How to Improve Writing Skills in Schools

AERO chief Jenny Donovan’s recent report suggesting a majority of Year 9 students in Australia are only writing at a primary school level is correct. What Donovan didn’t say is that’s only part of the malaise. Separate boys from girls, and the writing ability of Year 9 boys in Australia has been flatlining since NAPLAN commenced in 2008. So why haven’t we been able to move the dial for these young Australians? More importantly, what can we do about it?

The first thing to decide is not to repeat the same errors others have made. Let’s start with what to avoid.

MORE GRAMMAR ISN’T THE SOLUTION. Britain’s 20-year Literacy Strategy proved this: a weekly dose of the grammar hour saw writing results plummet. Why? Because grammar is only a subset of the writing lexicon. Indeed, leading UK academic Professor Richard Andrews summed it well: “There has been no clear evidence in the last hundred years that grammar interventions were helpful to improve writing quality.”

MORE READING DOESN’T FIX WRITING. In the same period Donnovan’s AERO team analysed Australia’s declining NAPLAN writing performance, Australia’s reading results went up. If the two educational skills were correlated, such a result would be impossible. Indeed, global research supports the notion that more reading does not produce greater writing - the cognitive and metacognitive skillsets are different. The answer? Do both. We should continue to explicitly teach reading. And, we need to explicitly teach writing.

So, how do you improve Australia’s writing skills? The good news is there are clear actions you can take:
The journey begins with teacher capability. Recent NSW research suggests up to 60% of teachers do not feel comfortable teaching writing. That should be no surprise; we haven’t taught three generations of teachers how to teach writing. But we have to. The teacher is the agent of change in the classroom. Teach the teachers first. Make them better writers and confident instructors of writing.

Don’t reinvent the wheel. We’ve taught writing brilliantly in the past. We can do it again. At Writer’s Toolbox, our approach is grounded in 19th Century Composition theory, when writing was taught by principles and the rules of composition. And we’ve combined composition theory with hi-tech AI to make this work for the 21st Century with great results. Use what works. 

Writing must be a whole school, every subject response. Writing is not just the domain of English. We need to teach writing in a way that every subject is supported, with a common language across a whole school.

Teach writing (like mathematics), from the start of schooling to the final year of education. This is vital. Leading American writing researcher Steve Graham and others have already identified the educational gap that emerges in high schools when we cease writing instruction at primary level. Indeed, unless we teach more sophisticated writing skills as we demand deeper cognitions of our high school students, we trigger that gap. And the only way to fix it is the explicit teaching of more sophisticated writing skills.

Rudimentary writing skills are taught in primary school. Writing skill development slows through high school. Meanwhile, cognitive load, thought development, and writing output expectations continue to mount. When both trajectories are not aligned, a gap emerges for the learner, widening each year it is left unaddressed.

Differentiate for the real needs of our students. Not all writers are the same. And not all students who struggle with writing face the same challenges. You need a fully differentiated approach, so you don’t miss the child, nor the teachable moment.

Understand that writing and thinking are bolted together - the writing problem has larger ramifications than just good communication. Writing and thinking are deeply connected. It is in the process of writing we develop many of our most important cognitive and socio-emotional capacities.

There’s good reason why some of history’s great thinkers - Thomas Edison, Leonardo Da Vinci, Ludwig van Beethoven, Mark Twain, Marie Curie, Virginia Woolf - wrote extensively in notebooks and diaries. When we write we don’t empty our creative wells, we release the floodgates of ideation and possibility: we posit, we explore, reflect, reason, debate. It’s a process researcher Peter Elbow called “self seeding”. Writing amplifies our thought power.

That’s why at Writer’s Toolbox we’ve built metacognitive and thinking skills into the AI’s immersive learning experience. You must. Because with writing you are taking the young person on a holistic development journey. As a result, we’ve seen strong gains in critical thinking and socio-emotional skills.

I believe we can fix Australia’s writing problem in three years. And the whole nation experiencing completely different outcomes. Why? Because we’ve seen the evidence at Toolbox. Whole school, whole cluster transformations within three years. Students who were disengaged, low-confidence, underperforming writers are now highly-engaged strong writers and thinkers, enjoying the educational success they deserve.

To reach this destination you have to teach writing and thinking in a way that works. You must reach the student and the teacher with practical effective skills across the entire educational life span. And technology, with its ability to deliver customised learning at scale, is a valuable part of this puzzle. It’s a puzzle we can solve.

Best-selling author Dr Ian Hunter has a patent in AI and is the founder of Writer’s Toolbox, the whole-school writing and thinking development programme. Used in over 700 schools globally, Writer’s Toolbox has seen educational gains 2-10 times state NAPLAN improvement rates.