the water. If you only gave children colouring in sheets, few people would say you were teaching art. We have become so anxious about children learning to write, that we keep running alongside them, holding onto the bike or, worse, give them a lecture on the science of balance and propulsion and never get on the bike.

Writing is learned from the inside out: it is learned by  writing. When published writers are asked for advice, what they say first and foremost is summed up by Ian Rankin: ‘Write lots. Read lots. Don’t give up’. Kate Clanchy says ‘We learn to write by reading; we learn to read by writing.’ We, teachers, need to get inside  the skin of writing; for ourselves. And I acknowledge it’s emotional. Sometimes, it is utterly private. And we can’t always predict when it will be so. We need to build that awareness into our practice and to respect young writers as writers now, not some time in the future.

Let them loose!

Perhaps the best advice I can give you comes directly from my swimming instruction manual:

It is inadvisable to keep pupils with “breath expelled” whilst explanations are made.

Get writing!          

A Writing Friend

Have you started that notebook?

Did you find one like Natalie Goldberg’s with a Disney character on the front or a more austere school ‘Exercise Book’? Perhaps you took Michael Avatar’s advice and found an A6 notebook and have been getting down at least 50 words a day. Perhaps you haven’t started yet. It’s the beginning of term. It’s always impossibly busy.

May I suggest you find a writing friend?

I have written before about reading aloud. Reading aloud is such a strong way of sensing the strengths and weaknesses of one’s own writing. Reading aloud to a living audience (it need be only one person) makes a huge difference. The person who listens may say nothing, but the act of reading in their presence reflects back to you something of what you have written -surprise, melancholy, laughter, edge of the seat suspense, goose bumps. It is an affirmation. Writing and reading with another or others can boost confidence and pleasure. The companionship of it and the call to commitment is invaluable.

In his essay, ‘A Map of Writing’, to which I return repeatedly, Peter Elbow characterises four kinds of audience: the self, the assessor, one’s peers and one’s allies. Allies, he says, are invaluable. They are not, he argues, better than other kinds of audience, but they are necessary. They are readers who care for the writer:

The simplest definition of an ally writer is someone who cares more about the writer than about the writing – who cares more about helping and being a friend than about improving the writing. I think of an ally as someone who sees that I am smart even when I write something stupid; who sees that I am good even when I write something that reveals selfishness or meanness or limited vision. When an ally reader notices these things in what I have written, he or she may point them out – if I ask for critical feedback – but I can always feel the feedback as only a part of subsequent caring for me and seeing my goodness. Ally readers are precious and should be cherished.

A writing friend can help you keep going. They help you commit to writing regularly. They can hear and appreciate your writing, whatever state it is in. You both check in. Meeting to write can be such an enjoyable thing. During the pandemic, many people I know chose to write on-line together. They would talk and write and read to each other. Quite a few of these pairs have continued to meet, now face to face. You can meet remotely or up close. Just know it can be a nice thing. Meet at a café, or in the park, in the same place or different each time, alternate between your homes or explore the territory that lies between them.

It is not just the writing. There may be coffee or wine; cake or cheese scones; you will talk about writing and all the other things that are important at the time; you may talk about teaching; you may share ideas. You will return to writing refreshed.

Find yourself a writing friend. Book a date.

Write!

It is September, the new term and all that.

I love September with its promise of new notebooks and pencils, maybe new shoes, and a coat that we will grow into. I prefer the beginning of a new school year to the New Year that begins with an evening of fireworks and Auld Lang Syne and a list of resolutions that are often abandoned within a week. The new academic year allows for resolutions that can be quietly listed without a great hue and cry. They often carry on through the whole year and if we fail, then no one need know.

I am thinking that it is a good time to resolve to write more regularly. Don’t make it too big a task – just five or ten minutes a day or one sacrosanct hour a week, with a friend, maybe, or alone, at home, or out somewhere that makes you feel happy. Don’t make a fuss about notebooks. Natalie Goldberg recommends cheap notebooks that you can fill easily and don’t need living up to. Michael Atavar suggests an A6 notebook; just 50 – 100 words a day. Any words.

I have been reading a lot recently about why we write. There are many good reasons, and most of them imply that writing can be good for us, enjoyable even. Is that why teachers tend not to make time for writing? We feel that we have too much else to do? That we shouldn’t be doing something that makes us feel good. It is, of course, like keeping fit, we don’t always feel like it and can make any number of excuses not to run, go to the Zumba class or sit down and write for ten minutes. However, when we have done it, we feel good. Why is feeling good not acceptable for the beleaguered teacher? There lies someone’s doctoral thesis.

So let’s look at it slightly differently. Whenever we write, we are adding to our deep knowledge of writing. We learn how to beat the demon blank page; we simply put pen to paper and discover something we didn’t know we knew; we find a way in to what seems an impossible starter; we are dissatisfied with a word or phrase, leave it, circle round, come back with something better; or we simply leave it and know that we may think of something we like better while we are doing something else; or we let it go, it’s not important just now; we discover that writing in a particular way leaves us feeling lighter, happier. These are elements of subject knowledge that are not written down but which are more powerful than much that is listed in the Framework for Writing.

You probably will rarely teach any of this directly, but you know it and it will be there in how you approach young writers. They learn from your behaviour, from your orientation. Sometimes you mention it to them. So write for yourself each week. It is great professional development if you prefer to think of it like that. What I hope is that it simply can become a fulfilling part of your life.

One person saying to another

Jeni Smith

‘But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it feel this way to you?’

Kazua Ishiguro, Nobel Prize acceptance speech 2017.

On Saturday, we had the loveliest morning of writing together in Norwich. Alicia is going to write about it so I will leave that to her. I just want to say that I feel lucky to belong to the group and to sometimes visit other groups where we write together. One of the great pleasures of these meetings is to hear other people’s writing, to see through their eyes for a moment, to be delighted with a particular turn of phrase or choice of word, to know that you had not thought of things in that way before, or to feel for a moment, yes, that is how it is for me, too.

