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Students should be grouped for writing instruction, although writing groups are generally more flexible than guided reading groups. Grouping for writing, like grouping for reading, is always based on the students’ identified learning needs.

Writing groups include groups formed on a short-term basis and longer term groups. A short-term writing group is formed because certain students share a particular strength or need; the teacher may have identified this while monitoring the students’ writing. The teacher draws a group of students together, shares the learning goal with them, and works closely with them to enable them to meet that goal. The composition of such writing groups is based on the teacher’s identification of a particular strength or need.

Longer term writing groups are instructional groups that the teacher forms on the basis of student writing samples that have been gathered and analysed. The students are grouped according to shared strengths, needs, and next steps identified from the samples, and a set of writing goals is established for each group. The teacher works, over time, with each group in shared and guided writing sessions and in group conferences about writing. As a general guide, there should be no more than four longer term writing groups in a class and a maximum of eight students in each group. Since students progress at different rates, the make-up of the writing groups will change as the students’ competencies change.

Teachers may not schedule these groups for regular writing instruction in the way that reading instruction groups are scheduled. However, it is important for teachers to ensure that they spend instructional time with each group and with each student on a regular basis.

Shared writing involves the teacher and a group of students – often the whole class – in working together to plan and construct a text (or part of one). The teacher demonstrates and talks through the process of constructing the text, giving explicit instruction in how to use relevant writing strategies effectively. The students contribute their ideas and expertise as the text is constructed. Most shared writing sessions last for between ten and twenty minutes. Just as in shared reading, sitting together as a group develops a sense of community and enables the students to discuss the text in a collaborative way.

In a shared writing session, the teacher selects and uses a range of instructional strategies. For example, the teacher might model and explain how to link and sequence words and phrases into simple, compound, or complex sentences. Or the teacher might prompt the students in order to reinforce their awareness of the features of a particular text form.

The shared writing approach enables teachers to help students develop more complex ideas and language and to foster their critical awareness as writers. It provides an excellent setting for introducing or reinforcing information about specific text forms, including the transactional text forms that students will increasingly encounter in social studies, science, mathematics, and other curriculum areas.

Shared writing enables the group to make connections with their reading. During shared writing, students can develop a writer’s perspective on their instructional reading texts. Learning how these text forms are constructed helps the students to read them more effectively. Sometimes shared writing draws directly on shared reading, for example, when the group prepares for writing by deconstructing an existing text, searching together for the writing features and literary devices that the writer has employed to create the text.

Shared writing can be very motivating for students as developing writers. When it is an enjoyable, creative, and empowering activity, students develop and reinforce positive attitudes towards writing.

Introducing the session

In every shared writing session, the student writers have a specific purpose for writing and also a learning goal. The teacher shares the purpose for writing, for example, “to persuade readers to adopt your point of view”. This writing purpose is reflected in the set task or tasks for the session, for example, “to write a letter in order to persuade the recipient to adopt your point of view”. The teacher also shares the learning goal with the students, that is, they tell the students what they will be learning about writing during the session. For example, “We are learning how to state a personal position and support it with evidence.”

Both the purpose for writing and the learning goal are based on the needs of the students in the group, as identified from analysed writing data (for example, analysis of texts in the students’ draft writing books). It is important that the students have a clear understanding of both their writing purpose and their learning goal.

Teachers often lead students into shared writing through a collaborative discussion about what they could write together to meet their purpose. This talk may determine the content of the writing. Shared writing discussions can involve, for example, discussing current themes in cross-curricular work, talking about the content of a graphic organiser that they have filled in during shared or guided reading, or recalling and discussing personal stories.

During the session

During a shared writing session, the teacher acts as scribe, writing on a chart or board that all the students can see easily. Generally, the students contribute most of the text, often in response to the teacher’s questions and prompts, but sometimes the teacher writes parts of the text in front of the students, with just occasional contributions from them. As the text is recorded, it is constantly reread and amended as teacher and students work towards communicating their ideas more and more accurately and effectively. By promoting continual revision of the draft text, the teacher reinforces the importance of ongoing editing, especially to strengthen the deeper features of the text. Students should be encouraged to reread the draft text through the eyes of its intended audience.

