Just Write Project

During 2022, EMC ran a small-scale project working with individual teachers in five different schools to explore ideas about how to use our Just Write and Write On publications.

Our thesis was a simple one: that sometimes students benefit from the opportunity to write freely and creatively on a topic of their choice, without too much teacher guidance. Reflecting on the processes they had undertaken when ‘just’ writing, while also learning about and practising writing in other areas of the English and wider curriculum, would help develop their ability to write for a range of audiences and purposes.

We drew on Sadler (1989) and Marshall and Wiliam (2006) to give the work a theoretical framework. They argue that writing is too complex and contains too many component parts for teaching to focus too much on minutiae; instead, students need to become increasingly competent at writing and handling whole texts over a period of time, in the process coming to recognise what makes ‘good’ writing and becoming inducted into a ‘guild’ of writing.

Entry into the ‘guild’ marks a point in writing development where students can more instinctively understand how and what to write, without being overly weighed down by thoughts about what goes where, when and how.

We designed a 10-lesson sequence to help students move towards joining this ‘guild’. We did not want to leave them entirely to their own devices, but instead decided to focus each lesson around a broad aspect of writing. In each lesson students would explore one of these broad areas, such as planning, structure, accuracy and form, before applying what they had learned to a piece of their choice. They would reflect on what they and their classmates had done by reading and assessing their own and each other’s work, using a formative assessment grid provided. This was to be a key part of the process: Sadler and Marshall and Wiliam stress the importance of being exposed to writing of different kinds and evaluating it in order to develop the skills needed to enter the guild.

You can find this 10-lesson sequence, plus a more detailed rationale behind how it was developed here.

We interviewed the teachers involved at the beginning and the end of the project, and also gathered work completed by their students. What follows is a summary of what we learned through talking to the teachers and looking at student work. Four of the teachers who completed the project stuck closely to EMC’s 10-lesson sequence. One, because a colleague was already teaching the sequence, made some significant adaptations. These have been outlined at the end of this write-up as they offer some interesting insights into the efficacy of responsive teaching practices.

It was clear across all of the schools that the books captured the imaginations of the students. ‘They honestly loved it,’ commented Justine from Beacon Hill Academy. Petra from Ironfield Grammar commented that ‘several of them said they really liked them and enjoyed using them’. She added, ‘They feel they have ownership of the book; they find it interesting and like it as a physical object.’ Evie at Rockford Academy said that her class would ask, ‘Is it Just Write today?’ because they looked forward to the lessons. Sarah at Rimington High said that her students ‘loved the book and it was so nice to hear them get really excited about it.’ As the project went on, she stressed that the students ‘really cared about those books. A lot of them were like can I keep it? They wanted to keep them and carry on doing things at home... They were so infatuated with them.’

Because the Just Write and Write On books contain a large number of different writing activities, it is possible to let students choose the task they want to complete in any given lesson. Justine found this a positive aspect of the project, commenting that ‘They loved that they had agency. They loved that they got to pick the texts that they wanted to do every week.’ Petra at Ironfield felt that ‘there’s something about free reign that gives them some idea of ownership and confidence.’ Maureen at Rimington High felt that ‘overall they enjoyed [having a choice] and met it with some enthusiasm, even some students who can be quite hard to engage.’ However, she did feel that it ‘was quite a lot for some students, especially SEN students’. Sarah at Rimington High had similarly mixed feelings. ‘I love the choice,’ she commented at one point, but qualified this by saying that sometimes she felt students would benefit from all focusing on the same type of writing, such as a newspaper article. 

The Just Write approach is out-of-step with some dominant ways of teaching writing currently found in classrooms. These tend to offer students models, which they analyse for writing features, before reproducing them in their own work. Often, students are also given relatively tight frames within which to write. It was interesting to hear, then, that teachers were sometimes surprised by what students could or could not do using a different approach. Sarah at Rimington High found that high-attaining students struggled with less structure. This is, perhaps, a reason to engage more, not less, with more loosely structured approaches: these are the very students who, logically, should be best placed to cope with self-directed writing. In contrast, she observed that ‘the mid-low boys loved it and actually really wanted to do well and show you something.’ Evie, from Rockford, made a similar observation about the boys in her class. She said that she ‘was quite surprised about how on board the boys in general were.’ She recognised that she risked drifting into stereotypes, but said that with the school consisting of 70% boys, there were ‘engagement issues’, which did not occur when using Just Write. 

