And on and on.

Have you thought about this? Have you mentally gone over how last year worked for you? Have you considered the list of things that you want to make sure you avoid, things that didn’t quite work the way you wanted them to? What made it to the top of your list?Similar Posts:

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Students read them. They vote on which is best. They talk about why they like them. They find identifying characteristics that explain what one does better than the other. Dead silent classes and phrases straight off a rubric that are meaningless, this almost never changes the way students create whatever I’m asking them to create. And, almost as often as not, students vote in droves for the weakest example provided.

If students don’t know why sentence A is vastly superior to sentence B, and even believe that the opposite is true, what do I do about that? If that’s the case, why even bother showing models? Why not resort to direct instruction on one version of a successful sentence? Why not simply have all examples be high marks? Am I going about this wrong by showing highs and lows? Am I expecting too much out of my models? Maybe a long view is in order and the fruits of these labors will come to at a later date. Or maybe those fruits are even impossible to see.

An example: I’m using AFI’s curriculum, as I’ve noted already, with my Speech class. On the first day, we had five videos in the room to look at. I tried my best to just facilitate the group’s discussion of the videos, hoping that they would naturally reach conclusions about why one product was better than another. According to the class, all of the videos did the job, had the right number of camera angles, the correct tone, and pulled it off.

Of the five videos, one had the actor laughing the entire time (the scene is meant to build tension and anxiety), another had one steady shot the whole way through (the requirements stated five shots as a requirement), and a third was the exact same movement over and over filmed from five different angles. There was one video that clearly was better than the rest, but the students didn’t see it quite that way until I pointed a few things out. And at that point, the criteria becomes teacher centered, not student generated. I think that’s the exact opposite of the purpose of models. They have no ownership of that so it likely matters far less than if they reached those conclusions themselves.

I have a hard time separating myself from the use of models, but I also have a hard time gathering up data to advocate for their use. What has your experience been like? And I’m talking any “text” here, not just literature and not just writing. Art, math, science, history, what have you. Drawings, video, labs, live performance, what they do.

Handouts

These are some of the things I’ve used that come from student models.

• Introduction Models (PDF) (Word)
• Picture Write Models (PDF) (Word)
• Body Paragraph Models (PDF) (Word)

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