It is important to encourage and value contributions from all students in conversations during shared writing. The teacher may sometimes need to elicit a response from a shy or new student. Effective teachers build and maintain a momentum so that all their students are motivated and engaged in the activity. “Think, pair, share” is a good strategy for engaging all students in shared writing conversations.

Concluding the session

Towards the end of the session, the students proofread the draft text. This gives the message that skilled writers attend to the surface features as well as the deeper features of writing before publishing a text.

The students also analyse the completed text, for example, by comparing it to an existing text that they have deconstructed. A range of teacher questions and prompts can help them to ascertain how far the text meets its purpose and how far the students have met their learning goal.

The conversations that take place during this analysis enable new writing purposes and learning goals to be identified. Sometimes the teacher sets a writing purpose for the group; sometimes the students suggest or identify their own writing purpose, based on what they know about their own learning needs and goals. Effective teachers generally involve the students in helping to plan the criteria that will show they have met their learning or writing purpose.

These conversations also build the students’ awareness and understanding of quality writing, especially when teachers ask strategic questions such as “What makes this writing have this impact on you as a reader? How can we make our writing as effective as this?” Thinking about these questions contributes to students’ metacognitive awareness.

Over a series of shared writing sessions, all of the processes used in writing a text can be demonstrated and discussed – forming intentions, crafting, recrafting, and sometimes presenting to an audience. Often, the product of shared writing is intended to meet an immediate learning need, and the group may focus on only one part of one process during each session. The same learning goal or writing purpose can be explored over several sessions.

After a successful shared writing session, many students are ready to write independently. The shared writing session will have clarified for them the purpose for writing, the writing strategies and skills they need to employ, and the features of a text that meets the purpose (that is, what success looks like). They will also be clear about their learning goal and how they will know that they are learning what they planned to learn. Some students, including many new learners of English, may need additional directed instruction through guided writing.

Using shared writing to help students who are experiencing difficulties

Shared writing is an effective way to support students who are experiencing difficulties in writing, including those who lack confidence or motivation. It is also an effective way of helping students who are learning to write in English as a new language. Within the supportive environment of the shared writing session, they can see the text growing slowly and purposefully as the teacher scribes, and they can be encouraged to contribute ideas. Words, phrases, and sentences are repeated and revised, enabling the students to build on their existing vocabulary and language skills.

Guided writing is an opportunity for the teacher to work intensively with a small group of students who share similar learning needs. Guided writing often follows shared writing. The guided writing group may be a longer term group, or it may be an occasional group formed for a specific instructional objective. The teacher knows what the students have already learned, what their needs and interests are, and what their next learning step will be. The next learning step is explicit in the learning goal for the writing activity. The writing activity generally involves working on a model developed during shared writing

The students, sitting with the teacher, construct their texts individually in their own draft books. The teacher supports them closely in finding the best way to meet their learning goal. For example, if the goal were “to use tense consistently in sentences”, the teacher and students might initially decide on the general thrust of some sentences that require manipulation of tense. All the students would write their sentences individually in their draft books and then share them with the teacher and with each other. Such sharing helps students to discover how well they are meeting the purpose. The students learn from one another as well as from the teacher, seeking, offering, and responding to feedback as they think, talk, and write their way through the task. The teacher is able to monitor the progress of every student.

Although this approach to writing is most often employed with students who need extra support, it is equally useful for extending high achievers and, indeed, all students. For example, if the purpose were “to use the passive voice effectively”, the students might work first as a group, with the teacher, and then individually to change instances of the active voice to the passive voice in an existing explanation text. The teacher might model the process and then direct the students to make further changes independently. The group might go on to talk about the changes they have made individually and the difference that their changes have made to the tone of the text.

