I’ve been playing around with using models (a.k.a. exemplars, anchor papers, etc.) for several years now, but more recently I have been using them quite regularly in classroom instruction time.
Here’s a recent example:
After a recent grade 9 unit on poetry, I wanted to give students a summative assessment that assessed their knowledge of poetic devices, reading comprehension, and Schaffer paragraph writing skills, but I wanted to do two of them — one as practice and one that counted.
For the first, practice test, I borrowed a poem and prompt from a past British Columbia Provincial Exam for grade 12 that asked the following:
In paragraph form and with reference to “The Quarter Horse Colts,” discuss how the use of poetic devices reflects the speaker’s attitude toward nature.
When I graded the tests, right away I noticed a difference between the strong ones and the weaker ones; the strong ones all had good or great topic sentences that answered the prompt. The weaker ones for the most part addressed the prompt partially or not all, making the rest of the paragraph fairly hard to write well.
I typed up several model topic sentences from the students’ own tests and placed them back to back. They were:
- The use of poetic devices in the poem makes the speaker seem observant and peaceful.
- In the poem “The Quarter Horse Colts,” the author uses two main poetic devices, imagery and simile, in order to convey her attitude toward nature.
- Huettl uses multiple poetic devices to show how much she enjoys nature.
- In the poem, the author uses a variety of literary devices to paint a picture in the reader’s mind.
I beamed up on the projector a paper with the prompt and the four model topic sentences. I told them that their first job when responding to any prompt is to figure out exactly what it’s asking and what must be answered. Together we acknowledged that there were three separate components of this prompt to answer:
- the use of poetic devices
- the speaker’s attitude
- toward nature.
I then asked students in their table groups to decide whether any of them were good topic sentences based on whether or not they answered all three of those components, and to rate them best to worst.
Right away, students saw that numbers 1 and 4 were the weakest, because they didn’t answer the prompt. There was some good debate over answers 2 and 3, and most agreed that 2 was the best, but that the best option of all would be a combination of 2 and 3, one that read:
In the poem “The Quarter Horse Colts,” the author uses two main poetic devices, imagery and simile, in order to convey her joyful, positive attitude toward nature.
Even better was when I asked what was the difference between a strong topic sentence and a weak one, and the students themselves volunteered comments like, “The first one isn’t specific enough,” and “Number 2 is much more detailed.” These are the kinds of comments I write ad nauseum on their papers but they never seem to be able to transfer that kind of understanding of the comment to the next assessment in order to do better.
To top it off, I shared a sample “excellent” paragraph with them and went through it piece by piece to see how it followed the Schaffer model.
I gave the exact same style of test a week later but with a different poem and prompt. Out of 29 ninth graders, 23 students raised their grade from the practice test to the graded test; two stayed the same, three went down by one point out of 20 and one went down by two points. The best part was that 12 students with Cs and Ds on the practice test went on to get Bs and As on the graded one.
Using models of high, average, and low quality and then asking students to grade or rank them and explain why is helpful in getting students to see the difference between being effective and being off the mark — something they don’t understand instinctively, even with feedback.
And if you worry you don’t have class time because there is too much else to do, don’t. The topic sentence workshop took all of 15 minutes of class time, and it saved me hours of grading and extra-help time, as students largely did much better on the final test.