Thread by @ClareRees3

I marked 500 GCSE Paper 1s this year. It was a genuine joy. Here’s what I learned from the creative writing section @Team_English1:

1.Loved the planning structures (see below for the best). It still encouraged some students to attempt writing an entire novel though….

2.Pre-writing is key. None of the top students I saw were writing their piece for the first time. I had a few students (!) insert the Lit quotes into their work. Planning beautiful quotes about the weather/ landscape/characters is a good use of class time.

3.‘Fan fiction’ is fine. Some schools are formally teaching these in a sense- with twisted fairy tales, or different slants on traditional stories. I recognised Heartstopper-inspired stories, Expanse-inspired, and also Mark Lawrence fantasy (same character names). These worked.

4.Story formula. Some students had pre-prepared scenarios which they inserted into anything. Twisted worked very well: a psycho keeping people prisoner appeared in at least ten I marked; descriptions of walking through strange worlds- beach, desert or moonlit garden. Great!

5.Pre-prepared characters. Some students had clearly prepared a character in advance who they inserted into any story.
6.Anaphora. Key lines repeated- perhaps as standalone paragraphs. Leads nicely into this same line as a twisted ending. Quotes from the Lit paper were used too.

7.Who is the narrator? Describing the picture from an unusual perspective was a great, and fairly easy, technique (a tea cup, a dog, God, an alien etc.).
8.Using the Section A extract as inspiration or a model. A number of students did this, and it worked.

9.WARNING: there are ‘teacher youtubers’ teaching this. I had around 30 students write me a story about a priest dying then waking up and walking through heaven. Not a classic Year 11 concept. They did well- but it’s a red flag that they’re using somebody else’s concept.

10.Similarly, don’t teach an entire class the same opening. When you get a whole batch through using the same sentences, it’s a red flag that they’re not very able.

11.But mainly, the teaching was AWESOME. I can’t believe how good both the students’ writing, and the teaching of it has been under the difficult circumstances of the past few years.