Guided writing provides students with additional scaffolding so that they can achieve their writing purpose and learning goal more effectively. It should not simply repeat hat has been taught in a shared writing session.

Independent writing means students writing by themselves with varying levels of support from the teacher. In most independent writing situations, the student will write for a specific purpose with a clear understanding of what achieving this purpose will “look like”. Teachers provide a good model when they share their own writing and are as honest and specific in their writing as they expect their students to be.

Often the independent writing task is generated through shared writing. After the shared writing session, many students are ready to write independently using the writing strategy or skill they have learned with the group. Some students, however, need the additional scaffolding and support that guided writing gives them before they begin to write independently.

As well as completing teacher-directed writing tasks, students need time to write for their own purposes. They need opportunities to write simply and honestly about their own experiences and things that matter to them and to share their writing. Self-selected writing tasks enable students to explore ideas that interest them and to practise, at their own pace, what they have learned during shared and guided writing.

As the students write, the teacher talks with individuals, giving feedback about their writing as appropriate. It’s important to be ready to support students when necessary but not to intervene in a way that interrupts the writer’s train of thought or reduces their sense of owning their own writing. Writing should always be an enjoyable activity. Students should look forward to sharing work with a teacher who helps them to reflect on what they have written and to consider how the reader will feel when reading it.

Students should be encouraged to share their writing with a buddy, a group, or the class. They may choose to share their work at the draft, revised, or published stage. Sometimes they will display published work in the classroom or at another school or community venue. Effective teachers model collaborative ways of talking about writing so that their students are supported in sharing their work and can help one another to clarify their meaning and extend their thinking. When everyone is involved in helping to extend a piece of writing in a supportive and creative classroom climate, all the students benefit.

Sharing work also creates an opportunity to celebrate students’ writing achievements. Making meaning of, thinking critically about, and enjoying their own texts and one another’s is rewarding and helps to establish a community of writers.

Shared writing involves the teacher and a group of students – often the whole class – in planning and constructing a text together. The teacher models and talks through the process of constructing a text (or part of one), giving explicit instruction in how to use writing strategies during the shared writing process. The students contribute their ideas and expertise to the process of constructing the text. (This is often followed by guided writing; when the teacher has constructed part of a text, the students continue writing their own texts, working with teacher support but as individual writers.) Through shared writing, students can take part in constructing a more complex text than they would be able to write on their own.

Modelling can be used as an instructional strategy to show students, step by step, the planning, shaping, and structuring of a text for a specific purpose. The teacher may model the use of a “mind map” or “web” to show how a writer assembles ideas and then sorts them to be ready for writing. Carefully planned questions can help the students to think about how a particular text might be organised. The teacher may prompt by showing them similar familiar material or by reviewing with them the features of a particular type of text.

This approach enables the teacher to expose students to new, rich language, adding to the range of vocabulary and language structures that they can use in their personal writing. Shared writing reinforces positive attitudes towards writing by making it an enjoyable and creative activity.

The shared writing approach is not just for beginners. In years 3 and 4 and beyond, teachers can help their students to develop more complex ideas and language and can foster their critical awareness as writers. Shared writing provides an excellent context for introducing or reinforcing information about the features of texts, including the features of the kinds of non-fiction texts that students will later encounter in science, mathematics, and other curriculum areas.

The teacher begins by sharing the purpose for the shared writing session with the students. During the session, the teacher acts as scribe, writing on a chart or whiteboard in front of the students and showing them how to construct a coherent and enjoyable text. Over a series of shared writing sessions, the whole process of writing a text may be modelled – forming intentions, composing, revising, and publishing for an audience (see pages 138–141). Generally, however, the product of shared writing is intended to meet an immediate purpose, so the group will focus on only one part of the process.

Topics for shared writing can arise from many sources, including:

• current events and situations in the students’ lives 
• current themes in cross-curricular work 
• readings that the students have shared 
• artefacts or objects that the students have handled and discussed 
• discoveries in the natural environment 
• hobbies or school activities that the students take part in 
• images from wordless picture books, photo sequences, or paintings.