The meetings are the most joyous form of teacher development I can think of. And one of the things that I always take away is the knowledge that all these different writer teachers are working away in their own schools and classrooms and making a difference to the children they work with. It is more than that. There is something nourishing about meeting and writing together, sharing our ideas and experiences from the classroom, musing on the use of a semi-colon or wrestling with a current implausible recommendation from an anonymous somewhere in the field of education. There is also something that is personally enriching, a particular kind of friendship, solidarity, affirmation and hopefulness.

There are fewer teachers’ writing groups in existence now than there were before the pandemic. They have been another one of its casualties, I fear. I would very much like there to be more. Just because they bring something very particular to the lives of teachers who join them.

If you would like to be a member of a teachers writing group, please do get in touch with us. Between us, we will do our very best to see whether we can find you a nearby group or help you to start one. Only two or three need to be there to get things going. Your group may remain a small one, but it may well grow and become important in your lives.

2026 - A Year of Reading

READ. You have no business wanting to be a writer unless you are a reader. You should read fantasies and essays, biographies and poetry, fables and fairy tales. Read, read, read, read, read. Kate DiCamillo

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When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else. Zadie Smith

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Happy New Year! 2026, a National Year of Reading, is here and is to be celebrated. Reading is what makes us writers. Reading is our playground, our solace, our inspiration. All writers are indebted to the writers who have gone before us. As we read, we are transported, amazed, intrigued, challenged. As we read we absorb the language and rhythms of many voices. As we read, we discover that things that we never imagined could be written about, can be written about, in ways that comfort and strengthen us and in ways that we had not thought could be. Sometimes our reading opens a door that helps us to write something that we thought we could not write. Sometimes when we read, we discover we are not alone and sometimes we are made privy to lives and ways of thinking that we may not have otherwise known.

One of our tasks as teachers of writing is to find the writers whose work can inspire and inform young writers who are developing their own fluency and style. ‘Read, read, read, read, read’, says Kate DiCamillo. Indeed. Use your libraries. As I think about 2025 and forward to 2026, I am grateful to my local Suffolk library which has provided me with books written by people from across the world and from many walks of life and persuasion. The pleasure of finding writers whose voice, style and wisdom surprise and delight me is immense. When I am able then to share that writing with others, adults and children, the pleasure is doubled. It is a kind of magic to see how one writer can inform the writing of another; how the invention of a writer proves to be a particular inspiration for others.

It is my intention, this year, to restore and to add to, the recommended reading lists that formed part of the original website. It may take a while, because I would like the lists to be practical and helpful. There are books about teaching writing, books by writers about writing, books about language and the nature of composition and there are the books that speak to young people and offer them the means to let their pens fly. I shall begin, this month, with books about words; a quiet start, and one that reflects the way I run a workshop, beginning, always, with listing words in one way or another.

I wish you a year of good reading. Let the writing begin!

1. Read lots.

2. Write lots

3. Don't give up. Ian Rankin

https://www.nationalyearofreading.org.uk

https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/creative-matters/blog/long-reads/investing-power-reading

https://www.booktrust.org.uk/about-us/news-updates/supporting-the-national-year-of-reading-2026/

https://literacytrust.org.uk/about-us/national-year-of-reading-2026/

https://thequeensreadingroom.co.uk

https://readingagency.org.uk/get-reading/our-programmes-and-campaigns/national-year-of-reading-2026/

https://societyofauthors.org/2025/07/07/national-year-of-reading/

Kindness

Let us begin with kindness. The world we live in just now is filled with anger and fear. It’s a volatile mix. Fear, especially, seems to make us clamp down, to generate rules and restrictions, to threaten dire consequences. It is not good for our children. It is not good for us. In a recent Instagram post, NO THEM, ONLY US, Oliver Jeffers reminds us of our duty of care ‘to our children and grandchildren to break these sickening cycles of violence and vengeance in both thought and action that distract and divide us.’

‘The answer to this,’ he believes, ‘lies in human decency. In kindness, tolerance, humility and ingenuity. Re-evaluating what it is we actually have with this life on earth, and what we actually want from it.’

‘As ever, we have work to do.’

What we do in school cannot help but be touched by the world around us. Although the world of school is very different from the acts of physical violence and hatred that surround us, I think that current expectations of teachers and the curriculum are in themselves a kind of violence. Teachers do their best to provide a rich and fertile environment where children may grow. It is not always easy. We could do with fewer barriers and constraints. We have a duty to our children to nurture them in ways that help them find a path through the scariness with courage and imagination, and to have at their fingertips a whole raft of knowledge and skills which them help them grow and understand, and upon which they will draw in good times and bad. Writing is one of those things. Writing is intimately wrapped up with story and poetry and thinking and remembering, appreciating and wondering and imagining. Writing sits alongside drawing and painting and making, dancing and acting, singing and making music.

Writing thrives on and fosters community. It can open up our thinking, cultivate awareness, help us grow. It can be a way of solving problems and of affirming who we are and imagining who we might become. I have worried a great deal about the new Writing Framework. As I write this and look back at ‘why writing matters’, I think that maybe the Framework writers would agree with me. But I am not sure. And as I reread more of the framework, it feels so locked down, so distant from a real experience of what writing can be, I wonder whether its authors fear writing; loathe it, even. If that is the case it is great pity. Far too many of us hold a fear of writing. Far too many teachers fear writing. They may have been told at some time in their schooling that they are bad writers; or they have struggled to write about things they were not interested in in ways that didn’t make sense to them. Very often writing failure is experienced as a failure of self, also. We keep pushing writing away from us and we need to take hold of it and find what it can do for us and what we can do if we write.

