by Lee Hill
Those of us who’ve become interested observers of the creeping Pixlification of teaching and learning over the past few years will have heard of the ‘Walking-Talking-Mock’. The principle behind it is fairly simple: a teacher uses a script to vocalise her approach to responding to the questions on an examination paper, with the goal of enabling students to see how an effective student completes the questions on that paper. This is not to be confused with merely taking students through a completed exam paper, talking them through the answers and how they have been arrived at after the class has completed the paper. No, with Walking-Talking-Mocks, the emphasis is on providing the students with a trial run on an exam the students themselves are about to sit, with the aim that this will increase their confidence when it comes to their turn. There’s a very good reason why this particular strategy has gained traction in schools: it works. Walking-Talking-Mocks are an excellent way of scaffolding students’ own thinking, clarifying the processes that successful students execute when approaching their examinations.
Similarly, we’ve all become familiar with the concept of presenting our classes with WAGOLLs, exemplar versions of the work we want our students to produce, so they can see What-A-Good-One-Looks-Like. I’m not certain where the concept of WAGOLL came from. I’d hazard a guess that its advent coincided, around 2010, with the rise of Twitter as a force in educational circles. Twitter’s strict 140 character limit (now sadly increased, with a noticeable loss of pith, to 280 characters) meant that every word mattered. Sharing good practice relied upon our ability to convey our ideas as succinctly as possible, leading to the explosion in edu-acronyms. Like WAGOLL.
A teaching technique I have used that yields fantastic results in enabling our students to see the connection between thinking and producing, providing a bridge between the thinking process of the Walking-Talking-Mock and the finished product of the WAGOLL, is the live classroom model.
I first experimented with live modelling about five years ago when I had a class of students who, despite my best efforts to show them, failed to produce the required standard for their GCSE English Language writing controlled assessment. In lesson after lesson, I would give them examples from the exam board course book. But, despite my best efforts; despite giving them success criteria and highlighted models; despite my detailed marking and feedback after the students produced their own efforts - despite all of this, the students steadfastly refused to get it.
My first efforts at live modelling were influenced by Robert Marzano’s discussions of so-called ‘explicit instruction’ and John Hattie’s findings that explicit, or direct, instruction had one of the best effect sizes of all teaching strategies. Hattie explains that ‘[w]hen teachers adopt explicit teaching practices they clearly show students what to do and how to do it. Students are not left to construct this information for themselves. The teacher decides on learning intentions and success criteria, makes them transparent to students, and demonstrates them by modelling. In addition, the teacher checks for understanding, and at the end of each lesson revisits what the lesson has covered and ties it all together (Hattie, 2009)’.
So how do I do live modelling? I am drawn to Marzano’s ‘I do - We do - You do’ model. It is the simplest way of implementing an effective live modelling strategy in the classroom.
The ‘I Do’ phase of explicit instruction is where I write for the students. The most important thing about this phase is that it should be done entirely ‘cold’. Writing a prepared exemplar is nowhere near as effective because it is product, not process. Such an exemplar is no more effective in helping our students strive to produce excellent writing in all subject disciplines than would be showing someone a photograph of a Victoria Sponge and expecting them to reproduce it from the photograph. Having said that, it is sensible to produce a ‘route map’ for the piece of writing you are going to be demonstrating, before you get to the lesson.
James Durran (@jdurran) has produced this really useful guide to live modelling in the ‘I Do’ phase, which I reproduce below:
Once I have completed the model piece of writing, I ask a range of directed questions designed to encourage students to be critical readers of my writing. For example, I might ask them why I have used a particular piece of punctuation, or why I have structured a sentence in a particular way. I would also ask them if there are any improvements they would suggest. The final part of this process is the production of success criteria, a simple list of what makes the writing successful, which students can then use as a checklist for their own attempts.
In the next part, the ‘We Do’ phase, I continue to act as class scribe but this time, I use targeted questioning to get the students to produce a similar paragraph to the one I have just modelled for them. As I scribe for them, I ask them if they are satisfied with particular word choices, and if not how they might improve it. It is really important that they don’t only pay attention to word level choices, i.e. their choice of appropriate vocabulary for the writing they are doing. They must look at sentence level choices closely too. This means making sure that if they are writing to advise that their sentences are mainly imperative sentences, telling readers to do something. In Science, this might mean they write in the passive voice only when writing up their experiments, rather than in the first person. Finally, they must pay attention to how they structure whole texts. This means, for example, not using bullet point lists in a History essay, or including tables and data in mathematics or Science or Geography.
Then comes the easy part, the ‘You Do’ phase, where students set to work on their own independent piece of writing. It is important that I don’t simply let them sink or swim: if any students are stumped by something, or struggling to work through a problem, I may encourage them to work with a classmate. I may, if I see enough students having the same problem, stop them working to address the common problem.
A note on differentiation: to differentiate during the ‘I Do’ phase, my main method is using questioning. During the ‘We Do’ phase, one method to differentiate is that I may actually free the more able students to go straight into the ‘You Do’ phase, where they use the success criteria and my model to produce their own piece of independent writing. As we work through more and more models of a particular type of writing, the number of students who jump straight to the independent ‘You Do’ phase rises as more of them become proficient. When all students are working on their own independent writing in the ‘You Do’ phase, my main method of differentiation is through circulating the room, addressing misconceptions, giving further support and asking challenging questions, as appropriate. To stretch further at the top end, I might actually encourage students to move on from the model, to begin to spread their wings. The most important point to make about the whole process from ‘I’ to ‘We’ to ‘You’ is that it should be flexible, changing according to the difficulty of the task or the level of expertise in the class already when you start the process.