How can a secondary teacher improve GCSE and A-level outcomes? To me, for most subjects, the answer is clear: effective writing instruction.

Some may raise their eyebrows: students, of course, write in lessons every day. But I’m talking, specifically, about teaching students to produce high-quality academic writing, a practice that I believe is missing from many classrooms.  

At the beginning of my teaching career, I noticed that across all levels of attainment, students’ oral skills outweighed their writing ones. When I asked other humanities teachers, they said they had found the same.

Often, pupils would find essay techniques difficult to master, despite the hours I put into trying to improve it.

I’d make checklists of the component parts of an A* paragraph, I wrote my own essays and gave them out to students as exemplar examples. But results didn’t improve.  

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When looking for an evidence-based solution, I realised I focused too much on what good writing entailed, rather than explaining how to improve. It’s the latter that is at the heart of effective writing instruction.

To transform my practice, I looked through the education research and distilled what I found into different activities that evidence showed would develop writing skills. Although these activities are very specific, there are seven overarching principles that I believe are crucial to success.

Effective writing instruction: the seven key principles 

The first is that the more frequently pupils write, the more likely they are to improve. This sounds obvious, but, traditionally in humanities, we teach a topic and ask students to complete an essay at the end.

However, extended writing needs to be part of the learning process, not just the outcome: it should be built into lessons and homework. 

The second is that teachers need to guide writing practice for as long as possible: you need to scaffold a lot at the beginning, before gradually encouraging independent work. Often, I think that teachers think they need to prioritise either writing practice or knowledge recall. That’s not the case, they can - and should - happen concurrently; that’s the third principle.

The fourth principle is about group work: while some activities will require students to work alone, their writing skills can also benefit from writing in small groups. And while we don’t want to simply show students what excellent writing looks like, teacher modelling does have a place in effective writing instruction - this is the fifth principle. Take the time to produce a model paragraph to share: if pupils perceive you to be the expert, they’re more likely to take your advice seriously.

The sixth principle is around feedback: here we should be abiding by Dylan Wiliam’s maxim that “feedback should be more work for the recipient than for the donor”. Traditionally, students are given a mark and a comment. Instead, annotate the essay with questions, and get them to redraft the sections that need improvement before providing a mark. 

The last principle is all about self-reflection: students need to monitor their own development. After their first piece of writing, they should set goals for improvement, and reflect on those goals with every piece of writing they do in the future.

This may be a bit daunting. To begin with, I’d recommend any teacher to set a writing task and audit the class to find out what the common and individual weaknesses are. From here, you can choose activities that will address those gaps. There’s no point going over the things that they can already do well. Make sure you constantly evaluate this and adjust the activities as the skills develop: you should always focus on the things they find tough.  

How to embed writing instruction in your classroom

I have a huge number of activities that I deploy, but the following are ones that I’ve found really useful, and easily replicable.

“Judgement Jenga” is the first and it’s great for isolated skills practice. Often students have a well-argued and detailed essay but sit on the fence when it comes to their conclusions. This activity helps them to produce evaluations that pick holes in the weaker lines of argument, without destroying the essay completely.

So, in practice, I give them two one-sided arguments relating to a topic covered recently, and then, in pairs or threes, they build an evaluation that acknowledges the validity of the first argument, while also asserting the merits of the second.  

Another activity is around modelling, and it’s called “Mark my Words”. With this, I give students a piece of writing I’ve done personally - it should be a piece that has mistakes - and ask them to mark it using the assessment criteria. Where they find knowledge or skills errors, ask them how they’d then rectify them.

So what’s been the impact of all of this work? Well, personally, I’ve seen a huge improvement in students’ academic writing. A few years ago, when I wasn’t teaching it so directly, students saw exam technique as a big module at the end of the year, just before exams. But breaking it down into discrete components, and scattering the teaching throughout the year, really has an impact.  

Students are encouraged to reflect quite deeply on their own work: they spend a lot of time redrafting their answers; they learn from their mistakes and build on their writing skills in every lesson. They are much more aware of their own strengths and weaknesses as writers and, fundamentally, that awareness means they’re able to work on the things that they find most difficult.

It’s been difficult to assess the statistical outcomes: I’ve been doing writing instruction for around four years, and I’m sure that in that time, I’ve become better at delivering the activities. But in quantitative terms, I’ve definitely seen an improvement. My colleagues have noticed a real difference in the quality of the writing produced, and writing has improved at a much earlier stage of the course, in comparison to other years.

Robin Hardman was talking to Kate Parker, schools and colleges content producer at Tes. He is the head of politics at a school in south-west London and is the author of The Writing Game: 50 evidence-informed writing activities for GCSE and A level