On Wednesday 27th January St. Luke’s Young Researchers went to London to the Institute of Education. We went there to present our data to the university researchers. When we first came in, we had a sandwich and juice feast. Jonathan explained the agenda and our main focus- improving writing progress – to the IOE researchers, Chris and Sarah. We showed our findings and themes to them and then we clarified them. Our themes were:

Pairs

Progress

Planning

Pace

Talking the text

Children’s choice

Handwriting and spelling

Free writing

Jonathan and Kay presented us with the changes the teachers were exploring. We then compared them with our findings and saw where they matched. We could see that we agreed on two important areas – choice and planning/pace. We then devised three questions to research:

Will learning with others make a difference to children’s progress in writing?

Will having more choice help us make more progress in writing?

If we spend more days writing, will we make more progress?