Brett Healey
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Brett Healey
@bhealey.bsky.social
48 followers 31 following 12 posts
Teacher, Literacy Specialist, Writing Researcher, PhD in Education
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bhealey.bsky.social
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...
June 23, 2025 at 7:05 AM
bhealey.bsky.social
You can get the ebook right now: petaa.edu.au/w/Store/Item...
May 28, 2025 at 3:33 AM
bhealey.bsky.social
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...
May 28, 2025 at 1:53 AM
bhealey.bsky.social
If you are interested in learning how to teach these strategies, read the article for free here. link.springer.com/article/10.1...
March 29, 2025 at 5:29 AM
bhealey.bsky.social
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.
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.
March 29, 2025 at 5:29 AM