If we want students to write more, we need to make writing part of each and every lesson. In this video, logonliteracy's Pat Hipwell explains how you can help encourage your students to write more... and to write well.
If we want students to write more, we have to expect it. We have to expect writing each and every lesson. Otherwise, they come to do a major piece of assessment and students will just not have done enough writing in preparation for that.
But it's important with writers, particularly with reluctant writers (and many students are reluctant to write because they find it so difficult) to start small.
Don't demand pages and pages and pages in the first instance, just ask for, for example, one paragraph, one well-constructed paragraph comprising of four to six sentences.
Writing is so difficult because it exerts a huge cognitive load. You know, if we were to count the number of elements in writing, it's probably somewhere between about eight and ten different things that we have to simultaneously control. And even the best writers do not control all of those things simultaneously. They work on different things at different times.
So for instance, if you think of professional writers - they generally don't do their own editing and proofreading. Somebody does that for them, because that's an extra load on them on top of the creation of the written work.
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