24 participants, 1 Peta Freestone, dispensing tough love, 2.5 days to focus only on getting words down, 514 hours of writing in total, 20 pizzas, 32 ice creams, 48 bagels, 2 jars of pickles, innumerable cups of tea and coffee, 46 squishy blocks delightedly received: 23 green, 16 blue, 5 red, 2 gold, a breakthrough where a  previously un-noticed pattern emerged from the data, a realisation of how it all fits together, an almost finished first draft, a quietly muttered ‘I’ve got this’, 1 cemetery, no casualties, some tears, some stretching, 244 000 words written.

Now who wants to come to the next one...?

Over the last few weeks we have had two opportunities to share some of the resources around developing criticality that we have produced as part of our ongoing collaboration with teachers in a local secondary school - St Angela's Sixth Form - and a post-16 college - NewVic. We presented this work at the QMUL Language Centre's annual professional conference and also to a group of colleagues visiting from Haugaland and Skeisvang upper secondary schools in Norway, and De Duine school district in South Africa. In both cases there was plenty of discussion on what is meant by criticality in different contexts, and what we need to consider in order to develop students' ability to be critical as well as to nurture their critical dispositions. Please have a look through our presentation from the days and get in touch if you have any questions or comments.

One of the favorite maxims of Thinking Writing is ‘a small amount of writing for a large amount of thinking' - attributable to John Bean, I think. So I was very thrilled a few weeks back when student emails started coming into my inbox that demonstrated just that. The emails were from the Forum of the first year Shakespeare module I’ve been lurking in the background of this semester. Students had been on a trip to the Globe Theatre and were now preparing for a visit from a Shakespeare actor, part of which would be a Q and A.  A number of years ago the module leader, Warren Boutcher, first asked students to submit a possible question to the actor; now he is using the VLE (QMPlus) more fully. Students post their question (or rather set of linked questions) to the Forum; fellow students read and rank them to decide which should go forward to the actor; finally, the actor makes a choice of their favorite question- and this wins a £50 book token prize.

Louise Younie, a Clinical Senior Lecturer in Community-based Medical Education at Barts and the Royal London, runs a Journal Club for her colleagues, and Thinking Writing was asked to contribute. Louise writes:          

Draper’s Bar, last night of the teaching term and, in a sense, these final year students’ last day at Queen Mary – they are feeling nostalgic for the times they first frequented this place as first years. They’ve come tonight to launch their new website developed as a part of the final year Comparative Literature module, Constellations. The site, built in WordPress, contains anthologies curated by the students around themes of their choosing - and perhaps, on this evening, they notice a rather elegiac meta-theme emerging – Mortality, Pessimism , Endings…

The anthologies each consist of six texts (poems, prose, drama, film) commentaries and an editorial survey piece. The students have worked in groups, and the writing is both collaboratively and individually produced; it’s exciting to see it published and accessible to anyone. Do take a look and post a comment: www.clc.sllf.qmul.ac.uk

I spent two days last week running a retreat for PhD students, with a twist – in addition to the usual retreat goal of supporting PhD students in their writing, we had a new agenda, to train them as facilitators to help us run Thinking Writing retreats. Over the last three years our writing retreat program has grown from two staff and postgraduate student retreats each year to a range of retreats for retreats for staff, graduate students, undergraduates and local school teachers and students, usually one or two days in length. In 2011-2012 we ran over 15 retreats, and demand is continuing to grow.

Last summer Gabrielle Jones an English teacher and Programme Manager for Literacy and Learning at Leyton Sixth Form College brought 15 or so of her colleagues to Queen Mary for a day’s Writing Retreat. Last week she invited us to the College to see how she and others had adapted some if the ideas and incorporated them into their teaching. Teresa and I sat in on two A2 classes where students were revising for their exams in a couple of weeks and also talked with teachers over a sandwich lunch. In what was a really fascinating morning we picked up a number of shifts in the way writing was being used by teachers and students.  Before, writing was set as something to do after class; now it was much more regularly part of class activity; students were becoming used to finding a focus and writing for short bursts of time, usually of their own choosing: 10, minutes, or 20 or 30; they’d share their goals with a partner before writing, and afterwards discuss how they’d got on.