How to teach: English - Chris Curtis 2019
Draft in threes
How to teach accuracy
I love drafting in lessons. Mainly because there is less lesson to plan, but also because it gets you to the heart of the writing process and the problems students have with specific parts. I will often insist they draft in threes.
Draft 1: will check they understand the task.
Draft 2: will check that they have addressed any writing issues.
Draft 3: will be the polish.
I think the repeated process is really handy because each draft is flagged as a different task, and it has a different impact on different students. The good writers use the drafting process to refine and hone their work and the weak writers make large leaps in progress — draft 1 contains no punctuation whereas draft 2 contains some secure use. As I’ve alluded to, writing is hard. Students get things wrong. It may seem that punctuation, for example, is obvious but 11-year-olds can get so involved in the moment and in their ideas that they forget about its existence.
I like to simplify the marking sometimes and use a mark out of 10. Take this example for a student writing a paragraph of a horror story:
Draft 1: 3/10
Target: Add more ambitious and effective vocabulary.
Draft 2: 7/10
Target: Vary how you structure your sentences.
Draft 3: 9/10
Target: Be more creative with how you present your ideas — steal ideas from the examples in the lesson.
This example shows improvement as a process and it teaches students to see it as such. All too often, writing is seen as merely the product of learning, as a form of communication that happens when it is assessment time. Drafting several times is really helpful to me and to the students. You see the students who don’t listen and who will not make progress. You see the impact of your instructions. You note that there are students who don’t follow instructions. Using this approach throughout Key Stage 3 helps students to develop their writing ’muscle memory’ in preparation for exam season, when time for planning is more limited.