Justine was particularly pleased with how Just Write worked with one disengaged student in her class at Beacon Hill. This student presented with quite severe behaviour issues in lots of lessons, often refused to do any work and was regularly excluded from school. She commented that ‘he has very, very low self-esteem and said that he thinks he’s stupid and not good at English.’ She went on to say that the Just Write project was ‘the first time I’ve seen him excited about something and probably the first time he’s asked me a question because he’d say ‘are we doing Just Write today?’ Justine pointed out that anyone looking at the boy’s book, with no idea about his background, would think he hadn’t written much, but that ‘for him, he wrote so much’.

Evie at Rockford was also able to talk about one individual student whose work surprised her. She spoke of his response to an activity called ‘Day in the Life’ in which students are asked to imagine they are an animal for a day and write about the experience. The boy is diagnosed as autistic and ‘can be quite chaotic at times’ and ‘quite hard to encourage to write for a long period of time.’ Yet, with this task, he was able to indulge in his love of horses. ‘He loved it!’ said Evie. ‘He wanted to show everyone who walked past in the corridor this piece of work he had done, A Day in The Life of a Horse. Although he’s always enthusiastic verbally, that sometimes doesn’t translate into writing.’

The 10-week lesson sequence devised by EMC placed a high emphasis on formative assessment, particularly self- and peer-assessment. Drawing on the work of Sadler and Marshall and Wiliam, we recognised that for students to be inducted into a ‘guild’ of writing, they needed multiple exposures to different writing, including that of other students. Making evaluative judgements about this work (formative rather than summative ones) would enable them, over time, to develop tools to help them understand the processes that go into effective writing. Consequently, there was a focus in the lesson sequence on students sharing and discussing each other’s work. There was also a simple assessment grid, to be returned to regularly, which identified some of the broader concepts pertinent to writing.

Evie, at Rockford, felt that allowing students to assess their own work in this low-stakes way boosted their confidence. She said that students ‘liked the assessing your own writing scales’ because they were ‘low stakes and easily boosted students’ confidence.’ When Maureen’s students at Rimington High used the grids, she felt they inhibited students from ‘really responding to the work’ so that what they came up with was a little bit more generic. Petra, at Ironfield Grammar, found that students gave marks to themselves and their peers clustering around 3 or 4 out of 5, perhaps indicating a nervousness about marking themselves too low or high. In contrast, Justine’s students at Beacon Hill, were more willing to give a range of grades to themselves and their peers. She felt this helped them to identify what to work on themselves in a non-threatening way. The freer approach from these students perhaps stemmed from the fact that they were in Year 7, whereas Petra’s were in Year 9.

Teachers valued the opportunities the grids provided for students to talk about their work. Petra, at Ironfield Grammar, described a process that is in keeping with Sadler’s notion of the ‘guild’ of writing developing gradually over time, not necessarily with any obvious markers along the way, but heavily dependent on multiple exposures to texts, with the opportunity to discuss and evaluate. She felt that students enjoyed reading and commenting on each other’s work. She said that they tended to always give positive feedback, but that ‘they were moving towards being able to critique’, even as they were not necessarily fully conscious of this. She identified this through the way students made suggestions to their peers, even while remaining positive. They say things like, ‘Where else could you have gone with that character?’ or ‘How could you have written a bit more description for that setting?’ She felt they were most comfortable when evaluating their own work. She observed that ‘They would almost give a little bit of critique before reading their own work out to the class.’