One of the ways to do that, especially if you are a teacher, is to write with others. Find a group. See if there is a teachers’ writing group near you. If that is not possible or attractive to you, then write for yourself, quietly, each day. Look on this website. You will find many ideas of how to start. As you write, relax into it. Write for yourself. As you write, begin to notice what you are learning. Be prepared to share that with those you teach. Show them real writing. Know that you learn to write not by writing sentences, but simply by writing. Write for yourself; write for someone else.

Write with love.

Stepping into the sunlight

This July, just as schools were preparing for the end of the summer term and we were thinking about the following few weeks when holidays could be taken, and life lived a little more freely, the DfE published The Writing Framework. It’s designed to go alongside The Reading Framework and, to emphasise that, has come up with A Simple View of Writing to mirror the simple view of reading. Why is it, I wonder, that we must deny complexity? (I know, I know, they say that it doesn’t imply that writing is simple but … )

I should have written about The Framework straight away. I intended to. But the thing made me so deeply angry that I decided not to write in the furnace of my rage but to give it some time to settle. I had not meant that settling time to be quite so long. Or that it should have allowed the sadness to creep in alongside the anger. I remain positive. The framework must be addressed, but I shall not write directly about it today, except to observe that it is not statutory. So let’s hold our horses.

In the meantime, let’s look at the bibliography. Will it give us some insight as to what has given rise to this document? Glancing down the first page, I spot Frank Cottrell-Boyce – ‘David Fickling lecture: Literacy, reading and children.’ It comes as no surprise that the quoted link is no longer available, but a quick search brings up an extract.

As I read it, I was suddenly reminded of a literacy conference focusing on creativity. It was held in London on the day after the attack on the Twin Towers and so the atmosphere was charged. David Almond was there and he spoke wonderfully about his visits to schools and how he shows children his notebooks. He showed one to us. It was messy. There were jottings and scribbles. He showed us how he sometimes writes with the page upside down. He mentioned the discomfort some teachers feel about this. And as the session continued, and more people joined the stage (perhaps it was time for questions?), two or three of them, slowly, but very deliberately, stood in front of David, with his messy notebook and his ideas of freedom and openness. There was something unsettling about this denial on that particular day. Despite lip service to something more humane, the drive for stultifying rules and mind-numbing drills remains. The reference to Frank Cottrell Boyce’s lecture is in the Framework’s bibliography but it is at all too easy to imagine its perpetrators, with steely determination, standing in front of it, so we can’t see.

Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s lecture tingles with joy, with passion, with humour. He reminds us how valuable stories are and how crucial it is to read aloud and how story is a way of opening ourselves up to others as readers and as writers. He reminds us how reading, and writing, are filled with unknown promise; he gently reminds us how, as teachers, we can find ourselves shutting all that down.

Let’s not allow ourselves to stand in front of the messy notebook.

Let’s be fearless.

Let’s step into the sunlight.

Reading aloud

Spend at least ten wildly happy minutes every single day reading aloud.
- Mem Fox, Australian children’s author

When we think about feeding the writer, we think about reading. Perhaps, we think about them devouring one book after another as we might have done as bookish children. However, we should never forget the power and the pleasure of being read to. Rumours go around that reading aloud is not teaching, but we know that reading aloud is essential nourishment. Even as adults we love the sound of another reading a story, maybe we use audible, maybe we are lucky enough to know someone who loves to read to us. Then the stories come to us, the rhythms and magic of the writing capture our minds, our imaginations.

For many children, this is how they come to know how particular writers sound. By reading aloud we open up the text for them. They may well want to read the book themselves once they have heard it. As a teenager, television dramatisations opened the door to Dickens for me. I would watch an episode or two and then start reading at pace so that I was always ahead of the televised story. The televised adaptation helped me gain purchase on the unfamiliar language and context. We know that sometimes when we start reading an unfamiliar author the going can be slow until we get used to their way of putting words together.

So, when we read aloud, we ease the way in for less experienced readers. For many children, particularly in primary school, when reading might still be a slow business, we can read novels that are intellectually and emotionally relevant to them and that might still be too laborious for them to read for themselves with any pleasure. We voice the text. A Year 5 child for whom English was an additional language liked to hear her teacher reading, because when she read the book herself she heard her teacher’s voice in her head. She heard the writer’s voice through her teacher’s voice. It was particularly pertinent for her, but I think there are many of us, adults and children, who are introduced to the voice of a writer through the intermediary voice of a good reader.

Once we have heard those rhythms aloud we can draw upon them when we are reading and when we are writing. They become part of our own voice and we can try them out using our own words. Reading aloud, one to one, is an essential part of learning to read. Reading aloud provides a shared experience: meditative, hilarious, challenging, surprising, communal. It draws us together. It becomes part of our cultural capital. Reading aloud is not just for the youngest children. We are all drawn in by the spoken word. My English teacher sometimes read us short stories during A level lessons. ‘The Rain Horse’ by Ted Hughes, Hemingway’s ‘Indian Camp’. I have not forgotten them, nor the quiet of the room as he read, nor the ways in which a story might work. Even if we don’t have time to read whole texts to older students, we can still read poems, shorter extracts from prose. Sometimes the music of a writer is harder to hear when one reads silently. I didn’t properly notice the loveliness of Gilbert White’s nature diaries until I read them aloud. It is why it is so helpful to read our own writing aloud, and to hear others read theirs.

In the opening chapter to her wonderful book about writing stories, Steering the Craft, Ursula Leguin says:

The sound of the language is where it all begins and what it all comes back to. The basic elements of language are physical: the noise words make and the rhythm of their relationships. This is just as true of written prose as it is of poetry, though the sound-effects of prose are usually subtle and always irregular.
…. I think awareness of what your own writing sounds like is an essential skill for a writer.

Our voices, what our writing sounds like, come from all that we have read and heard and how people do or do not listen to us. If we are to feed the young writer, then reading aloud is an essential part of the diet. We will offer it and they will use it in the ways that are theirs.

