18
Wilderness Times | Spring 2020
LOW STAKES WRITING
ARMED WITH PURPOSE
Asking a student to recall the last time they wrote for pleasure or without the weight of assessment usually results in muffled laughter. For the vast majority of our students, it does not happen. Most have abandoned the journals that they once scribbled in whilst lying belly-down on their bed. Yet, we expect our girls’ writing to be fluent, sophisticated and bold, and request that they pluck the appropriate words from a vocabulary that stretches the length of the Wilderness Parklands. Unfortunately, this takes practice, not only to acquire a vocabulary of that size, but to use it correctly. Writing is a skill and something that Stephen Heller (2015) suggests that we start treating as a verb, rather than a noun. Writing requires work. Low Stakes Writing (LSW) is the product of our girls’ writer’s block and the need for growth in this area. We hope it could also be the vaccine. Task sheets should not be synonymous with the fear of putting words on a page and while writing isn’t the only cause of this fear, it is certainly one of them. LSW is a program that provides students with weekly opportunities to hand-write in ways that are constantly varied. We aim to create agile and adventurous writers who can express themselves with confidence. Taking writing outside of the classroom is a nice place to start if we want our girls to feel like they can write with the same freedom as the 230 species of migratory birds that visit the Coorong each year.