Hearing students share their work around the class was also beneficial for teachers. Petra used the Just Write books the previous year with another class, who received no direction, but were left literally to just write. She felt this had value, giving students space to explore their ideas. However, this year she noticed that she ‘definitely got more feedback because they shared and I’ve had more of an awareness of what they’ve been doing.’ She also felt that the approach that followed the EMC sequences of learning meant that every student engaged, whereas the previous year a small minority did not

A key difference for some teachers between the approach used with Just Write compared to teaching writing in regular lessons was marking. The Just Write books were not marked by teachers and it was stressed to students that the books were very much for them to experiment with their writing without worrying about getting things wrong. Justine, at Beacon Hill, felt that this ‘made them a lot more confident to write … when they were allowed to pick a task and not worry about SPAG, I think it made them feel more relaxed.’ She explained that this allowed her to take an approach that cultivated one student’s creativity in ways that otherwise might have been missed:

Generally, EMC avoids writing overly prescriptive lesson sequences for teachers. When we design resources we tend to leave room for teachers to adapt them to the particular needs of their students. However, in this instance, we mapped out a 10-lesson sequence, both to save teachers time, and to try to bring some consistency to the project. Each lesson began with a broad focus (such as planning, structure, audience) before students chose a piece of writing to attempt. There was also time built in for sharing work with other students and for self- and peer-assessment that used grids designed for the project.

There was no negative feedback about the sequence and some positive comments. For example, Justine noted that a focus on ‘purpose’ early on in the lesson sequence resulted in this being intertwined into subsequent work. She commented that ‘there was more of a thread in what they were writing later one, because I could notice, for example, they wanted to make that one funny, and that would be their purpose.’ She felt that the different areas of focus were pitched at the right level: ‘Often it needed a quick reminder from me at the start of the lesson. All of the focuses for the lessons were sophisticated ideas but communicated in a clear way that the students could understand.’ Petra felt of the focuses that the students ‘like them and engaged with them. And they did think about which pieces of writing they were going to choose off the back of it.’

Maureen felt that the sequence ‘seemed to work quite well’ but also noted that ‘you’d jump over things quite quickly.’ As an example, she said that ‘there was a thing on planning and then we jumped over that.’ Justine had similar concerns about the lack of time given over to planning, commenting ‘I think students needed more about that.’

One concern was that some students found the freedom to choose a task overwhelming. Evie pointed out that teachers in her school adapted the sequence by limiting students’ choice. For example, they sometimes put four suggested tasks up on the board and asked students to choose one.

The issue of planning came to the fore in the adaptations made by Sarah at Rimington High. Sarah’s experience of using Just Write was similar to that of other teachers in the project, but the adaptations she made seemed to be key to its effectiveness for her students. Given the adaptations clustered around planning and choice, in keeping with some of the issues raised by other teachers, it seemed worthwhile to offer Sarah’s experience as an extended case study below.

Sarah was given the EMC 10-lesson sequence but was not asked to stick to it rigidly. This meant that she was able to identify ways in which it did and did not suit her students, a responsive approach that we would generally encourage at EMC. While she drew on several aspects of the sequence, she felt that her class needed more teacher input about planning than the sequence made time for.

Developing her teaching of planning was a personal target of Sarah’s, based on her experience of her KS4 classes, which, in her words, 'are really terrible at planning, and this really affects the structure of their work.' Consequently, she wanted to embed good planning processes in her students at KS3, so as not to repeat this problem. She was working, in this instance, with a mixed attainment Year 8 class of boys and girls.

She noticed that the students really valued the Just Write books themselves, so did not want to plan in them. They also, she said, 'hate planning'. Despite this, she spent two lessons offering them four different ways to plan. This included mind-mapping, plotting out a beginning, middle and end, and planning points in a linear fashion. She then insisted before writing tasks that students planned using one of these techniques for 15 minutes. In her words, 'I wouldn’t let them even touch the books until they’d planned.' Students had to write at the top of the page in their regular exercise books the type of plan they were going to use and then spend the time both selecting the activity they were going to complete from Just Write and setting out their plan. This process 'helped them focus a lot' and resulted in work that Sarah found noteworthy in several ways.

First, it resulted in more work than she was expecting. 'They wrote reams,' she commented. 'I’ve never ever seen them write that much.'

Second, it resulted in students being able to generate lots of ideas on their own. While planning was going on, Sarah would circulate round the class identifying students struggling. Generally, they weren’t struggling with coming up with ideas, though, but with how to contain, order and limit their ideas, a question of 'reigning in' and 'crafting'.

