Reflections on designing a material to teach essay writing

21st March
Benjamin Yap

Contents
1. Introduction
2. The need
3. Inspiration for the design
4. Design considerations
a. Ease of use
b. Appeal to child
c. Permanent material in the class
d. Independent
e. Concrete to abstract
5. Testing
6. Adjustments

Introduction
I stand by the maxim that ‘function precedes form’. That is, nothing should be
designed within a vacuum, without first giving thought to its function and how it is to
be used. This material (which is, in actuality, part of a larger undeveloped series of
materials on teaching essay), was designed with the intention of having students
learn how to form a persuasive essay body paragraph. This was birth out of a idea
prompted by Petrina and the need for there to be a ‘hands-off’ means for me to have
students learn essay writing.

The need
Setting aside issues of inaccurate grammar, students tend to ramble (as opposed to
argue) when they are answering Exercise 7 of their IGCSE past papers. There often
isn’t a logical progression of arguments, with each sentence building upon the
previous one. Instead, students tend to ‘speak their mind’ in a first-thought-first-write
basis. I.e. they write whatever comes to their mind. Granted, there are proficient
students who would be able to pull this off without any issue, but the most of the
class belong to the former category.

Inspiration for the design

As you can see from the picture provided above, the material design is inspired from
the Montessori sentence analysis material. In the Montessori sentence analysis
material, students are guided through a process of breaking down and analysing a
sentence. This material not only assumes and expects students to be able to identify
the main verb of a sentence, but also help them to move parts of the sentence
around to explore how alternative sentence structure sounds.

The material that I am developing (working title is: persuasive paragraph material)
accomplishes a similar function, only with a body paragraph of a persuasive essay
instead of a sentence. Students should be able to take almost any body paragraph
provided and analyse the parts within. One example is provided in the image below
taken during the initial prototyping stage:
More details of the material will be explained in the following sections.

Design considerations
A few things were clear in my mind during the planning stages:
1. The material must be easy and fun to use
2. The material must be simple enough to use without too much explanation
 3. The material must help students write a good persuasive essay body
paragraph

Design considerations: ease of use

In designing the material, I wanted the material to be as self-explanatory as possible,
like the sentence analysis material. Hence it is made in the shape of arrows: starting
from a key idea (which is illustrated by a key) and is followed by the remaining
arrows until the end. I omitted the need for words where possible so that it forced me
to make the material intuitive to use.

Design considerations: appeal to child

The material is made with striking colours so that it would be appealing for someone
who might use it. However, the colours were limited to shades of yellow and black.
The symbols for connecting words were made to be blue, which is a complementary
colour to yellow. The shapes were decided with a combination of an element of
playfulness as well as logic in mind.

The key is chosen due to fact that many teachers use the term ‘key idea’ when
teaching or talking about the topic sentence in an essay body. The arrows follow
from the key to show that there should be some continuity in the writing from one
point to another. The connecting words symbols were decided with a ‘ball’, ‘ramp’
and ‘changing tracks’ in mind. The ramp will get the ball rolling (ramp = ‘firstly’, ‘for
starters’, ‘in my opinion’). This is followed by the ball (furthermore, moreover,
therefore) and then the changing tracks (however, but, on the other hand).

Design consideration: permanent material in the class

It was my intention to design something that can be used repeatedly for multiple
topics and themes so that all the effort put into it will not be for a one-time lesson.
This material can be used to analyse body paragraphs of most secondary level
writing as well as guide students to write a solid body paragraph of any persuasive
writing prompt. It is meant to be kept in the class for the students to use at their
leisure as well as when the teacher would like a student to review steps in writing an
essay.

Design consideration: independent

Although this material should be able to be used independently once learnt, it does
require the teacher to present the material to the student. During the presentation
phase, the teacher would act as the control of error. Upon learning how to use the
material to analyse paragraphs, sample paragraphs will be provided by the teacher
for students to cut up and label accordingly. Accompanying these sample
paragraphs will be a breakdown of each part of the paragraph in a separate sheet
which is to be left in the material box.

