Writing Pedagogy

In writing I am trying to create a balanced programme and figure out how to be an effective teacher of writing. This means I need to accommodate my learners needs. 

With all of my students being at significantly different levels they have different writing goals they are working towards. When we worked as a whole class it was very interesting to see all of my students work on the same piece of writing and the different ways they interpreted what I was trying to explain.
I became aware of how each level differs in needs and expectations. Some of the goals and needs were clearer than others meaning they had obvious areas to work on whereas, others are competent enough that I am yet to find a way to extend them.

My first writing lesson was personal writing that focused on a moment in time.

The context was ‘A time that I felt scared’. Almost all of my students had some really great ideas about times where they felt scared however, some decided to write about a time when they felt excited as they had more appropriate ideas around this.

Personally, I believe that this lesson was not set up very well as I was unclear about where I wanted my students to take their writing and, what the purpose of personal writing was.
When planning I was merging recount and personal writing together and soon found out they were not the same thing. The idea I wanted to get across was that they are writing about a specific moment such as, what exactly happened in that moment when they felt scared.
I found that a lot of the students had no idea how to structure their writing after we went through the planning stage, and I realised what I should have done was to actually model step by step what I wanted them to write, so before they started their writing they had an idea in their head about what I wanted. As I had merged the two writing styles I did not have a clear structure myself and based it purely off what the plan looked like. I gave them an exemplar which I later realised they had no idea how to use.
I realised how important it is to model writing using an exemplar or my own story. My students seem to love story telling so this maybe something I could use in my favour to develop a unique way of understanding what and how we should be writing.

As we have practised personal writing weekly I can see some really great ideas begin to develop into great poetic writing. It was much easier for the students to write when they were writing about a recent experience they had, rather than trying to write about a memory. So, we went on a nature trail walk, where the students took their writing plans with them and recorded everything from what they could hear, see, touch, smell, and feel.

This allowed them to record appropriate language and ideas on their plans which they could later use and refer back to throughout the writing process.