Whole School Writing Improvement

Excellence in literacy at the forefront of the Education Strategies targets, to improve outcomes for every student in every classroom, regardless of their starting point. Although we have excellent results at BHHS, we are always looking for ways to make sure we are helping our students keep developing their skills.  

At BHHS, we are moving towards taking a Structured Literacy approach to teaching literacy, including a highly explicit and systematic teaching of all important components of literacy.  This includes foundational skills, such as decoding and spelling, as well as higher order literacy skills like reading comprehension and written expression. 

In 2023, our work on literacy improvement will focus on writing, and will begin within our English domain.  Writing is the formal process of ordering and communicating our thoughts, so improving writing is also a way of teaching valuable critical, logical, and creative thinking skills.  We will be trialling a whole school writing rubric, which will allow us to give students consistent and precise feedback on their writing skills and help students to set goals for their own writing improvement.  

Students may set goals to increase their use of sophisticated vocabulary, use more complex sentence structures, punctuate sentences accurately, or connect ideas in their writing and develop better cohesion in their paragraphs. 

Once students are confidently reflecting on their writing skills, setting goals and working with their teachers to progress their skill development, we will begin exploring how this work will continue in their other subjects too.  We know that your children need and use their literacy skills in every subject, and that every teacher can support and extend them in this process.   

Parents can support this work at home by doing the following: 

• encouraging journalling as a way for students to process their thoughts, and develop a regular writing routine 
• noticing and drawing your child’s attention to how different pieces of writing are either more or less formal, harder or easier to read, use vague or specific word choices etc.  
• encouraging your child to plan, draft and edit their writing.  Sometimes students underestimate the importance of each of these steps.  
• sharing any written work you complete as part of your job or life eg. letters, emails, reports, invoices/quotes etc. and explaining their audience and purpose 

Alongside this writing focus we are also investing in some new programs to support students in their classes.  We have recently purchased LanguageNut, an online platform of games and activities which supports students learning English, or who need additional support developing their vocabulary and grammar skills.  This program is currently being trialled in our EAL and intervention classes.  Early next term we will also begin trialling Spell IT, a structured approach to teaching spelling rules and patterns, in our junior classes. 

We are very excited by this opportunity to take an evidence-based approach to improving students’ literacy, and we look forward to sharing some examples of student work with you in upcoming newsletters.  

By Erin Gleeson

Assistant Principal

Literacy / MYLNS Specialist