How a Teacher-Written Exemplar Can Support Effective Teaching

        In this Kappan column, Newark educator/author Paul Bambrick-Santoyo suggests that before teachers give their students a challenging Common Core-aligned question on a passage – for example, How does the author use figurative language to convey the protagonist’s tone? – the teacher should sit down and write the kind of response students should ideally produce. This gives the teacher a helpful end-in-sight benchmark for planning the lesson, for doing on-the-spot checking as students work, and for assessing students’ finished products. “Writing an objective is only the beginning of envisioning how far your students can go,” says Bambrick-Santoyo. “Writing an exemplar will bring it into unmistakable focus, so that there can be no doubt when your students have reached it.”

        “At its core, an exemplar takes our broad standards and transforms them into a concrete definition of how ‘rigor’ works,” he continues. “The most a standard can offer – even a great standard – is a vague description of ‘what’ students must learn. An exemplar paves the way from ‘what’ they’ll learn to ‘how’ they’ll show it” – for example, linking the evidence to a central claim.

        An exemplar also makes it possible for the teacher to compare students’ work-in-progress with the ideal and provide efficient real-time feedback (Bambrick-Santoyo watched a middle-school teacher give individual help to her entire class in just ten minutes). Here are the key elements to such rapid-fire teaching:

        • Gather useful clues. “When you use in-class data to inform your next move,” he says, “you not only address error in the moment, but you also give yourself guidance on how to plan in the days and weeks to come.”

        • Work with the fasters writers first. Many teachers help their weakest students first, get bogged down, and don’t reach most of the class. Bambrick-Santoyo recommends doing the opposite – working first with students who write the fastest (who aren’t necessarily the strongest writers), then moving on to struggling students as they reach the point where help is most productive.

        • Use “shorthand” symbols to communicate with students. For example, as a teacher circulates, she might put checks by evidence that is on target and circle evidence or explanations that need to be fixed. Agreed-upon marks like these allow the teacher to move more quickly from student to student and give feedback to the entire class in just a few minutes.

“When Students Don’t Meet the Bar” by Paul Bambrick-Santoyo in Phi Delta Kappan, April 2014 (Vol. 95, #7, p. 72-73), www.kappanmagazine.org;

 Bambrick-Santoyo can be reached at  pbambrick@uncommonschools.org.

Stephen Anderson