The term ‘shared writing’ refers to any collaborative writing task. For example, a group of children may write a story together with or without the teacher’s help – on a white board, flip chart or on the computer.
The term is also used to refer to the classbased shared writing activity taking place in Literacy Time and intended to move children towards becoming independent writers. (This element of Literacy Time may focus on shared reading or shared writing.) Teachers draw on text, sentence and word level objectives. Shared writing gives the teacher an opportunity to model the writing process, for example by encouraging the children to rehearse sentences orally before committing them to the page. The children reread what has been written to ensure a flow from one sentence to another and to put right errors.
There can be valuable discussion on punctuation and on why one writing decision is better than another. As with any writing task, teacher and children need to be clear from the outset about to whom the writing is addressed and its purpose. The concept of ‘audience’ and ‘purpose’ was at the heart of the work of Jimmy Britton and his colleagues on The Schools Council Writing Projects of the 1970s. An issue for teachers is how to make shared writing tasks more than exercises, the ‘dummy runs’ Britton refers to. One way is to draw on work which has engaged and interested the children in other lessons to give real purpose to Literacy Time tasks. The children writing about Cocoa the Bear felt great committment to their work (see Class Writing Project).
Britton, James (1970) Language and Learning London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press.
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