Our Te Mata School writing goals, learning pathway, provides clarity about what learners need to achieve at each level of the curriculum.  

If we want our learners to be empowered and take ownership, we need to provide them with explicit support and teaching. Learning does not happen by chance. As a school, we have developed a writing pathway with goals and this is being embedded across our school in different ways. Teachers are iterating, adapting and making changes to how they explicitly teach writing in classrooms as a result of this pathway.  

• Junior School: Yellow flipouts in the books show the goals that each learner is working on (the team started in Term 1, 2024). 

• Middle & Senior School: Goals are glued in or written in to show what the learner is focusing on, linked to writing in the moment (Both teams started in Term 2, 2024).  

Our intent is for all learners, across the school, to have ‘goals sheets’ glued into the front or the backs of their writing books. As they achieve goals these will be highlighted and dated to show progression. 

Explicit teaching in action!

Students refer to goals sheets to help them understand their learning pathway.  

When you walk into a classroom at the beginning of a writing lesson you will hear lots of discussion about topics and or goals that are being focused on. Oral language and handwriting goals are an important part of our writing pathway. Our writing pathway is based on current evidence and research.  

• The Simple View of Writing 

• The Writing Rope

• The Writing Revolution 

• Science of Reading & Writing 

• The Syntax Project 

• Published work by: Helen Walls (The Writing Teacher & Christine Braid)

• The New Zealand Curriculum 

• e-asTTle Writing Rubrics 

• Literacy advisors

As a learning community we identified that we would like to build a culture of learning and assessment capability across our school. Our intent is for learners to be able to share what they are doing with growing confidence. As a result, learners are beginning to monitor their own learning, referring to their goals, their ‘what’ as they write. The inclusion of success criteria or extra elaboration linked to tasks allows learners to understand the ‘how’ linked to their writing/goals.

Teachers give students feedback linked to their writing goals.

So, what does this look like in our classrooms? How do our students feel about writing? 

When you ask students what they are doing during a writing lesson you may hear them saying:   

• We are learning about paragraphs and we are learning what we need in paragraphs, why they are in stories.  

• We are learning about topic sentences, having them at the start of a paragraph. And using exciting words instead of boring words (subject specific vocabulary).

• We are learning the ‘who and the do’ and we are using the ‘who and the do’ in the sentences.  We have to sit at tables for our writing, and sitting at the table makes our writing nice and neat.  Writing is a quiet time. 

• We are writing about penguins and how to write a paragraph about them.  

• Writing in books and devices. Depending on your writing goal you get to write in a book or on your device. 

When you ask students to tell you more about their writing goals they may say: 

• If our writing goal is highlighted it means we have finished that. We are working on the ones that are not highlighted.  

• We are using a multi-paragraph planner to include an introduction and a conclusion. We are working on appositives. 

• We are learning about conjunctions: because, so and but, and about common nouns too. 

• We are learning about how to include an Introduction, using a multi-paragraph planner. How to combine sentences to create an elaborate subject.  

• We all have different goals in our books that we are working on. 

• We have our own yellow flipouts and we have to use what is on it (the goal). People have different ones. (Junior School) 

• In the back of our book we have goals that we are learning about.  

When you ask students to tell you more what makes writing more enjoyable they may say: 

• Describing stuff, using cool words to describe a noun.

• I like that you can make sentences sound interesting.  

• Learning how to spell new things. Having lots of things to do, to write about. Writing about me, my weekend or my favourite things.  

• It is creative and you can let out your thoughts.

• Getting to publish a piece, it is fun to type.

• When your teachers give you a cool subject to write about e.g. information reports.  

Students write in books and use their devices to assist them as needed. Our Senior School Students write on their devices also.

Article added: Wednesday 26 June 2024