What’s the rush?

The race to finish a piece of work first leads to poor writing. To really improve children’s work, David Didau likes to slow things down...

If the story of the Hare and the Tortoise teaches us anything it’s that being quick can cause complacency – but winning the race is still the end goal. The Tortoise wins only because the Hare is a fool. But school isn’t a race; everyone finishes at the same time. So why is it that ‘finishing’ has become ingrained as a mark of success when there are no prizes for rushing. What of craftsmanship? What of excellence?

Anything of worth takes time. We may want our food fast and our furniture flat-packed, but we know these things are not the same quality as a lovingly prepared meal or a hand-crafted chair.

There are many areas of life where we recognise the need for patience and practice: we would never put on a play without rehearsing or turn up for an important sporting event without having practised. Yet for some reason schoolwork is not the same: once will do; good enough is good enough.

But what if we took the view that work was either excellent or unfinished? Children need to know that nothing of worth can be achieved in a single draft and that there are always improvements to be made.

The concept of Slow Writing came from recognising that children rush to complete their work and tend to focus on what, but not how to write. They default to the simplest, most commonly repeated ways of expressing an idea, and fail to consider how sentences might best be shaped and crafted. Experienced writers, though, have an implicit understanding that punctuation and vocabulary are tools to be employed to sometimes spectacular effect; we know that sentence structures must be varied in order to guide our readers’ response. But children are often unaware of these things and so fail to think of them.

Providing constraints, however, forces pupils to think creatively. Asking children to slow down and consider how to shape their ideas around explicit instructions makes them to think about how, not just what, to write. Useful constraints could be as simple as:

* You must use four long sentences (18-14 words) and two short sentences (seven words or fewer) in this piece of writing.

* You may not use ‘and’ or ‘but’ in this piece of writing (except at the beginning of a sentence!)

But if you’re looking for something more sophisticated, here’s how the technique I’ve come to call Slow Writing works.

Before beginning the process, I would make it clear that I am asking pupils to draft, not write: the obvious implication is they will be expected to re-draft. The first go will not be good enough. To make this less onerous, it’s useful to ask pupils to double space their work.

So, to slow down the writing process, we could issue instructions for each individual sentence:

* Your first sentence must be in the form of a question.

* Your second sentence must be exactly four words long.

* Your third sentence must begin with the word ‘Despite’.

* Your fourth sentence must be exactly 21 words long.

* Your fifth sentence must begin with a present participles (_ing)

And so on. As you can see, using these prompts not only necessitates some grammar teaching, but also makes grammatical knowledge accessible and exciting.

Children (and teachers) are often startled by the quality of the writing produced, but sometimes following the prompts results in something a bit forced or clunky, so I would always make pupils re-draft, this time with the freedom to break any of the rules that weren’t helpful. Most children really enjoy the challenge of following the instructions and crafting a truly excellent piece of work.

And then, when pupils have become sufficiently used to writing in this way, I would suggest offering them a selection of Slow Writing prompts and asking them to select their own. When they’re in the habit of doing this, remove the prompts altogether and ask pupils to come up with their own rules for each sentence. In this way, the habits of metacognition are brought to the fore and thinking about how, as well as what, to write becomes routine.

If you’d like to see how else you could use Slow Writing, please visit David Didau’s website (learningspy.co.uk) or pick up a copy of his new book, The Secret of Literacy: making the implicit explicit.

About the author

David is an associate of Independent Thinking, has run two English departments, and has been an assistant head with responsibility for teaching and learning.