A book a day

Two years ago, at about the time my mother died, the Penguin newsletter carried an article called  How to read a book a day for a month and survive.

In that time immediately after a death and in the house where my mother lived, I found that reading a book a day, an untidy list of titles that I mostly found by chance, worked for me. By the time the month had finished, I was almost drunk on the quick succession of unexpected prose. Each day I encountered a different style and point of view. Many short novels are in translation so I was immersed in different cultures and ways of seeing. The short novel seems to allow for experimentation. The brevity of each book sharpened the focus. I decided to do it again the following year.

I became adept at scanning the shelves of libraries and bookshops, new and second-hand, for thin spines. I searched, and found, lists of short novels recommended by other readers. Brevity allows one to be more adventurous – you are only going to be with the writer for a day. I constantly surprised myself. I found myself describing the experience as something like cold water swimming or daily cross country running. There is something muscular and exhilarating about it. I found, also, that I was, more consciously, reading as a writer.

The intensity and focus of this daily reading habit encourages me to notice the workings of novels. The immediate contrasts between one book and the next draws attention to style and technique. The length of the novel intensifies the way the writer tells the story, encourages gaps which make the reader work in satisfying ways, makes words count more intensely so that the experience can be like reading a long poem. I have included non-fiction and poetry in my lists though I have found that I prefer not to read poetry collections in a day. I like to read poetry slowly, to leave space between one poem and another.

I recommend the challenge to you. It makes me feel alive with language and storytelling, with the fizz and unexpectedness of other people’s thinking. It makes me want to write.

Reading Closely

One of the most pleasurable ways of spending time with children is time spent sharing books. It may be Orange Pear Apple Bear over and over again, Mo Willems’ Elephant and Piggie series, joyously sharing the dialogue, or the complexities of The Imaginary, Clockwork, Skellig or Gleitzman’s, Once that sends Year 6 children scurrying to read all the rest of that series of novels. When we read together we deepen the experience of reading and we feed the writer.

There is, in Norfolk, a school where, once a week, the whole school is reading together. There was. I imagine it still happens. It was started by its remarkable English lead, first in her own Upper Key Stage 2 class, then for all Key Stage 2 and later, through the whole school. For one morning a week, children, in small groups, guided by an adult, read novels and picture books. The school is lucky enough to be able to recruit enough additional volunteers to make sure the groups are small and that children have time to savour what they are reading. That slow tasting and appreciating each text is important. The quietness that falls on the school as children enter the world of books is, in itself, something to be savoured.

Ten years ago, in the school where I am a governor, we introduced a similar thing. Not the whole school reading at once, but the reading of a series of novels in small groups. If they read nothing else, by the time they leave primary school, these children will have experienced close encounters with up to fifty novels. We call it guided reading, but, now, having experienced it myself for all these years, I would prefer to call it close reading. The guidance is there but the guidance is two way. The adult brings their experience of reading and of texts and the children bring their own ways of looking, their own preoccupations and questions. Each time I read a novel with a group, I discover it anew. Each group and each child within it takes something different from the reading. And what I noticed, very early in my experience of this kind of group, was that not only did children love the reading, they linked it to their understandings of writing.

We know that reading nourishes the writer.  ‘When still a child,’ says Zadie Smith,  ‘make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.’ When reading in small groups we can make it possible for young readers to make the reading their own and, at the same time, let  them experience, discover, something about how writers, how writing can work.

Keeping ourselves safe

If we are to keep our young writers safe, then we must feel safe ourselves. This is no easy matter for teachers at the moment. To be frank, we do not feel safe. We have been made to feel wrong; to feel that we are not up to scratch. We lose confidence in our own knowledge and the deep understandings that come from working with young learners day after day. Because the rules are such, because the way teachers are judged to be qualified or worthy of promotion are such, that we must doubt our own experience. We fear inspection; we fear senior management teams, who are also afraid and probably know too little about writing themselves; we fear observations and tick lists; we fear that we will lose our jobs; we fear that we will be found wanting against criteria that have little to do with the lives of children and how they might flourish.

We are told that we must be teaching exactly the same things, in the same way, at the same time as our colleague who teaches the parallel class. We are told that, even though you are two very different people, teaching two wildly different groups of children, despite the weather, despite the time of day, despite the world news and the particular events of the lives of the children. And so we may teach without conviction. Or we may teach with conviction in ways that, if we were to give it a second thought, we would see as utterly lacking in sense. We may teach from pre-digested schemes, dreamed up by people who have no idea about who or how our children are. We press writing on children, top down, outside not in. We are not encouraged to think outside the box, and, you will know, just how small that box has become; just small enough to take a tick that confirms that we have read what we have been told to read, that we have regurgitated the axioms conveyed to us at the latest on-line training; that we have not thought for ourselves.

When we think for ourselves we are simultaneously unafraid and full of anxiety. We find ourselves doing it anyway. And then we find that what we do is welcomed. That those who hear of what we are doing or who see it, are amazed. When I meet with other writing teachers I hear stories from teachers who have made independent decisions about how they teach writing. There are often dramatic stories of the inspection, the monitoring visit or a baffled response to children’s success. These often include an account of the approaching footsteps -stiletto heels echoing down the corridor, the senior leader purposefully crossing the playground, the beating heart of the guilty party. And then the reveal: the inspector loved the way you teach writing/ thought that was the best writing lesson they had seen. What is it you do? The teacher who has taken over your class from last year wants to know why those children love writing so much -asked without irony but with genuine puzzlement.

These teachers run writing workshops, write alongside their students, regularly have time for freewriting and share their own writing with their classes. They teach children to be interested in and delighted with words; they respond with genuine interest and pleasure and give feedback that helps writers to see what they have achieved; they teach those writers ways in which to give feedback in the same way. There are many other things they do. Their ideas are evident throughout this website. They read widely and they read with the intention of learning more about writing and how to teach it. They work out their principles and can explain them. They regularly attend teachers’ writing groups.

