Getting students to write blighted me for many years. That may sound obvious, as I was an English teacher, but it was also the same in drama, media studies and film. When I taught religious studies for a brief period, I had the same issue.
Many of my pupils had the transcription skills they needed to go through the mechanical process of writing. Equally, they could provide short responses to help determine that they had all of the pieces to create a longer piece when we had broken it down, and they could talk to me about their ideas. I’d give them prompts and sentence starters with some success.
I’d PEEd (point, evidence, explain) and PEALd (point, evidence, analyse, link) until the cows came home. I’d checked my explanations from as many angles as I could find and broke down example answer after example answer, and yet still I found them struggling. Where was I going wrong?
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The answer finally came when I began to explore live modelling. Live modelling is different from examples or exemplars that you talk through or break down, as it reveals the construction process in action.
Coupling this with metacognitive talk about my subject (why I was writing what I was in response to the question), I realised I had found the bridge I needed between pupils’ thinking and pupils’ writing. With my other attempts, knowledge sat over to one side of their thinking and the written response on the other. The idea of turning this into an abstract essay or narrative had been too nebulous.
Live modelling made this a more concrete process and my pupils gradually gained confidence. Over time, they needed fewer examples of this. However, if we started working on something more complex or if the context had changed, I found that some still needed to see this step.
I began this process by typing live on PowerPoint or via a series of flipcharts, but eventually my visualiser became invaluable to me to make the process as speedy and accessible as possible.
Here are some of my top tips to make best use of the live modelling tool:
1. Plan for it
It doesn’t matter if you wrote this model the day before or borrowed it from elsewhere. A prepared piece can give you confidence when starting out and juggling the useful elements of classroom management.
But don’t just give it to the pupils as a completed piece. Instead replicate the thinking and writing process as it emerges, using it as an opportunity to make your disciplinary thinking explicit. Pause to reflect on the difficult elements to show them how this works and check for their understanding as you go.
2. Start small
Sometimes modelling a sentence, a few different sentences or a paragraph can be powerful and builds the habit of what you want pupils to do. I am not a fan of pupils writing it down as I go, although some may be able to, as it splits their attention between listening to and thinking about what I am doing, when they are also checking how it is presented on their page.
My preference is to go through all or part of the process, then pause if I want them to write it down, or simply take a picture of the image so we can go back to it later.
3. Focus on the most challenging parts
Often, we spend a lot of time on openings, but maybe they need to work on embedding a quotation into a response, or developing an argument or shifting the focus in their creative writing. Spending time making this as visible as possible is important if we want them to really understand what we are asking them to do at those tricky moments.
Live modelling worked well for me in English, but we don’t need to confine it only to writing. Live modelling can work anywhere that students may need help to make an abstract idea more concrete. Maths often does this well with worked examples. In geography, graphs and representations of data can be made more visible with a deft piece of teacher modelling.
But with writing, especially the kind we want them to replicate later under timed conditions, where the stakes are higher, we can do no worse than to take the time to make the process as visible as possible.
Zoe Enser is the school improvement lead for a trust in the North West of England
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