No matter what subject you teach, student performance improves if students can write effectively. But so many of the daily writing problems we as teachers encounter show there are still significant barriers to achieving this. Recognise any of these?
Common Writing Problems
- Your students ask you how to use a semi-colon—but you’re their geography teacher.
- All your media studies students reel off one long PEEL paragraph as their response in a Conventions of Genre internal exam. But the PEEL paragraph doesn’t allow for deeper cognitive analysis of a topic, so it’s hard to award any of them a top grade.
- Like some of the 8,379 students in a recent poll by the South Australia Commissioner for Children and Young People, your students say they’re struggling with how to express their ideas in writing and have asked for lessons to be more engaging. But you don’t know where to start, and you’ve run out of chocolate.
- There’s pressure on you to prepare for NAPLAN, but writing quality and student scores aren’t improving. Your Year 9’s still write monotonous simple sentences which neither persuade nor emote.
- Your department is required to embed disciplinary literacy into its curriculum—but how?
If any of this sounds familiar, you owe yourself a place at one of our conferences or events. You’ll learn practical examples to overcome all these common problems and more. Not sure what PD is right for you? Get in touch below.