The SecEd Podcast: Closing the writing gap

In this episode, Alex Quigley offers tips and ideas for the explicit teaching of writing skills in the secondary classroom.

Drawing on his book, Closing the Writing Gap, Alex explains how secondary teachers of all subjects can improve their students’ writing skills – and why this is important.

We discuss general principles, the Simple View of Writing, explicitly teaching and modelling the stages of writing, using talk and rhetoric, disciplinary literacy, teaching grammar, sentence composition, handwriting, and spelling.

Alex offers us some easy exercises/techniques including tips for improving sentence construction, editing-revising-rewriting, checking work back, vocabulary, and more.