Teachers who perceived themselves as writers offer richer classroom writing experiences and generate increased enjoyment, motivation and tenacity among their students than non-writers. –Teresa Cremin & Sally Baker
Description of the principle
Just as it would be difficult to teach children the tuba if you’ve never played one, so it is difficult to teach children to be writers if you never write. Become a writer-teacher who writes for and with pleasure and use your literate life as a learning tool in the classroom. Children gain from knowing that their teacher faces the same writing challenges that they do. Write and share in class your own pieces in relation to the projects you are asking the children to engage in, but be sure to maintain reciprocal relations when discussing and modelling your own writing processes and the exemplar texts you have written. Sharing the strategies that you really employ in your own writing is highly effective instruction.
What Writing For Pleasure teachers do
- Teachers write for pleasure in their own lives outside the classroom. They use their literate lives as an education tool in the classroom.
- Teachers write and share their writing with their class with regularity. They will also share their own finished pieces in relation to the projects they are asking the children to engage in. They will also take advice from the children on compositions they are in the process of developing.
- Teachers will readily share the ‘tricks, tips and secret’ strategies that they habitually employ in their own writing and will invite children to give them a try too.
Reviewing your practice: questions to consider
- How do you investigate, model, discuss and write alongside their children during writing sessions?
- How do you write for pleasure in your own life?
- How do you share your own writing into the class library?
- How do you produce writing exemplars for your pupils?
- How do you live a literate life and bring it into the classroom? How do you use your literate life as an educative tool?
Examples from the classroom
Writing Like A Writer In The Classroom
Ten Minutes A Day – A Writer I’ll Stay
Student-Teachers Becoming Writer-Teachers
Alert To Writing: I Could Write About That!
Writing And Using A Mentor Text
Writing with some pupils in my Year One class
Book-making In Nursery
Supporting resources
- eBook: A guide to finding, writing and using mentor texts with your class [LINK]
- The UKLA’s Teachers’ Writing Group [LINK]
- The National Writing Project’s Writing Groups [LINK]
- The UKLA’s Teachers’ Writing Project Questionnaire [LINK]
Suggested further reading
- Young, R. (2023) Guidance on teaching at the sentence-level [LINK]
- Young, R. (2023) Being a reader-writer-teacher [LINK]
- Kaufman, D., (2022) What to do when you think you don’t have time to write [LINK]
- Creighton, S., (2021) Our first teachers’ writing group [LINK]
- Young, R., Ferguson, F., (2020) Why effective writing instruction requires a writer-teacher [LINK]
- Fidler, L., (2019) A writer-teacher’s reflection on her process and writer-identity [LINK]
- Lane, M., (2019) Teachers developing their writing for pleasure [LINK]
- Valley, K., (2019) I think…that all teachers should do this so they can learn new stuff like us [LINK]
- Walker, J., (2019) When teachers are writers [LINK]
- Phillips, S., (2018) Am I a teacher-writer? [LINK]
- Young, R., Ferguson, F., (2018) What exactly is a writer-teacher? Teach Primary article [LINK]
This chapter begins by considering the role being a writer-teacher plays in employing the most effective writing practices most effectively. The authors proceed by discussing a teacher’s requirement to be a role-model and to demonstrate what writers do and how they undertake their writing pursuits. This includes sharing and discussing their own writing and craft with their community of writers in the classroom. The authors then unpick what is meant by shared writing, demonstration writing, and thinking-aloud. The authors examine writer-teachers as investigators of their own writerly life and writing practices and how Writing For Pleasure teachers will, in all likelihood, live the writer’s life. In the penultimate section, the authors discuss the challenges currently faced in nurturing teachers as writer-teachers. The chapter concludes with examples of effective practice from the classrooms of high-performing Writing For Pleasure teachers.
This chapter discusses the pedagogical and personal significance of teachers developing their own literacy. It discusses the ‘teachers as writers’ movement and provides full and rich guidance on how teachers can develop themselves as writer-teachers to the benefit of their classroom practice and themselves. It discusses how teachers’ writing, undertaken outside the classroom, can be used as a powerful and effective educational tool within it. It describes how writer-teachers are better positioned to help their classes develop and progress as writers. It gives guidance on how teachers can share their writing effectively with the classes. Finally, it gives support and further reading on how schools can create their own special interest or writer-teacher groups.
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