Third, it resulted in a great deal of enthusiasm, what Sarah referred to as 'excitement for writing again'. She explained this in terms of how the Just Write approach she adopted contrasted with some of her regular classroom practices. She reflected on what it must be like for students to have only a single focus for writing during the course of a unit of work, commenting:

Sarah, then, really thought that it was valuable for students to have a choice in their writing. This wasn’t simply a question of engendering enthusiasm. It also enabled her to learn what students could do in writing, beyond following her instructions for writing to particular models. 'When would you get a chance [in normal lessons]?' she says, referring to students being able to choose to write an acceptance speech for winning an Oscar.

Perhaps most significantly, Sarah felt that Just Write had a strong impact on students who at other times were reluctant to write. As was the case with two other teachers in the project, she identified it as having a particularly positive impact with middle and low attaining boys. 'Mid-low boys loved it and actually really wanted to do well and show you something,' she commented. She added: 'there was this specific boy who has been very apathetic all year, hasn’t really shown any interest... his final piece was amazing and especially around the boys it showed me they like to write” and said that the project showed her “that boys do like to be creative.'

It’s interesting that the boys being discussed by Sarah fit the profile of students who are often given less not more freedom in what they are allowed to do in lessons, under the impression that they require tight structures in order to produce good work. In this instance, the opposite proved to be the case. It seems to have been time spent on planning that enabled them to write effective pieces, with structure and detail.

Sarah submitted samples of work from four boys from her class. You can find these in the attached PDF file. Her comments relating to the work are reproduced in full here.

It's important to recognise that the pieces written by Sarah’s students were generated independently by 12-13 year olds who are insecure in their grasp of written English, and often reluctant to write. Errors and some clumsy constructions, then, are to be expected. What’s clear, though, is that all of the students have a strong engagement with the work. They draw on their own experiences, be it of real life or the imaginative worlds of film and TV, and so have plenty to say. They also seem to have a decent grasp of the form in which they have chosen to write. They will undoubtedly be able to produce more polished pieces of writing through a more structured teaching approach. But would that necessarily provide teachers with as much formative information about what the students can and cannot do, what the next stage for their learning might be, and so on? Would it push them that bit further towards being fully fledged members of the guild of writing?

This was a small-scale project, so we don’t want to makes excessive claims based on the evidence we saw. However, the findings do fit in with what we’ve seen and heard about teaching using Just Write and Write On in a range of different schools, and can be summarised as follows:

• There is a benefit in students being given space in English lessons to write freely with only light-touch guidance; key to this is building in time for subsequent sharing and for self- and peer-evaluation.
• Providing students with ways to develop their ideas before writing is key to the successful use of Just Write and Write On with a significant number of students. Advice and strategies for planning have an important role to play. By planning, we do not necessarily mean students mapping out work in a particular way; rather, we mean that they need to have time and space to generate sufficient ideas to write about.
• Some forms of writing require more teacher input than others if students are to tackle them effectively – Just Write and Write On are useful evaluative tools for showing you where there are significant areas to work on.
• While following a structured sequence of lessons saves on teacher time, it does not always leave sufficient room for the responsiveness needed in most lessons.
• It's not possible to draw quantitative conclusions about the effect of a writing intervention like this, carried out over a short period of time; however, qualitative data gathered from conversations with teachers and from reading students’ work offers valuable insight into the processes at work in the development of young people’s writing. The qualitative nature of observations by teachers is well summed up in these words from Petra: ‘I think it does help them to progress and it does develop their skills, but I think it’s subtle and I think quantifying those things is really tricky. But I definitely do think it has a positive impact.’
• Some students benefit from being able to continue with their chosen writing tasks across lessons rather than choosing a new task each lesson.
• Just Write and Write On allow students to write in a range of forms, for different audiences and purposes, that they might not otherwise meet in mainstream lessons.

We’d like to thank all of the teachers who took part in this project.

Marshall, B. and Wiliam, D. (2006). English Inside the Black Box. Granada Learning.

Sadler, D.R. (1989). ‘Formative assessment and the design of instructional systems’. Instructional science, 18(2), pp.119-144.