Murray Gadd

What an inspiring day with Murray Gadd. He makes everything sound so simple. I think I would be a great writer if he was my teacher and I think I would like writing. I will endeavour to teach in this way for my students. Some actions from today...
Buy lots more senior picture books as motivation for writing; change the planning format we are using as a team slightly to include whole class task and purpose, then for groups, learning intentions, success criteria and how to organise the lesson.
I really appreciated clarification on the classroom programme, teaching in groups and the task versus the learning goal. A fantastic learning day.

Teacher Inquiry

As part of our Writing PD we have been involved in a teacher inquiry looking at the modelling of writing. My inquiry was to use explicit modelling to enable my students to write compound sentences from shared planning. I have used shared planning in a more focused manner with my lower writers and they are becoming more confident at sharing ideas to add to our shared plan. They have also been referring back to the modelling and using the ideas in their writing. I have found that once a learning intention has been covered it is necessary to keep reminding the students to include this in all their writing and am thinking about a way I can make this more systematic. I am now using a differnt planning sheet where each group is planned for with a learning intention and explicit prompts recorded. I want to trial a new plan where the writing task is spelt out, separately from the actual writng group learning intention.