ABSTRACT
This chapter explores different theoretical approaches on thinking about writing and about the teaching of writing and begins to situate you within the debates. It includes three stories of classroom writers and their writing which were collected in the course of recent work with PGCE student teachers and master's work with a Newly Qualified Teacher (NQT). In the 1970's and 1980's, James Britton argued that as teachers, we need to pay attention to the kind of writing that helps pupils to think, and to the stage of writing which is mainly a search for meaning that in its expression satisfies the writer. He called this 'Expressive Writing', which he characterised as writing that is close to the self, derived from speech. The chapter includes collaborative and inclusive approaches to working with rich literary texts, using drama, creative thinking about audience and a properly complicated view of genre that avoids reductive over-simplification but does scaffold early attempts with less familiar genres.