I cannot claim that we feel safe, but we have confidence in how we work. Doubting ourselves is part of the deal but we also can touch on our core values. When we meet and write together, we experience ourselves as part of a community of writing teachers. We write and hear each other’s writing. We listen to shared worries and to stories from our classrooms. We experience writing in ways which strengthen how we teach and respond to children. We are reminded that we are not alone.

Keep her safe...

As I was writing my last post about feeding the inner writer, and planning further posts about the many ways in which we can do so, I wondered if I should have begun with the second piece of advice Anne Enright gives the writing teacher: ‘keep her safe.’ Here is the paragraph from her essay, ‘This is the gig’.

The job of the teacher in these hazy, dangerous circumstances is to feed the student and to keep her safe. Angela Carter did the first, with a scattering of photocopies, musings and anecdotes (she never mentioned my work, I think), and Malcom Bradbury did the second, by smiling a lot, and liking books, and keeping quiet (I don’t think he mentioned my work either –I might be wrong). The other students did mention my work; they had various opinions about it, but that was fine, because Malcom was there to like us all, and keep us safe.

[In Foden, G. editor (2011) Body of Work. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Full Circle Editions.]

If we are to write well, if we are to write at all, we need to feel safe. If we are to write what is important to us, we need to feel safe. If we are to take those all-important risks, we must feel safe. Malcom Bradbury smiled a lot and liked them all. That is the first thing we need to be able to do: to like our students. It is not always easy. We can begin by discovering what is interesting, what is good, what is particular to each person. Writing can be a wonderful way of making those discoveries about a person.

We must stop imposing our ideas of what ‘proper’ writing should be like and be open to what young writers bring to us. If they are worried about producing ‘the right thing’, they are less likely to feel safe, and less likely to write well. We have to stop ourselves fretting about correctness; stop allowing that to be the first thing we think about when we propose a task or when we hear or read what has been written. Let us be surprised and delighted. Let us take young writers seriously as Michael Armstrong does, recognising them as having the same desires and impulses as an adult artist may have. They simply have less experience to draw upon.

We do have a responsibility to introduce children to what we know about writing, to help them understand conventions and even some rules, to introduce them to as much of the cultures of the world as we are able. We do not have to impose any of this upon them as the only way. Alison Gopnik (2009) suggests that the prolonged period of immaturity that is unique to humans is bound up with the human capacity for change. She says:

An animal that depends on the accumulated knowledge of past generations has to have some time to acquire that knowledge. An animal that depends on imagination has to have some time to exercise it. Childhood is that time.

[Alison Gopnik (2009) The Philosophical Baby. Bodley Head: London.]

When we are children we are devoted to learning about our world and imagining all the other ways that world could be. When we become adults we put all that we’ve learned to use.

The writing classroom can be a wonderful place for discovering who we are and what we have come from. It is a place where we can think on paper and where we can use our imaginations. It is a place where we constantly learn from each other, no matter our age, our personal experiences. For me, one of the most exciting things about a writing workshop is that one can never really predict what is going to happen. One of my great pleasures is to see a writer reading their work aloud and discovering from those around them that their writing has worked in ways they hadn’t fully believed were possible.

That excitement does not come if we have already pinned down our writers so tightly that surprise is not only unlikely but is probably unwelcome. We must trust our writers and they must trust us. They must know that we are interested in what they have to write and that we are interested in the ways in which they write.

Now that I have written this much, I realise that before we think about keeping children safe so they may write well, we need to feel safe ourselves. In my next post, that is what I will think about. In the meantime, consider the ways in which you keep the writers you work with safe. We should love to hear from you.

Feed the Writer

Writing is learned from the inside out. So say Janet Emig, academic, and Ann Enright, novelist. Many others say the same in different ways. In Body of Work, a collection of essays by UEA Creative Writing alumni, edited by Giles Foden, Ann Enright goes on to say:

…It is not a subject like geography that can be doled out in parcels of information. Writing is a discipline and, as with any discipline whether spiritual or physical, the doing is everything. No one can do it for you.

The job of the teacher in these hazy, dangerous circumstances is to feed the student and to keep her safe.

What does this look like for the primary school child or secondary school student? What can their teachers do? What can they do to feed their students?

So many things.

In feeding the inner writer we can think about the experiences they already have and others that we can make available to them. Some experiences may involve body and mind, a change of scenery or perspective. Some experiences may be about immersing themselves in ways of writing: experiencing how it is to write with these rhythms or those restrictions. These may allow the young writer to discover ways in which their own experiences can emerge through writing.

And each experience brings with it its own language, the words and syntax and music that allows us to name and explore, to discover, challenge and imagine.

Recently, I have been helping children in Key Stage 2 to prepare performances for Poetry by Heart. Children are required to learn one poem, or two from a set list, one published before 1918 and one after. It is a wildly affirming thing. In the schools where I volunteer, we take great care to match the poems to the child. They often surprise us with which ones they like. We read them a small selection that we think might work for them and from which they choose. It is a magic thing to see them respond and we know when the choice is right. There may be a huge grin, a declaration of allegiance or, more often, a softening, a sense that this poem is the one. There is something within it that speaks to them. I want to mention it because that commitment to the poem is crucial. They will work with the poems for weeks. The poems will stay with them a lifetime.

In Poetry by Heart children do take poems to the heart of themselves. They allow the poems to speak through them. They allow themselves to speak through the poems. It is a two way traffic. And it has an impact on their writing. Like so many things, we come at it slant.

Here is a way in which we feed our writers. It is a particularly literary offering. There are many others. Over the next few weeks, I shall be thinking about the ways in which we can feed our young writers and how we keep them safe.