Shared writing provides a supportive instructional setting in which (depending on their students’ learning needs) teachers can:

• model the process of writing 
• explain and model the use of the conventions of written text 
• explicitly teach writing strategies 
• analyse how words are constructed 
• focus on letters, words, and letter-sound relationships 
• explore letter clusters, words within words, and patterns of spelling 
• model strategies for checking and improving spelling, syntax, and punctuation 
• model strategies for rereading and revising texts 
• develop students’ vocabulary and their knowledge of syntax and idiom 
• show students how to choose language to convey emotion or to persuade an audience 
• demonstrate the use of a range of forms and structures in written language 
• develop students’ sense of an author’s purpose and of the different audiences for different types of text.

During shared writing, as the teacher prompts, gives feedback, explains, and questions, valuable conversations arise between the teacher and students and also among students. In order to encourage the ideas and contributions of all the students, the teacher may sometimes need to elicit a response from the shy or new child. Effective teachers build and maintain a momentum so that all students are motivated and engaged in the activity.

A great deal of implicit learning occurs in shared writing, just as it does in language experience activities. The students listen actively and also participate as the teacher makes links to what they have recently read, heard, or written.

Teachers can introduce students to many forms of text during shared writing – reports, recounts, instructions, explanations, descriptions, narratives, charts, labels, speech balloons, wall stories, captions for photographs, diaries, shopping lists, recipes, dialogue, poetry, and more. Familiar texts can also provide starting points for shared writing. The teacher and students can innovate on a story, a poem, or even a particular sentence that they enjoyed, patterning a new idea on its style and structure. This can lead to conversations that build the students’ awareness, especially when teachers model strategic questions like: “What makes this good writing?” “How can we make our writing like this?”

The teacher uses shared writing to develop the students’ understanding of how different kinds of writing meet different purposes. By making links with the students’ reading, teachers can elicit or explain the reasons why, for example, lists, reports, instructions, and letters are presented differently. The teacher helps the students to make the connections and to transfer the learning to their reading or future writing (see also chapter 5).

Using shared writing to meet diverse needs

Shared writing is an effective way of supporting NESB students. They can see the text growing slowly and carefully as the teacher scribes, and they can be encouraged, in this supportive environment, to contribute ideas. Words and phrases are repeated and revised, enabling all the students to build on their existing vocabulary and language skills. This is also very valuable for students who are experiencing difficulties in writing, including those who lack confidence or motivation.

Shared writing enables teachers to build the learning of those whose home literacy practices differ from those of the school, to incorporate these students’ expertise, and to help them learn about classroom literacy activities. In shared writing, topics can be chosen to reflect the students’ diverse experiences and backgrounds.

In “interactive writing”, a variation of shared writing, all the children are involved in scribing the common text. Each child needs a marker or pencil and a small whiteboard or clipboard. The teacher leads the writing, but all the children write down the text themselves, sometimes copying and sometimes writing known letters and words themselves.

Interactive writing is most effective with a small group. It provides a safe and supportive environment for reluctant writers, for NESB students (students from non-English-speaking backgrounds), and for any students who need to give intensive attention to features of the English language.

By involving their students in this way as “apprentices”, the teacher can make explicit the various conventions of print (such as spacing, punctuation, and directionality) as well as helping the children to express meaning and think about what is being written. As the children become more confident and fluent, they will move from interactive writing, where they are fully supported, to guided writing.

In guided writing, as in guided reading, the student progressively takes control of the writing process. The teacher usually works with a group on a focused task. The teacher knows what the students have already learned, what their needs and interests are, and what their next learning steps will be. These steps are generally identified as the learning goals for a writing task that follows on from a model provided during shared writing. The students construct their texts individually, working with the ideas about writing already developed with the teacher. The teacher supports them in working out how best to convey their message to the intended audience.

