Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible.
– Tony Robbins
Description of the principle
To maintain children’s self-efficacy, commitment and motivation during a class writing project, teachers should ensure that children know the publishing goal for the project, that is to say the future audience and purpose for the writing. The class, as a community, should have a say in setting the product goals for the project. This is what will they have to do to ensure their writing is successful and meaningful. Setting shorter-term process goals (e.g. generating an idea/planning/drafting/revising/editing/publishing) benefits learners in terms of cognitive load, focus, motivation and achievement; for example, ‘You have two days left to complete your draft’. However, once experienced enough, children should be able to use their own writing process and only need the final deadline for completing the project; for example ‘You have eight more writing sessions before these need to be ready for publication’.
What Writing For Pleasure teachers do
- To maintain children’s commitment and motivation during a class writing project, teachers ensure that their classes understand the ‘publish goal’ for the project, that is to say, its audience and purpose.
- The class, as a community, also have a say in setting the ‘product goals’ for their project. This takes place in the form of discussions as to what they will have to do, and what it is writers do, to ensure their writing is successful and meaningful in the context of the project’s aims.
- The teachers often share a piece of their own writing, in keeping with the project, to initiate a discussion about writing decisions. The children then use the outcomes of these discussions as an aid to setting product goals for their own writing. The product goals are similar to success criteria, but importantly they also include more overarching goals linked directly to purpose and audience.
- Product goals are put on display and are repeatedly referred to by the children and the teachers throughout the class writing project.
- Teachers set specific ‘process goals’ for writing time to help the class generally stay on track, without forcing children to keep to a certain pace or a specific writing process.
Reviewing your practice: questions to consider
- How do you see writing as mastery through repeated practice rather than performance-oriented and therefore provide children with space and opportunity to develop their writing over time?
- How do you set class process goals for children to achieve during a writing session?
- How do you ensure that product goals relate to purpose and audience and link directly to the class’ learning needs?
- How do you ensure the class’ product goals are well known and/or on display?
- How do you involve the children in setting product goals for a class writing project?
- How do you work with children to set individual writing goals?
- How do you help children set their own publishing, product and process goals for their personal writing projects?
- How do you ensure children know what the class’ writing goals are, how they can achieve them and what resources or strategies are available to help them?
Examples from the classroom
Let’s make a ‘Guess Who?’ book! Writing character descriptions in Year Two
Supporting resources
- eBook: Getting success criteria right for writing: Helping 3-11 year olds write their best texts [LINK]
- eBook: Reading in the writing classroom: A guide to finding, writing and using mentor texts with your class [LINK]
- Our writing development scales and assessment toolkit [LINK]
- eBook: A guide to pupil-conferencing with 3-11 year olds: Powerful feedback & responsive teaching that changes writers [LINK]
Suggested further reading
- Young, R. (2023) Trust the process: setting process goals [LINK]
- Young, R. (2023) Establishing publishing goals for class writing projects [LINK]
- Young, R. (2023) The components of an effective writing unit [LINK]
- Kaufman, D., Young, R. (2022) The components of an effective writing lesson [LINK]
This chapter gives practical advice on how teachers can manage the issues of marking writing and setting targets. It gives suggestions taken from real classroom practice. It discusses how pupil conferencing can be a powerful mode in which to improve children’s sense of self-efficacy and gives a rationale for providing written feedback whilst children are still in the process of producing their texts. It shows how teachers can decrease their workload whilst still giving children high-quality support. This chapter provides advice on how to mark the compositional and transcriptional aspects of children’s manuscripts, adapting the marking according to where children are in the writing process. It explains how teachers can set writing targets and future writing goals in collaboration with children and how formative feedback such as marking and target setting can inform future planning and encourage efficient and effective responsive teaching.
This chapter introduces the setting of writing goals within the context of a community of writers, including setting distant, product, and process goals. The concept of distant goals is explained, including its powerful relationship with establishing purpose and audience for writing and the teaching of genre and textual features. The setting of product goals follows, with the authors again making the link between the collaborative setting of product goals alongside exploration of the field, tenor, and mode of genre teaching. Next, the authors examine how teachers and children set process goals (writing deadlines) on their way towards publication and performance. The authors share ways in which teachers and children can work collaboratively to set writing goals for class writing projects. The chapter concludes with examples of effective practice taken from the classrooms of high-performing Writing For Pleasure teachers.
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