Podcasts

The SecEd Podcast: Closing the writing gap

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

Alex Quigley is a former teacher who now works at national content manager at the Education Endowment Foundation supporting teachers to access research evidence. He is the author of numerous books for teachers including the Closing the Vocabulary Gap, Closing the Reading Gap and most recently, Closing the Writing Gap (all from Routledge). Find Alex @AlexJQuigley or via www.theconfidentteacher.com. This episode is hosted by SecEd editor Pete Henshaw.

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