Making a Difference

I was delighted that NWP were once again invited to run a writing workshop at the UKLA International Conference, 60 Years of UKLA Making a Difference, on Friday 5th July. I had hoped to be at the workshop with the wonderful Theresa Gooda, but she was, alas, not able to be there in the morning. You may have encountered her at other sessions and workshops throughout the conference; we would both love to hear from you if you were there. 

In preparing for this workshop  I thought about what we, within NWP,  have learned from children and each other as we write and reflect together in many different contexts. We are coming to better understand, through long-term, informal ethnographic study, the nature of writing and the teaching of writing as practice.

When adults and children are given the freedom to take ownership of their writing, one sees, again and again, the essential human nature of writing and its links to drawing, making, thinking and language; its relationship with the mind, spirit and body. To feel confident about writing and to be aware of oneself as a person who writes is a powerful thing. If students are to learn to write, we must honour their language and give them space and freedom to be playful, subversive, inventive, experimental. None of us, adult or child need have writing imposed on us. We learn writing, as Anne Enright says, from the inside out. When teachers write together we learn about ourselves as writers and, collectively, think about those we teach and the ways in which we set up the conditions that allow that inside out learning in our writing classrooms.

Now, more than ever, teachers and children need to take back the pleasure and the power of language that is a part of who we are. 

I wandered...

The Lake District. 50 mph winds; clouds scud in packs; sunlight chases across the fellsides and disappears over the ridges; daffodils more jitterbug than gavotte. The speed of the wind brings downpours and quickly takes them off down the valley. White horses crest the lake.

I discover that whilst William Wordsworth had his daffodils dancing in the breeze, Dorothy, on the same occasion, records a storm: the ‘furious wind’ seizing her and William’s breath. Maybe today we walked in weather closer to those dancing daffodils than I thought.

As we walked, I listened to the fearsome roar of the woods. I thought about the difficulty of capturing the many small moments of the hillside path; the lichen: silvered, ochre, the palest green; the fells like nineteenth century etchings, grey and lowering; cushions of moss and the downward rush of water between rocks and squelch; the patterns forming and reforming across the lake as the wind blew this way and that and a scatter of martins, small, quick arcs riding the air above the water.

And, as I walked, I also thought about writing: how difficult it can be sometimes and what an essential part it can play in our lives. I thought about the barriers that schooling can place between the child and their writing selves; and about the ways in which we can open up to them writing in its many forms. We can restrict ourselves, and those we teach, by limiting our picture of what writing can be, what it can do. And yet, if we open ourselves up to thinking about words and drawings on paper, the possibilities seem endless.

I am always struck by how much children welcome the opportunity to freewrite, and how often I stop the flow of their writing too soon. Freewriting allows a personal exploration of what pen and paper and mind can do. It is a place of experimentation and discovery both in terms of thought and of style. It is the kind of writing that helps me find direction, even as it seems to wander. Over the years, it has loosened up the way I use notebooks and has helped me to develop ideas and to find ways of expressing those ideas.

I have begun reading The Notebook A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen. Its contents span an unexpected variety of uses for writing. It reminds me of a wonderful exhibition at Kettle’s Yard Lines of Enquiry: Thinking Through Drawing which was an exhibition of the way thinkers in many fields use drawing as part of their work. The exhibition included drawings by archaeologists, astronomers, composers, geneticists, geologists, historians, physicists, surgeons, zoologists amongst many others.

Drawing and writing help us to think.

In describing Darwin’s use of notebooks, Allen explains how, on the voyage of the Beagle, his notebooks contained ‘whatever caught Darwin’s eye’, formal geological observations sitting alongside notes of expenditure, people met, routes taken. The historian, John van Whyle, describes them as ‘the worst’. ‘Not written at a desk, often in pencil, short lines, staccato notes, terrible handwriting, very faint, with arcane geological content.’ Over time, Darwin developed his use of notebooks. Once aboard ship, he wrote up his notes from trips ashore as coherent narrative. Later, he dedicated different notebooks to different intellectual functions, including those where he conducted a dialogue with himself, asking questions and pursuing his thoughts. On the page of his notebook where he drew his first evolutionary tree, Darwin wrote, ‘I think.’

Too often we think of writing as an end product, rather than as a part of a process of thought. I am wondering now about the ways in which we can encourage more fluid, speculative and adventurous kinds of writing in our classrooms.

What might that look like?

What's in a name?

We are entering the last of January, so I am getting in my new year’s wishes before the end of the month. Happy New Year! I have so much to write about and have just not been able to shape anything coherent; not so much writer’s block as writer’s bramble patch. Urgent ideas and pressing thoughts tangle and snatch so that sentences veer off into nonsense or are overwhelmed with further thought. Forgive me.  I feel  that we need writers and thinkers more than ever at the moment. We need to write ourselves and we need to give those we teach the chance to know for themselves what writing can bring to their lives.

I shall begin with Writing Club: a joyousness of little girls busy with pens and paper (and far too much washi tape.) I have been running this after-school club for seven years and it has always been popular, particularly amongst the youngest children. When Emily and I started the club, we expected that it would attract mostly Key Stage 2 children and the first groups were a brilliant mix of older and younger children, including children who not yet writing in the conventional sense. It made us rethink our ideas about writing and we became the richer for it. That’s maybe something to write about on another day. Last week, because older children were off on important business, there were only five and six year olds in the group. We began with our own names.

I had seen a post on Sophie Blackall’s Instagram account which inspired my idea for the session. (Those of you who know me will know that anyone may choose to write something that is more important to them  at that moment. I simply like to have an idea ready for them, should they want it.) Sophie Blackall is an artist and maker of books for children. She had been working with a school and had been taken by the way the children had written their names with such flair and individuality - ELIZA had perched hearts on the top of each letter; Arthur wrote swooping ‘R’s; Iris underlined her name with an emphatic zigzag. I loved the way that Sophie Blackall had noticed these differences and drawn attention to them and had a feeling that it would be something Writing Club would enjoy.