Design considerations: concrete to abstract

The material is to be used to analyse ready paragraphs so that students can see
what a well-constructed paragraph looks like. I.e. the elements of it: such as the topic
sentence, supporting reasons, evidences, examples and etc. This would be the
concrete stage of the material. For students who are clueless on what a persuasive
essay is about, the teacher will explain the elements of a persuasive essay body
paragraph first with the symbols only.
Upon analysing a few paragraphs, the student will then be asked to move on to
begin writing his / her own paragraph of a given topic. Writing prompts with outlines
will be provided to facilitate this process. Students will only need to practice
elaborating the paragraph with this material.

Testing
This material was tested out on a 14-year-old who has not learnt persuasive writing
yet, and a 15-year-old who has experience writing persuasive essays.

During the testing period, I was still figuring out how to present the material and
hence decided to introduce the various symbols to the 14-year-old. That seemed to
have confused him slightly as he tried to remember the various names of the
symbols. An accompanying chart would be helpful. Because this child was not
familiar with persuasive writing, I supplied the key idea and explained how a
paragraph fails without a key idea.

I subsequently read him the questions written on the arrows (which were meant to be
guides for him to elaborate the key idea) but this served to only confuse him further
as the questions were vague. Fortunately, the elements of the paragraph were
printed on the backside of the arrow (labels such as ‘example’, ‘reason’, ‘effect’, etc.)
and this served to help him elaborate. Once he was done writing the paragraph, I
asked him to look for the connecting words so that I might label them with the
symbols I have prepared. However, his lack of grasp of the language was evidenced
by his not knowing what connecting words were. To his credit, he was a bright child
and after explaining, he was able to identify them.

I skipped the concrete level of this material because I wanted to test if this material
could ultimately perform what I wanted it to: which is to help students write a proper
paragraph. From the first test with the 14-year-old, it seems that it has accomplished
it. However, considerable control of error was needed from my part as the teacher. I
wonder if the control of error could be a list of diagnostic questions a student go
through after writing each paragraph.

When testing on the 15-year-old, he seemed to be able to use the material to write
better, far easier than the 14-year-old. I conclude that this material requires a
prerequisite knowledge in what persuasive writing is for and a considerable amount
of general knowledge before quality writing can be produced. While obvious in
hindsight, this wasn’t to me at the initial stage.

One thing pointed out by the 15-year-old is that he would prefer to have a list of
connecting words supplied so that he can choose and use as and when needed. I
agreed with him as the material is not to test his knowledge but to aid writing. Adding
a list of connecting words doesn’t make the material any more complicated than it
already is.

Adjustments
After considering the feedback from the two students and upon discussing with
Aaron, who also teaches English, the following are some adjustments:
 1. Transition sentences was reworded to ‘Bridging sentence’ and its shape is
made into a form of bridge.
2. Transition sentences are no longer a necessity but a good-to-have as the
paragraph would still flow well provided that connecting words are used.
3. There need to be a separate set of material to teach students to craft
transition sentences.
4. ‘Antithesis’ and ‘Rebuttal’ were two arrows added into the set. This is to
accommodate for different formats of persuasive writing paragraph. Some
writers choose to add in an antithesis which is swiftly rebutted to make his
argument more persuasive. However, both Aaron and I agreed that this would
require a separate set of material to teach it.
5. ‘Bridging sentence’, ‘Antithesis’, and ‘Rebuttal’ were changed to grey instead
of black since it is not part of the core items.

Concluding remarks
In designing the material, I have come to the realisation that it requires a process of
back and forth feedback among student and teacher. This dialogue between teacher
and student will help crystallise the presentation method of the material as well as
the design and mechanism of the material. This process inadvertently takes time and
hence material design should take place one or two material at a time so that most of
the flaws can be dealt with first before moving on the next material.