How to Get Children to Edit their Work and Put Feedback into Practice
Getting children to rewrite their work is a hard sell, but perhaps there’s another way to help them put feedback into practice, suggests James Clements…
Learning to write is a tricky business. Crafting a great piece of writing means juggling many different elements: an awareness of audience and purpose; marshalling your ideas; structuring those ideas across a text; arranging the right words and phrases to communicate what you want to say clearly; and that’s before punctuation, spelling and handwriting are thrown into the mix. Is it any wonder that children don’t get everything right first time round?
In theory, the way to help children develop as writers is simple. After some input, they produce a draft piece of writing. Then we give them some feedback (possibly oral, possibly written) about how to improve their work.
At this point they have the chance to act on our advice, either by editing or redrafting. Certainly this is the theory behind the plan-draft-evaluate-redraft writing process championed by the 2014 National Curriculum.
However, anyone who ever met a child will know that real life can be decidedly trickier than the theory. It is a universal truth of primary education that when it comes to teaching writing, encouraging children to redraft their work can be a hard sell.
For every child keen to make changes to their piece of writing, they’ll be another who will pipe up with the incredulous “But, I’ve finished” or “I’ve looked at it and there are no mistakes”.
For every child who works hard to hone their writing like a craftsman, there’s another who will make changes, but ones that actually make their writing worse.
One way to help children learn to act on feedback is to give them a very similar writing task to the one they have just done, rather than ask them to edit or redraft. This gives them the chance to demonstrate what they’ve learnt from feedback, without having to rewrite the same piece again. Here’s how this might work in practice.
How it works with letters
Class 6M are studying The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane. In order to show their understanding of the story and to practise writing in character, they are asked to write a letter from the protagonist Henry Fleming back to his mother at home, describing his experiences fighting in the American War of Independence.
Once the children have finished, several of their letters are projected onto the whiteboard and the class works together to consider how they might be improved and developed. The children are given an opportunity to edit their work based on the lesson, before their writing is collected in for detailed written feedback from the teacher.
Next, the children could redraft their letter in the light of the marking, but following the ‘write-reflect-write another model’, children are then given the choice of writing a new letter from Henry set later in the story, or from another soldier to their family back home.
This gives pupils the opportunity to use feedback from the first letter writing session to inform their next piece. Everyone in 6M is given something to work on. Ali’s target is to use more descriptive language to try and paint a vivid picture of the battles.
Sam is asked to vary the sentence structure across the piece so that each sentence doesn’t begin with ‘and then’. The children are free to reuse the best parts of their first letter, but they must meet their given target.
Correspondence, whether formal letters, emails, notes or messages, can give children a great context for writing several similar pieces in quick succession.
For example, children might write a letter from one character to another and then write a reply or two letters with a similar purpose (complaining about graffiti and litter, for example) for a similar audience (to the town council or the local MP, perhaps).
Why diaries work well
Niamh and her Y1 classmates have been reading This is Not My Hat by Jon Klassen. After reading the story together, talking about it and acting it out, they are going to write a diary entry for the big fish who has his hat stolen. Pictures from the book are displayed around the classroom to remind them of the story.
Niamh writes a wonderfully detailed diary page, but she struggles to stay in the first person as she writes, drifting to the third-person narrator that is more common in story writing.
Her diary begins with ‘I woke up and my hat was gone’, but soon she is writing about what happened to the fish (‘then he went to look for it’). Her teacher sits with her and helps her to see the difference between these two voices.
Then Niamh has some time to write a page of another character’s diary, the eyewitness crab, explaining what he saw. Her focus is to write in the first-person as if she is the crab. She manages this brilliantly and is very proud when she is chosen to read her diary entry out to the class.
Diaries can be an excellent stimulus for children’s writing – either a personal diary based on real events, or one like Niamh’s, written in character, with another diary entry following along and providing an opportunity to address any misconceptions straightaway.
We should still redraft
Of course, it may be that sometimes redrafting the original piece of writing, rather than writing another similar piece, is exactly what is needed.
It might be that the redrafting process itself is the learning focus: learning to work on a piece of writing, crafting it so it communicates exactly what we want to say is a skill that is worth developing.
Or it might be that the original piece didn’t do what it was intended to do or perhaps the feedback is very specific to that piece.
Redrafting is still an important skill, and ‘write-reflect-write another’ shouldn’t simply replace it. Instead, it gives another opportunity for children to act on advice.
Clear feedback, delivered at the right point in the writing process, and then the chance to act on it can be one of the most effective ways of helping children to develop as writers.
If we can organise the teaching of writing so that children are given the chance to immerse themselves in a particular type of writing and the feedback they receive be focused on clear ways they can improve, we have the chance to help children become better writers.