I made two different folded book forms for the girls to choose from – a simple zigzag and a vertical flap book. I made my own examples and soon knew what fun it could be. I wrote my name on each page or flap – Miss Jeni, Miss Jeni, Miss Jeni – and found a different style each time I wrote it. I followed each name with something about myself: ‘Miss Jeni lives in a house full of books.’ (‘That’s got to be your house’, observed Maud.) ‘Miss Jeni loves to read.’ And so on.  Illustrations would follow.

They all wanted to do this task, beginning with the writing of their own names. There was that miraculous silence that falls when people are absorbed and then an outburst of giggling and singing, standing up to dance to their song, sitting down to write their names over and over. Of course, they made the task their own. Soon they were writing about each other and making books for their friends. Writing for the self and from the self. Our names are important. Writing in a community and for that community. Other people are important.  It’s one of the things I have been thinking about a great deal: that when we are teaching writing in primary and secondary schools, we do well to remember those we are teaching. Each individual: the language, experience and thinking that each one brings with them. Writing learned from the inside out. We can set up the conditions for them to write what is important to them. We do so within a community and, through writing, extend our experience and our experience of language and how writing can work.

Alone and Together

It is National Writing day 2023. What a good thing. It is a day for celebrating; and a reminder of all the pleasures and benefits of writing. 

Perhaps you already write regularly or it’s part of a plan you haven’t quite got round to. I think that much writing is solitary, and necessarily so. It is possible to celebrate quietly and alone. But since it is a National Day for writing, it seems to me that it would be a great idea to write with someone else. It might be with just one friend or a whole class of students. There is something transforming about writing alongside others and then sharing something of what you have written. There is a warmth, an exhilaration, a very special connection, in the quietness of writing and then the sharing.

Maybe you would like a starting point, a way in. Of course we can start with words, a list of them or a poem or piece of prose. Think also, about an action that allows for dreaming, wandering before writing. Make a fold, cut, take a line for a walk. Make a simple folded book, cut out a character or a small crowd of them, draw -something that you can see or something that arrives from your mind. The act of making creates a space into which pre-writing thoughts flow.

The six pages of a small book can suggest a form. As we cut and draw, we dream, letting the ideas unfold before the words hit the paper. It can be a quiet, meditative time that moves us from the busyness of the world to the inside and out again. Patterns emerge, a phrase or sentence comes to mind. We find ourselves letting the writing fall onto the page. We surprise ourselves.

When we come up for air and look around to see and hear what our companions have cut from card, what they have used to animate their writing and how their writing has unfolded, we are delighted. We learn, always, from hearing words read aloud; ours and theirs. I hope that you have time this week to sit down with one other, or with many, to write. And to hear each other’s writing.

One of the good things about having a special day to celebrate writing is the way it generates such a rich variety of ideas for writing. Start with First Story, the organisation which came up with the idea of this day, and play the roll the dice game. Choose one of the links on their website. Try Arvon or CLPE, the British Library or the Literacy Trust. There are more. Use the ideas now and save some up for later.

Because I wrote some things

NWP Director Jeni Smith reflects on the ownership of writing:

January has ended and I have not yet wished you a happy new year. So here we are: Happy New Year! I hope that the year ahead is good to you and that you have left behind all those early January resolutions and are forging ahead into an interesting February. The sun is shining through my study window, calling me to be out walking, reminding me that the windows need washing, making me think about all that I have not written in the last few months. And all that I have written, for my own eyes only.

In my last post, all the way back in October, I wrote about Writing Club, attended by some of the youngest children in the school. We are still meeting every week and our numbers have grown a little. It is a relief to have some older children in the group who can help with spellings and be, quite unselfconsciously, good examples of what a writer might look like. We can become very tangled up in thinking ourselves not proper writers because we have not published or appeared on anyone’s bestseller list. It seems presumptuous to call ourselves writers. But we do write. And it is a pleasure and a solace. Writing alongside each other, whether adults or children, reminds us of the many ways we can be a writer and we learn from each other. Writing Club is a highlight for those children who attend. I imagine that might be something to do with washi tape and stickers and watercolour pencils, but it also is bound up with making, composing for ourselves. Making a mark.

Everyone has the capacity to write and to use writing for their own purposes. Not everyone feels that. I fear that the seeds of self-doubt are often sown in school. Writing can all too often be connected with failures: to spell, to punctuate, to form letters beautifully or to choose words that the teacher considers sufficiently wowish. Writing is rarely easy and all those secretarial skills can present real challenges for the young writer. When young children are asked what is hardest about writing, they are more than likely to say that it is getting the words right, ‘trying to think about the words that match’. However, writing is also a feeling. I think we all need to feel we have the power to use our writing in any way we choose, and to shape it accordingly. As a Year 3 child told me recently: ‘Just be yourself and don’t worry if anyone else judges your writing bad; you are never wrong, it is your writing.’ There’s an echo of Peter Elbow in there. The reader and the writer are always right and always wrong. They are right about their own responses and intentions, wrong about the experiences and intentions other writers and readers bring to the work.

When we feel we own the writing, we can feel more open to changing it, to shaping it more carefully. We may also feel more nimble, more able to adapt a task and to take risks. We can choose when to keep our writing for ourselves and when it is for sharing. It can be a joyful thing.

What, for you, is the best thing about writing?

Here is a four year’s answer:

Because I wrote some things. I wrote “I love you mummy.”

All this is writing

I have been circling around this piece of writing for a while now. My recent reading has set me thinking – Simon Armitage’s Oxford lectures, Annie Dillard’s essays in The Abundance, Richard Mabey on nature writing, reflections on Hilary Mantel – but I continue to circle, unable to reach a satisfactory resolution. Sometimes writing goes like that: more time, more thinking, needed.

