One thing that always strikes me about successful schools is how precise they are. Everything is done in a very deliberate way.
Care and attention are given to choosing the exact right questions for a quiz at the start of a lesson, school policies and practices make sure that everyone is in class and ready to learn on time and each activity is designed with a clearly defined learning goal in mind. Nothing is left to chance.
One area where this makes a significant difference is in the approach taken to supporting students, especially with extended writing.
Extended writing
I can remember the frustration from my own school days of being asked to write an essay and not knowing where to start.
Other than a long piece of writing, I didn’t know what an essay was. I didn’t know what one was for. I hadn’t seen one being produced or been taught why they were produced in this way.
It isn’t uncommon to see pieces of extended writing being set as an activity at the end of a unit of work.
In geography, for example, students might have learned about different volcanic eruptions and their underlying physical processes, and then be asked to answer the question: “Why do some volcanic eruptions lead to higher death tolls than others?”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the variation in the quality of answers received is huge and often bears little relation to how much a student knows about the topic.
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Instead, it comes down to how well they are able to put together a coherent argument that builds towards a conclusion. But too often we skip this important stage: securing the procedural knowledge of how to write well.
Teachers will often inadvertently sidestep this stage, giving students some sort of supporting structure to write against. They might provide an essay plan, setting out what needs to go in each paragraph and/or some sentence starters to go with it.
However, these supports then need to be provided for each subsequent task as the underlying weakness hasn’t been addressed. The props become a permanent part of their schematic structure on how to write.
Instead, I would suggest using a systematic way to give and then fade out supports.
A stepped process
For the first term of a new course, such as at the beginning of a key stage, I would argue that we need to give much more support than we think we should.
Perhaps turning extended writing pieces into little more than missing word activities where the purpose is more for students to create a piece of writing that shows them what high-quality work looks like. This needs to be accompanied by an annotation explaining why it has been set out in the way that it has.
After several pieces of writing done like this, we start to fade out the supports. The next term might leave students having to include not only the key subject information but also some of the key connectives as well. Still supported by the annotation explaining what each part of the work is trying to achieve.
Then we might fade out further, and leave some sentence prompts and the annotation, before leaving students with just the annotation. By the next year, the annotation itself can be replaced with some reminders about what makes a good piece of work before even these are taken out.
The idea here is that we over-scaffold at the start until we are sure that students understand the principles of putting together a piece of writing in that particular subject, and then we remove the support in a systematic way.
The hope is that by doing this, we don’t get to the point that I know many schools currently are, approaching final exams with students still relying on sentence starters.
Mark Enser is an author and freelance writer