During guided writing sessions, students can practise any or all of the steps in the writing process (as set out on pages 138–141). The students learn from each other as well as from the teacher, seeking and responding to feedback as they each think and talk their way through the task.

The teacher’s instructional objective may be to:

• teach a writing skill, for example, how to write dialogue using correct punctuation 
• focus the students’ attention on a specific strategy for writing, such as using mind maps to plan a text 
• provide a framework within which individual students can develop their personal voice 
• build the students’ vocabulary knowledge by using new language and clarifying it in initial discussion 
• encourage the students to choose words carefully, thinking about their likely effect on the intended audience 
• teach the students about the characteristics of different text forms 
• build in the students a sense of being one of a community of writers.

As well as working on teacher-directed writing tasks, students need time to write for their own purposes while engaging with topics that are significant to them.

Independent writing gives students opportunities to explore ideas that interest them and to practise what they have learned during shared and guided writing. Students need opportunities to write simply and honestly about their own experiences and things that matter a lot to them and to share their writing. Teachers provide a good model when they share their own writing and are as honest and specific in their writing as they expect their students to be.

When the students are writing on their own, the teacher can observe their writing and note their progress. Teachers should be ready to support or guide when necessary, but they need to be sensitive about intervening in a way that might interrupt a writer’s train of thought or reduce their sense of ownership of their writing. Writing should always be an enjoyable activity. Students should look forward to sharing their writing with a teacher who helps them to reflect critically on what they have written and to consider how the reader will feel when reading it.

Students should always have the opportunity to share their finished writing with a group or class and to see their work displayed. The teacher models collaborative ways of talking about writing so that the students are supported in sharing their work and can help one another to extend their thinking and clarify their meaning. When everyone is involved in helping to extend a piece of writing in a supportive and creative classroom climate, all the students benefit.

Language experience activities are a way of motivating learners that can lead into meaningful writing (including shared or guided writing). Language experience activities involve planned, purposeful “doing and talking” together, which will be followed by writing and reading about the experience. Such activities help young learners to make sense of their world by taking part in, sharing, and discussing authentic experiences and (usually) going on to contribute to or construct a written text about them.

The teacher engages the students in the experience and in discussion that elicits the students’ own language about the experience, some of which is generally recorded on a whiteboard. The teacher may go on to use shared or guided writing to produce the text or texts about the experience. The key feature of this approach is that it uses talk about children’s experiences as the basis for writing.

A great deal of implicit learning occurs during language experience activities. Many messages are conveyed about the nature of writing, how print works, and the conventions of various forms of written language.

Language experience activities make visible the links between spoken and written language. A lot of talk takes place, and the children become aware that writing arises from oral language. As the children enjoy reading and rereading the texts that they have created, they build their awareness of the relationship between reading and writing.

Language experience activities also provide opportunities for teachers to meet instructional objectives in particular subject areas and to develop literacy learning across the curriculum.

Teachers plan interesting, enjoyable language experiences with an instructional purpose in mind. These experiences help children to think about what they would like to write. For example, the teacher may use:

• special events within the school, such as a fair, a sports day, or a visit 
• special events beyond the school, such as a celebration or another local or national occasion 
• a practical activity, such as cooking or painting.

Language experience activities allow the teacher and children to develop a shared language as together they use the language orally and discuss how to transform it into writing. The teacher models writing down some of the key words and phrases that arise in the discussion.

During discussion, meanings are clarified, and so the conversation can be extended. The students’ ideas are explored, and their words are recorded, by the teacher in shared writing or by the student in guided writing.

Such writing is deeply personal because it reflects the children’s voices directly. The teacher has a strategic role in ensuring that each child has ownership of what is written. One reason why language experience activities are so effective with new learners of English and students from diverse cultural backgrounds is that the experience can capture and affirm what is of personal value to each student.

Learner writers may express their ideas first in drawing. Teachers can gain a lot of information from their students’ drawings, for example, by observing the subject matter they choose and the details they include.