Brett Healey

Great news! Teaching Writers is now available for order online. Discover invaluable classroom insights from experts such as Bev Derewianka, Deb Myhill, Fisher & Frey, Helen Harper, Pauline Jones, Young & Ferguson, and more!
petaa.edu.au/w/Store/Item...

23.06.2025 07:05 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

You can get the ebook right now: petaa.edu.au/w/Store/Item...

28.05.2025 03:33 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

Thanks Ross. Your chapter contribution will be a popular one, with engaging ideas for motivating passionate and joyful young writers.

28.05.2025 03:24 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

Teaching Writers: From Apprentice to Expert will be available for pre-order in June.

Co-edited by Marie Quinn and me, the book is filled with research-driven strategies by many of Australia’s and then world’s experts on teaching young writers.

petaa.edu.au/w/Store/Item...

28.05.2025 01:53 — 👍 1    🔁 1    💬 2    📌 0

‘Let me see it through your eyes’: Teaching grammar‐for‐writing as imaginative embodiment Effective professional development (PD) in teaching writing involves supporting teachers' knowledge of the writer's craft, including their thinking processes, linguistic knowledge and practical strat...

My article ‘Teaching grammar-for-writing as imaginative embodiment’ is now available in Volume 59(2) of Literacy.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

08.05.2025 15:44 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

Improving narrative writing by teaching the linguistics of imagination - The Australian Journal of Language and Literacy Narrative authors use their imaginations to generate and select content for their writing. Narrative imagination is central to young writers’ agency over their choices. However, writing pedagogies hav...

You can find my article on teaching the link between imagination and grammar in Volume 48 of The Australian Journal of Language and Linguistics.

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

12.04.2025 06:00 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

If you are interested in learning how to teach these strategies, read the article for free here. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

29.03.2025 05:29 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

Narrative authors use their imaginations to generate and select content for their writing. Narrative imagination is central to young writers’ agency over their choices. However, writing pedagogies have become more formulaic, allowing little room for personal agency, while efforts to teach imagination have fallen by the wayside, regarded as vague, fanciful, and lacking in clear writing strategies. In response, a narrative writing pedagogy was designed around specific strategies linking imagination with linguistic choices (“imaginative strategies”), informed by cognitive stylistics and mental imagery. To investigate its impact on student writing, four year 5 teachers received training in the pedagogy before implementing it with 12 students in a 9-week narrative unit through individual writing conferences. A mixed-methods case study was conducted to explore changes in writing quality. According to pre- and post-test data, student writing improved significantly overall, especially regarding experience and meaning. To explain these improvements, a text analysis explored the change in one student’s writing over the course of the unit, coding linguistic features to imaginative strategies and interpreting their impact against experience and meaning. It was found that the writing progressively incorporated more of these features, resulting in greater narrative immersion. The findings have important implications on how teachers support students’ narrative thinking while allowing full scope for fostering student agency.

It appears that teaching specific imaginative strategies linked with narrative grammar concepts likely contributes to improving the overall experience, meaning, and reader response of students’ stories.

29.03.2025 05:29 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

Improving narrative writing by teaching the linguistics of imagination - The Australian Journal of Language and Literacy Narrative authors use their imaginations to generate and select content for their writing. Narrative imagination is central to young writers’ agency over their choices. However, writing pedagogies hav...

Just published. My latest article examines the impact of teaching imaginative thinking strategies on narrative writing quality. Open access in The Australian Journal of Language and Literacy. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

29.03.2025 05:29 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

Teaching an Embodied Thinking Process for Narrative Writing ‘With Grammar in Mind’: An Analysis of Writing Conferences and Teacher Talk The writing process method is applied by teachers intending to engage students in the types of processes writers go through recursively when creating a text, including planning, drafting, revising,...

My article outlining how teachers support grammatical choice-making by guide students through imagining and thinking about narratives. You can read it for free in Volume 64, Issue 2. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

01.03.2025 05:27 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

The essential conditions of writing workshop: Proposing a new conceptual model Writing workshop, as conceived by Donald Graves and other US researchers in the 1980s, positively transformed the writing instruction of many teachers. However, others experienced considerable challe...

New article from Douglas Kaufman that articulates the supporting conditions for successful writing workshop teaching.

This is an exciting beginning to what promises to open up much-needed ways forward for the writing workshop approach.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

02.01.2025 14:14 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

Crafting scenes | Writing & Pedagogy Effective narrative writers create immersive reader experiences through precise linguistic choices. Teachers can support effective linguistic choice-making in young writers through the process of imaginative embodiment, a method of narrative thinking framed by cognitive stylistics concepts and their embodied effects. In this article, I assess the effects of an imaginative embodiment pedagogy on fifth grade writers’ narratives by examining how their linguistic choices contribute to immersion. As part of the study, four Grade 5 teachers attended a training session on imaginative embodiment and applied the approach throughout a nine-week narrative writing unit with 12 students via one-on-one writing conferences. To study the effects of the approach, a linguistic analysis was conducted on student writing completed before and after the writing unit. The analysis was driven by a stylistic checklist that codes grammatical features to embodied effects, as well as an interpretive analysis of these features’ overall effectiveness on immersion. Findings suggested that students’ linguistic choices changed in response to learning the process of imaginative embodiment. Specifically, choices were characterized by their embodied effects, contributing to greater textual immersion. This suggests that teaching imaginative embodiment can improve writers’ narratives by affording them specific strategies for expressing meaning.

Teaching imaginative thinking for writing likely impacts the diversity and precision of children’s linguistic choices and the immersive qualities of their narratives.

Crafting Scenes available in Writing & Pedagogy. Let me know if you’d like a copy.

utppublishing.com/doi/10.1558/...

27.11.2024 15:03 — 👍 3    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0