Engaging Students With Bump It Up resources
Part 3 of 3
By KELLIE
The true benefits of Bump It Up resources are achieved through student engagement. Without this interaction, the resource is essentially a classroom display adding little value to improving learning.
There are many ways to engage students with Bump It Up resources, as it is being constructed, and when it is complete. This post will explore how teachers can support students to interact with the resources and demonstrate a process students can follow to guide their engagement.
Through modelling and demonstration, teachers support students to identify starting points and determine next steps for improvement using a variety of writing samples while establishing a consistent process for engagement.
This process is based around a series of guiding questions and creates a consistent way to explore all writing samples. Students will follow this process whenever they are using the Bump It Up resource to make judgements on starting points, next steps for learning, and when seeking feedback on their writing.
The ultimate goal is for students to engage in this process independently to self-assess and seek feedback on their own writing against the Bump It Up resource. However, as students develop the skills to interact with the Bump It Up resources, provide many opportunities to work with guidance and collaboratively before expecting students to use the resource independently.
Before you start, ensure students are familiar with the marking guide and how to interpret the criteria for success.
In the following examples, we demonstrate how students can make judgements on the quality of their writing using an adjusted marking guide. How this marking guide is adjusted is described in the blog “How to create a quality Bump It Up resource“.
How to analyse a piece of writing to determine starting points, next steps and formulate writing goals
This example demonstrates one way to introduce and practice a process of engaging with the writing samples on the Bump It Up wall through a series of guiding questions.
1. What is the starting point?
Students are guided to identify “what’s good” about the writing sample. They may require support to look beyond any obvious errors such as spelling and punctuation.
Using the marking guide, students examine a piece of writing to identify the features that are evident in the writing sample. Students may highlight the criteria on the marking guide to help determine the writer’s most recent starting point.
A ‘starting point’ does not always refer to the first piece of writing in the process, and as students edit and revise their writing for quality, the starting point for comparison will reflect these improvements.
In this example, students were guided to look beyond the obvious spelling and punctuation errors when making decisions against the marking criteria. The students verbally identified the writer’s use of a prepositional phrase.
Highlighting the marking guide (see image 2) provides a visual representation of achievement to assist students to determine the next steps for improvement.
2. What is the next step for improvement?
The students identify the next step to improve the quality of writing.
Referring back to the annotated marking guide, students determine the next steps for improving the quality of the writing. On a highlighted marking guide, the next steps for improvement are those steps beyond the starting point, or any components of the statement of achievement that are not yet met.
A judgement can be made about which step to prioritise if more than one are identified.
3. What feedback would you give to improve the quality of the writing?
The “what’s good” and “next steps” provide the basis for feedback on the writing sample. This provides information on current progress and what’s needed for continued progress.
4. What is the goal for improvement?
The next step in improving the quality of the writing, naturally forms the writing goal. Referring to the identified next steps for improvement, students form a writing goal based on the success criteria.
Setting goals that are directly related to the next steps for improvement, rather than broadly stated goals that apply to any form of writing, provides the information students need to improve their writing in accordance with curriculum expectations.
This process recognises that goal setting should be about progress, not just outcomes (Frey, Hattie & Fisher, 2018).
Modelling the process and providing students with opportunities to provide feedback on the writing of others is beneficial in many ways. While engaging with various writing samples, students practice analysing writing, finding starting points, identifying the next steps for improvement, giving feedback to improve a writing sample and setting writing goals to improve the quality of the writing.
William and Leahy (2015) acknowledge that this process also helps students to respond better to feedback on their own work and knowing how to apply it for improvement.
Pairwise comparison
During a pairwise comparison, students analyse and compare two writing samples.
Understanding the pairwise comparison process is essential as students move toward using the Bump It Up wall for self-assessment and evaluating their writing independently. The sequence of questioning embedded in the pairwise comparison leads students through the steps to follow as they analyse their writing against sample texts.
Begin by analysing and exploring each writing sample in detail. Model and demonstrate this process many times, using teaching exemplars and student writing samples, showing students how to look for the features of the text that indicate how effective the piece of writing is.
1. What do the samples of writing have in common
Students read and compare the texts to identify what the writing samples have in common, or how they are alike.
In this example, after reviewing the common features, the students concluded that these texts were examples of the same story revised and edited. Often, the two pieces of writing will not reflect this process.
2. Which sample of writing is better? Why?
Using evidence from the writing samples, students decide which of the two samples demonstrates a better quality of writing and determine why.
Students are supported to elaborate on their explanation of why to describe how the improvements in writing have added to their understanding, or relevant enjoyment, of the text.
Students will use this comparison process to determine where their writing ‘sits’ in relation to the samples on the Bump It Up wall.
Once the better sample is identified, students determine how to ‘close the gap’ between the samples by examining a text in detail following the same process described above.
3. What is the starting point?
4. What is the next step for improvement?
5. What feedback would you give to improve the quality of the writing?
6. What is the goal for improvement?
A note on formulating writing goals based on the success criteria.
Hattie and Clark (2019) state that while it is important to remember the aspects of excellence in writing that may not be addressed in the success criteria, the most useful improvement suggestions give explicit examples, and are focused around improvement to be made on the current piece of writing.
When students are familiar with the process of analysing writing against success criteria to determine what the writing currently ‘has’ and what is needed to move the writing forward, they become highly skilled in identifying what is required for improvement and why.
In this example, students discussed what they thought would improve the writing before referring to the marking guide.
These students are familiar with Bump It Ups and have been supported to engage with the criteria for success. They knew exactly what they were looking for in the writing sample, and their advice for next steps aligned with the marking guide.
“Bump It Up walls take self-assessment to a higher level of student and teacher agency when teachers and students co-construct them.” Sharratt (2019).
Co-constructing the Bump It Up wall
To co-construct a Bump It Up wall, follow the pairwise comparison routine gradually introducing the samples of writing until the writing progression is complete. The samples of writing may be teacher-generated, examples of past students’ writing, or jointly constructed by the teacher and students.
If these samples are paragraphs demonstrating how writing has been improved aligned to the achievement standards being assessed, one or two Bump It Ups may be used together to show progress. Introducing examples of the assessment task text as a whole can be included further along in the teaching and learning cycle. This is, of course, at the teacher’s discretion based on their and their student’s experience in using Bump It Up walls.
The supporting explanations of the qualities of the samples, and what the writer has done to achieve this quality can be also be teacher-generated, or jointly constructed.
The end result is a progression of writing samples showing the improvement in quality which are supported by statements explaining what the author has done to improve each piece. Writing goals can easily be added to the progression.
Most importantly, students will have the skills and understanding to compare their own and their peers’ writing to the Bump It Up resources following the same routine to self-assess and elicit feedback.
Video tutorials
These short videos will step through each of the described demonstrations and focus on each step in greater detail.
Video 1: Introduction…. please view this first.
Video 2: Supporting students to analyse a writing example.
Video 3: Pairwise comparison.
Free Bump It Up resources
Don’t miss Quality Writing Instruction’s free Bump It Up resources:
1. Bump It Up dialogue resource when you sign up to our newsletter.
2. Resource used in the above video tutorials available in The Lounge.
Part 1 of our ‘How to make the most of your Bump It Up resources’ series explores how Bump It Up resources support students’ writing development and the questions to ask when purchasing, designing or borrowing Bump It Ups.
Part 2 describes how to design a Bump It Up resource aligned to students’ writing outcomes.
Discussions and questions are encouraged in “The Lounge”, Quality Writing Instruction’s Facebook group.
