Writing at Days Lane
Writing Assessment Frameworks
Talk For Writing
At Days Lane, our aim is that all children love English and are excited to read, write and express themselves. In order to achieve this, we follow Talk for Writing (TFW) as a whole school, a cumulative and systematic process for the teaching of English.
Talk for Writing fundamentally teaches children how to be writers – not just how to write. It supports children to be able to generate ideas, draw upon their reading and writing confidently for a variety of audiences and purposes. The methodology follows a three-tier pattern: Imitation, Innovation and Independent Application. During the imitation stage, children get to know a text really well by orally learning it, exploring it through drama and then reading it for vocabulary, comprehension and writer tools. The Innovation stage is grounded in the processes of shared writing, with a strong and systematic focus on securing the basics of handwriting, phonics/spelling and grammar in relation to what is needed for the text type being taught. The final stage, Independent Application, promotes children to draft, edit and publish their own independent versions.
Below is an example of how children use story maps and oracy to develop their vocabulary, understanding of structural techniques and a range of other writing skills.
Click on the link to listen to Year 5 orally retelling of 'The caravan': https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-T26RnFOvrJIE_f_PRcJ2XwNX13Smp_J/view?usp=sharing
Writing Assessment
Each unit of work starts with a cold task (pre-assessment) and ends with a hot task, so that children's progress can be tracked over the course of their learning journey. Examples of cold and hot tasks can be found below:
Comparative Judgement
Days Lane participate in Comparative Judgement assessments throughout the year. Teachers assess children’s writing outcomes (national samples of the same writing task), which are presented side by side on screen. Teacher will then make a series of judgements for a number of students’ work.
To increase the reliability of judgements, a range of colleagues make judgements about the same set of work and an algorithm then brings together all the judgements to provide a rank of all the students’ work. A scaled score and writing age is also generated, which can be measured against the national average (see example results below).
Days Lane use this approach as a starting point to analyse writing strengths and developmental areas within year groups, across the school and across our Challenge Partners ‘Link to Learn’ hub.
Half term moderation sessions take place within our ‘Link to Learn’ hub, which consists of three schools (Days Lane, Burnt Ash and Oaklands Primary School). Year groups complete pre-moderation activities before engaging in quality professional dialogue and assessment during their moderations sessions (see moderation expectation document below).
For further information regarding Comparative Judgement, please click on the link below:
Borough Moderation
Our Year 2 & 6 cohrts were chosen as part of the local authority's sample of schools to moderate in the summer term (2022). Samples of children's writing were selected and the moderators quality assured teachers' assessment judgements. I am please to say that all of the teacher assessments were validated by the borough moderators and summaries of the moderations can be found below: