School’s changes improve kids’ writing

Traditionally, New Zealand has struggled to teach writing, one principal says, but his school is making a change.

Jonathan Treadway of Northcross Intermediate said, in comparison to maths and reading, writing has fallen behind because marking it is subjective.

‘‘As a school and as a country we have struggled with our students in writing … As a leader of the school, that was concerning,’’ Treadway said.

So the school has employed a new way of teaching writing and seen achievement rise.

The school’s head of literacy, Jane Edington, said, when she first started at the school three years ago, the first thing she did was approach the high schools in the area and ask what the school was and wasn’t doing well.

The schools told Edington all the students needed was to be able to write an essay and ‘‘decent narrative’’ and most students were struggling with basic sentence structure and paragraphs.

In term two of 2016, the school implemented Write That Essay, a new way of teaching developed by Dr Ian Hunter for university and high school students.

Edington said Northcross was the first intermediate to use the method which focused on teaching the basics, and they saw results within the same day.

‘‘Straightaway they [students] perked up … They would be saying things like ‘why didn’t someone tell me that years ago?’’’

But there was one issue - the posters and resources were for high schoolers, so the school ran a competition asking students to write sentences for the posters which will be used internationally. Hunter taught the teachers to write first, so they could provide a model for the students, said Edington.

‘‘It’s fair to say, if you take any staff and ask which is the one you struggle with or want more help in, I’d say seven out of 10 would say it’s the writing,’’ she said,

‘‘We teach them [students] the building blocks. That was what we weren’t really doing before.’’

Treadway said he hoped high schools would see the change.

‘‘The schools will be able to say they are coming through wellprepared and able to write.’’

Using the John Hattie method, which measures writing capability by something called effect size, students jumped two year levels in eight months. The method says 0.40 is a good year’s growth, Northcross Intermediate grew by 0.8 effect size.

Northcross Intermediate students Stella Drinkwater and Stirling Bennett with teacher Jane Edington.