The Process Writing Project

The Process Writing Project offers an opportunity for teachers to develop writing schemes that give pupils opportunities

• to explore and discover ideas and experiences as well as recording and transcribing them;
• to compose their texts in ways that reflect the complexity of the writing process;
• to use and develop their procedural knowledge of language in drafting and revising 
their texts.

In process approaches to teaching writing, composition consists of overlapping processes and sub-processes used recursively, including prewriting, drafting, revising and celebrating.

The key principle is that as far as possible writing starts with, follows and may contribute to the development of students’ own experiences and ideas.

Current methods for teaching writing, described by a DfE (2011) review of the NLS as ‘a widely-accepted model for the teaching of writing’, in which pupils analyse then emulate model texts supplied by the teacher, have taken a lot of the struggle out of writing.

Providing scaffolding such as models, writing frames, lists of features to be covered and ready-made plans has also taken significant elements of challenge out of writing tasks.

An approach that enables pupils to engage with compositional challenges without doing their thinking for them is the most effective way for them to secure mastery of the writing process, and is certain to be more productive than one where they follow prior guidelines set, directly or indirectly, by somebody else.

The Process Writing Project encourages the use of teaching approaches that emphasise longer-term learning. These are more likely to lead to improvements in students’ writing capabilities than those that focus on immediate outcomes.

For more detailed discussion, please refer to the following article:

Keen, J. (2017) Teaching the Writing Process, Changing English, 24(4), 372-385