Literacy PLTs

It is at this time of the school year that the practice of teaching and learning is both critiqued and celebrated, and none more so than when reflecting upon a school wide PLT program in its inaugural year. As Emily Ryan has touched upon, there are multiple reasons that a school wide professional development program works. It is efficient and effective and unites teachers as a professional body who value themselves enough to invest time into their teaching practice.

This year, our focus in the Literacy PLT has been on improving writing. Undisputable is the fact that to succeed in both schooling and in life, people need to know how to communicate in written form. Every year the education system comes under scrutiny about how the educational journey ends for students – silent, sitting at single tables, pouring out all they can recall and apply in 2-3 hours. Despite such controversy, the educational outcome of writing is never questioned. Regardless of the student, the learning domain or even the philosophical stance on education, teaching students to write clearly and cohesively is our obligation.

Accordingly, presented in the Literacy PLT sessions this year was an approach to writing that improves student writing by providing instruction that is systematic, cumulative and explicitly teaches students how to write. Our sessions were based on the ‘The Writing Revolution’ which is an approach that at its most strategic and effective, begins at the sentence level and builds to extended pieces of writing. The approach values the planning and editing stages of writing, and the rigor of the learning relies on the content of the curriculum for which it is embedded. It also adheres to the broader body of research known as the Science of Writing. So how did we go in our first year in the Literacy PLT with a focus on writing? We discovered that regardless of where a teacher is at in their journey of teaching writing in the classroom, our writing PLT provided knowledge to arm teachers with explicit teaching strategies, formative tasks and a language to dissect the writing of students. It built upon sentence level work and progressed to paragraph writing with scaffolding to support any writer. One of the best things that came out of the writing PLT was the discussion and interest that it generated. Conversations in the sessions were constructive and illuminating, and while we were all learning together, we also shared practice and learnt from each other. It was affirming to hear how the teaching of writing works in the classrooms of Science, Indonesian, Drama and Art, alongside the more traditional writing-based subjects of English and Humanities. We learnt that the writing needs of students has commonalities in every classroom and is best taught using the lesson content to provide the purpose for writing. In the Art classroom for example, while the opportunity to write is not as prolific, it still needs to be focused, organised and use subject specific vocabulary. Similarly, the metalanguage for teaching writing in any classroom is important, and if used consistently across a whole school, it can reduce the cognitive load that students undergo when writing. Writing is one of the hardest things we ask our students to do and the more we unpacked it during our sessions, it became obvious that students rarely become good writers without effective instruction.

Although our Literacy PLT sessions have come to an end for the year, the knowledge that we have shared about writing is in its infancy. This type of approach relies on longevity, consistency and most of all the belief that it will enhance both the learning outcomes and the life experiences for our students. I would like to thank those who shared their experiences in our PLT sessions this year. As well as learning together, it also provided a time to celebrate wins, sometimes sigh together in frustration and debrief alongside our colleagues at the end of a busy day.

Mrs Sharon Hitti

Instructional Leader - Encounter, Middle School Encounter Teacher.