Writing Matters: Literacy Symposium

What you'll get:

• Live symposium viewing on October 3rd (10am - 1.30pm)
• Live Q&A throughout moderated by the presenters
• Access to the full recording of the symposium for 30 days
• All symposium resources and slides 

Across the symposium we will explore:

1. Untangling Writing: The Simple View and the Writing Rope (Dr. Jen O'Sullivan)

This session examines what children need to become successful writers through the Simple View of Writing (Berninger et al., 2002) and the Writing Rope (Sedita, 2022). Together, these models illustrate how transcription, text generation, language and higher-level thinking work together during writing. We will explore how they can inform effective writing instruction.

2. Motivation Matters (Dr. Clara Fiorentini)

What inspires children to write? What helps them persist when writing becomes challenging? This session explores practical, evidence-informed approaches to nurturing motivation and engagement across the primary years. We will consider how choice, purpose, audience, feedback and a supportive writing community can help every child develop confidence, agency and a positive identity as a writer.

3. Syntax Matters (Dr. Dee O'Toole)

Sentence-level instruction is the foundation of strong writing, yet it’s often the most overlooked. This session explores why syntax deserves explicit attention at every class level, and how strategies from ‘The Writing Revolution’ can be adapted from junior infants through to senior classes. Walk away with practical, evidence-informed tools to strengthen your pupils’ sentence construction and, in turn, their overall writing.

4. Integration Matters

How can we use writing as a tool to support children's learning across the curriculum, rather than seeing it only as an end product in English? This session explores writing as a tool for thinking and learning. We will consider how purposeful writing can give children time to process new content, connect and integrate information, develop more complex ideas, and engage in critical thinking and problem solving, in line with the Primary Curriculum Framework. Through practical examples, we will examine how children can learn to write as historians, geographers and scientists, developing the disciplinary literacy needed to think, communicate and build knowledge within different subjects.