Then, in the last three days, I have had two glorious, joyous, hopeful face to face encounters. On Thursday, our school Writing Club met after school for the first time in several years (we have been squeezing into lunch times) and on Saturday, five of us from the Norwich Writing Teachers group met in person for the first time since January 2020. I have loved our on-line workshops. During the height of the pandemic, they seemed like a sacred space where teachers and, often, their children, met on screen against the background of home. The on-line workshops have allowed us to write with people from across the country. When time differences have allowed, we have even written alongside a teacher from Dominica. It has been, and continues to be special. But, oh, the pleasure in sitting around a small cafe table with our pastries and our cooling cups of coffee. We didn’t write. We talked. There was so much to say and conversation flowed in between and over itself in ways that a Zoom meeting does not make easy.

Our talk was of the classroom, of our reading and our writing, our hopes and ambitions and the obstacles that stand in our way. As always, I worry if we are not writing. Our notebooks and pens lay untouched. Rightly so. We orientated ourselves. We discovered how things had changed for us all, and how they remain the same; the importance of placing children at the centre of our thinking; the nonsense that pervades schools and stands in the way of growth, despite the rhetoric; the courageous head teachers who place children’s happiness at the forefront of their thinking; the ways that each person around the table finds ways to open up possibilities for those they teach; the ways we make reading and writing a special part of children’s lives.

On Thursday, I met with the three children who had signed up for Writing Club. It has always been a popular activity in the school and I am sure it will be so again. There were two Year 1 children and one from Year 3. As always we began with words. It never ceases to please me! Off we went, one word each: heffalump pizza amungus sketti bolognaisi.  That was so enjoyable and so quick that we did another round. Let’s do foods, I said, taking their lead: raspberry oranges curry apples. And then we did four more rounds: scrabble chess jigsaw bingo; swimming walking bobbling climbing; turquoise bobbly blue  (lots of giggles) pink gold; red shoes, my pyjamas, flower dress, woolly jumper. There is something exhilarating about compiling lists of words together. There is laughter and there are pauses for explanations (the pyjamas are hard to get on but she likes to wear them as soon as she gets home from school). We discover it is both funny and OK to say bobbly blue -and how good that is to say. Try it! There are stories within the single words. We see the fun of hearing our own words amongst the words of others.

The words became a great preface to the little books we were about to write. I had brought each child a small folded book and some bird stickers to decorate the cover. No matter how old you are, part of a writer’s pleasure is the stationery (read Hilary Mantel on stationery). And so we wrote our names and began to draw and write. I drew my son and daughter, because they are always goading me to say which child is my favourite. But food had taken hold amongst the  rest of the group: tomato pasta, pizza, egg -but not the slimy centre bit. They drew and wrote, providing a running commentary as they did so. Their talk unfolds the thoughts and experiences that underpin what they choose to represent on the page. It is true for us all, I think, that the words on the page rise up from the great underground caverns of our lives.

Writing Club comes at the end of a long school day. Before the time was up, we broke out the washi tape. Of course we did. And we continued to talk and shape our ideas and experiences. Reading, drawing, talking, laughing, choosing stationery, breaking out the washi tape.

As far as I’m concerned, all these things and many more are an important part of writing: indeed are writing.

A short history

Thank you letters – the post-Christmas commitment on small sheets of notepaper.

Not understanding what other girls did to have their writing praised.

Writing and rejection – short stories that were just too weird.

In many writing workshops over the last twenty years or so, we have asked participants to think of some highlights from their lives as writers. You may have been at one of those workshops. We hand out sticky notes and ask people to write a different memory of writing on each one. We usually ask writers to add their age at the time of the memory, though that isn’t compulsory. We are going to share what we write with others. We suggest areas that you might think about: learning  to write; teachers’ influences; the most important pieces of writing you have written; writing at home and away; the travel blog and the letter to an unborn child; the highs and lows; letters and e-mails; writing as the start of something and sometimes its ending; writing for the family, the personal, the academic; the all-important notebook and the momentous graduation to a handwriting pen.

When we share our writing we find that there are always things we have in common and reminders of things we had not thought of.  Always there are memories which are the unique and intriguing. In the individual and the collective we find the beginnings of our selves as writers and the experiences which shape us as writing teachers.

The power and pleasure that came from the one thousand word limit.

Writing reports – scrumpling and rewriting and blotting and rewriting.

Writing daily about teaching and the  classroom. The revelation of it.

At this point in the summer, as you settle into yourself, as you may already be looking towards the new autumn term, perhaps you could take a moment to reflect on our own history as a writer.

Note down some memories; five to eight would be a good start, more if you want. Perhaps you could draw a timeline. Live with it. More memories will come. When we are writing in a group, we often choose one incident to write about in more detail -you could do that. Or you could add to your headline memories: a potted history of your writing life gathered in brief moments. As we push for more elusive memories, we build a fuller picture. It has a bearing on how we write and how we teach.

                        Writing into friendship and romance  across an ocean.

                        Reading a poem aloud and listening as others talk about it.

                        Shaping the SED – writing that hits the buttons and uses the language.

                        Observing and writing about a classroom  – shaping the words to make it live again.

It is good to write your history alone – you have time and space. It is good to write your history amongst others. The talk that weaves between the writing brings different perspectives. It helps us see ourselves and to see the possibilities for our classrooms. More than ever these days, we need the strength of shared understandings. We need to know that we are not the only ones who are listening to those we teach and placing them at the centre. We need to know that we have deep understandings of writing and the confidence to share those understandings.

With that in mind, thank you, to all group leaders, who have kept on writing with others throughout the last few hard years, and a special hurrah, for the Whodunnit Group, who will be meeting, face to face, in London, next Tuesday. Do get in touch if you would like to join them.

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