By Steve Graham
Original article: LINK
The Writer(s)-Within-Community Model (WWC) looks at both social and cognitive aspects of writing. This model is helpful as it can be used to understand and improve what schools know, believe and do.
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The WWC model views the teaching of writing as a social activity. It suggests that writing and its teaching are shaped by the context and the abilities of the people involved. Schools and their writing classrooms include various people like: writers, teachers, collaborators, readers, consultants and mentors who all share common goals and use writing to achieve them. The WWC model has three main parts to it: the school, the cognitive abilities and resources of the teachers and pupils, and its operating principles.
Adapted from Graham, S. (2023). Writer (s)-Within-Community model of writing as a lens for studying the teaching of writing. In The Routledge International Handbook of Research on Writing (pp. 337-350). Routledge.
- The school: These are the key parts of a writerly school and how they interact.
- Cognitive abilities and resources: These are shown in the two green boxes on the right. They represent the abilities and resources of the teachers and their pupils. These invariably relate to each other in the writing classroom. For more on this, see our books The Science Of Teaching Primary Writing and How To Teach Writing.
- Operating principles: These are four principles that guide how well a writerly school functions.
The components of a writerly school
Classrooms use writing to achieve various goals. For example:
- Purpose: Seeing the value of writing (and being a writer) as essential [LINK].
- Audiences: Making writing throughout the year to share with a variety of people [LINK].
- Motivation: Wanting to write for intrinsic and extrinsic reasons [LINK].
- Identities: Encouraging students to be strong writers [LINK].
- Writerly norms: Emphasis on the processes and conventions of writing [LINK].
- Achievement: Setting and achieving product and process goals [LINK and LINK].
- Writing to learn. Writing to read more deeply: Writing as a way to learn more about a subject or text [LINK and LINK].
Members: Classrooms include teachers and students, each with different roles. Students are writers, collaborators, teachers and readers. Teachers are also writers, learners, readers, and instructors. Classrooms are led by teachers but children choose writing topics [LINK], publishing goals [LINK] and success criteria [LINK] for class writing projects. This gives them decision-making power.
Tools: Students use various tools for writing, such as paper, pens, mentor texts [LINK] and lesson posters [LINK].
Typical actions: Teachers teach writerly routines to manage their classrooms and teaching. This includes having:
- Excellent organisation and classroom management so the writing classroom runs in an orderly, cooperative and positive way [LINK].
- Reassuringly consistent routines for teaching class writing projects [LINK], individual writing lessons [LINK], delivering writing instruction [LINK], giving feedback [LINK] and peer review [LINK].
Written products: Classrooms produce various types of writing, including handwritten and digital compositions [LINK]. There is a clear progression for producing narratives [LINK], non-fiction [LINK] and poetry [LINK] across the school.
Physical context: Teachers organise their classrooms to make them as elegant and as useful as they possibly can for their young writers [LINK].
Social context: The social context of the writing classroom involves the relationships among its members, which can affect feelings of belonging [LINK]. Classrooms should feel like a community of writers working and learning together [LINK]. There should be a pleasant, orderly, joyful and supportive feeling in the air [LINK].
Evolving collective history: A writing classroom is shaped by the writing history of its members. Teachers should therefore think about progression, knowing where their pupils have come from and where they are going next in their writerly apprenticeship [LINK].
Social, cultural, institutional, political, and historical forces
External forces shape the nature of the writing classroom too. Schools should have strong writing policies [LINK]. Teachers should reflect on their own feelings towards writing [LINK] and their writing teaching [LINK and LINK]. Schools should also critically reflect on government and institutional initiatives to ensure that they actually align with best practice in writing teaching [LINK].
The effectiveness of a writing classroom depends on these various interconnected factors. As teachers learn more about writing teaching and their students, they should naturally adjust their teaching and make improvements. This is important. Teachers should adapt their teaching so that they can give their students what they need most [LINK].
The role of the writing teacher
The writing ability and thinking processes of a writing teacher are crucial to the quality of their writing classroom. A teacher’s skills, knowledge, and cognitive resources can shape or limit their teaching methods. Teachers play a central role in any classroom’s success. Their cognitive capabilities—such as their knowledge, beliefs, and personal writing processes—determine how effectively they set and achieve writing goals [LINK].
Writing teachers rely heavily on their long-term memory when teaching writing. They draw on the vast store of writerly knowledge and experiences they’ve accumulated over their careers to help them plan and conduct writing lessons effectively.
- Writerly knowledge: Teachers use their stored knowledge to establish sensible writing projects, create lesson plans and manage the classroom environment. This knowledge includes understanding their students’ needs [LINK], the most effective teaching methods [LINK] and their school’s writing policy [LINK].
- Self-regulation: Teachers also use their knowledge about themselves as writers to manage their own behaviours, emotions, and personality traits while teaching writing. For example, knowing how they feel when they write (and how they felt when they were at school learning to write) helps them teach writing better [LINK].
- Experience: Through repeated positive experiences, teachers gather a wealth of knowledge about teaching writing effectively. This includes how to teach writing skills [LINK], the progression of various forms [LINK], and its profound connections to reading [LINK]. They also learn about their strengths and weaknesses as writer-teachers.
- Beliefs: Teachers hold various beliefs that influence their teaching practices [LINK and LINK]. These beliefs affect how much effort they put into teaching writing, the tools and methods they use, the goals they set, and the classroom environment they create. For example, a teacher’s belief in the importance of writing can motivate them to devote more time and energy to teaching it.
- Modulators: Feelings like joy, anger, sadness, fear, excitement, and anxiety can impact a teacher’s actions and decisions as can their personality traits. For example, characteristics like openness to new experiences, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism influence how teachers behave and interact.
- Decision making: All this information helps teachers make informed decisions in their classrooms. This includes judgments about students’ progress [LINK], the effectiveness of different teaching methods [LINK], and how to address the writerly problems children are having as they arise [LINK].
Lesson study
Studying writing teachers and their methods can be done using a model like WWC. This model helps describe, explain, and predict what teachers do when they teach writing. Key components of a writing classroom to consider include:
- Writing goals: The specific objectives teachers set for class writing projects and individual lessons [LINK].
- Roles and responsibilities: The roles, identities, and authority that teachers and students have in the writing process [LINK].
- Tools: The resources and tools teachers use to achieve their writing goals.
- Written products: The quality of the writing produced by both pupils and teachers [LINK].
- Teaching methods: The typical actions and routines teachers establish and how successful these are [LINK].
- Environment: The physical and social management of the classroom [LINK and LINK].
- Interactions: How all these components interact with each other to create a successful writerly classroom experience.
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Overall, while teachers can access other resources like teaching materials [LINK] and peer advice [LINK], their decisions and actions are deeply influenced by the own individual knowledge and beliefs.