Working towards a shared understanding of Writing micro goals, PLD 8th April 2025

We are all in the process of experimenting with using small, personalised writing goals for our students, which we are calling micro goals. In coming to grips with this approach, it is clear that we have some 'working through' to do of how this will look in our different spaces, with children working at different stages with their Writing.

Our conversation today was aimed at moving closer to a shared understanding of what we mean by a micro goal, and also what the implications of this approach are for our lesson planning and - especially - feedback to students.

Helen Walls' How to Teach Writing, Spelling and Grammar provides a model of how to develop and use small, personalised goals to move children forward in their Writing. Helen Walls recommends asking: 'What is next small step that will make the writing more readable, or the process more manageable, for this student?' (How to Teach Writing, Spelling and Grammar, p. 58).

Walls also champions 'Fast Feedback': spending a 30 seconds conferencing with each child during the writing process as a means to keep these goals in sharp focus. 

(ibid, p. 59)

She also recommends a sticker chart or similar at the back of a child's book to capture the goal and record successes. The approach we are using, based on what has been working well in Autahi for the last year or so, is to use pictorial or other notation to record the goal at the top of the next day's writing page. Then, as children come to write, their personal goal is waiting for them on the page.

In this way, we have a daily opportunity to feed back directly to each student. We can praise content, language and creativity. We can notice efforts toward meeting their personal goal. We can also ask them to fix up mistakes in real time. Marking goes on during the lesson, in conversation with the writer.

Designing appropriate micro goals for our students

Micro goal skills need to be modelled each time we write. They will also need to be explicitly taught. We may choose to use needs-based workshops to do this. However, it is vital that we also maintain plenty of opportunities in our programme for children to have lofty goals for content, purpose, language features and creative exploration. These provide contexts for Writing and stimulating opportunities to work on our goals. Working with clear personal goals helps to control the cognitive load in play (we're not expecting our students to work on too many things at the same time) and offer opportunities to experience success.

Things to bear in mind:

• A micro goal is not the same as the learning intention for your writing lesson. It is on-going and relates to an individual’s own writing development journey. (Our lesson learning intentions can be lofty and may take a long time to master: micro goals are small, incremental improvements.)

• Micro goals relate to curriculum expectations. Transcription will be the major focus for at least years 0 to 3.

• A micro goal is personalised. Ask yourself: what is the next small step that is going to help this writer the most?

• Micro goals are about cumulatively building skills: if you’ve mastered adding finger spaces to your writing, it stays in your writing skills kete forever, with more skills added alongside.

• Students must be able to say what their own micro goal is.

• When you conference with a student, the spotlight is on their micro goal.

We experimented with using the curriculum to design some goals that could be used for our students.

What will micro goals look like for your students?

Choose a skill set from the curriculum (e.g. Transcription Skills, Composition). 

For each year group in your space: use the NZ English Curriculum and  Helen Walls’ examples as a resource to help you design 3+ possible micro goals for this skill set. (This won’t be an exhaustive list, but this is about finding an appropriate challenge level.)

A useful question to keep in mind as you do so is: what are the ingredients for ‘a good sentence’ at this level? 

Some students will be working above or below these levels, in which case we can draw micro goals from appropriate alternative levels to move them forward.

For example:

More goals can be found here.

Some next steps:

• We can add to our bank of goals. We are also evolving some symbols that we can all use to capture goals on the page.
• Our upcoming peer observations will focus on using micro goals and will be a good opportunity to share practice.
• We have questions around how to manage Writing in this way with many different writing levels and specific learning needs in play in our classrooms. Workshops, different styles of groupings, peer support/writing circles have all been suggested. It's clear that we probably all need a mixed menu of Writing lessons of different kinds going on during the week. 
• We have juicy questions about how our focus on transcription skills is reflected in how our students write in other contexts such as during Inquiry, note-taking, diagrams etc. 
• It will be useful to check in how we are all doing with this in two or three weeks.