On Exemplars..

In the beginning (of my teaching career*) there were pre-written exemplars and they were, and still can be, a helpful way of giving students model answers to help develop their learning. However, what I didn’t initially understand was that just giving students an example to stick into their exercise books wasn’t ever going to be enough to help them improve. After (or sometimes before) they’d tackled a piece of writing or analysis, I’d painstakingly construct model paragraphs and essays for them to refer to that hit the success criteria. The problem was, that I didn’t do much else with my exemplars, other than explain why they were good examples before moving on. I’d then get frustrated when their subsequent work didn’t reflect the skills used in the exemplar – after all they had a great example to look back on, why weren’t they using it to improve?

A bit further down the line I realised, from discussions and observations with colleagues, that both myself and my students needed to get much more active in the process. These pre-written exemplars were good at showing students what to do to improve, but not how to improve. So, we began on the how. We discussed and then annotated exemplars with what was good about them and why, linking discussions to the success criteria; we discussed and deconstructed less successful exemplars and explored what we needed to do to improve them; we discussed and shared each other’s work more, so we were exposed to a variety of different approaches; we discussed our redrafted and reworked writing and what we could do to make it even better.

Hopefully, you’ve noticed that the common element in my change of approach, and lightbulb moment, was (and still is) using exemplars to generate a discussion and a verbal articulation of how to meet the success criteria and improve. Since starting my metacognition research, I don’t use pre-written exemplars as much. This isn’t because I don’t value them, but because I’ve found that live modelling examples (where I write them in real time) is a more effective way of explicitly explaining my thought processes. In my experience, this really helps students to understand how and why I’m shaping my answers to meet the criteria and improve. I am still providing lots of exemplars, it’s just that I now use them more as part of a metacognitive process, where the thinking about how and why we are learning is just as important as what we are learning.

*This was a time when using an OHP to annotate during a lesson was, to me at least, working at the cutting edge of technology and the rumble of the wheel-in TV advancing down the corridor generated giddy levels of excited anticipation.