WAGOLL

With Easter assessments looming, I have been providing a lot of model texts for my pupils to work with. While these act as an aspirational target for pupils, they also provide  pupils with a working text that they can adapt and use for themselves.

The writer of Perfect Assessment for Learning, Claire Gadsby,  calls this WAGOLL (What A Good One Looks Like) and while it's something that I've done for a while, I've approached this style task with a different view this time round. As previously stated, while this gives pupils something to aim for, it can really reinforce their knowledge of grammar and key vocab.

With year 7, a fellow Spanish teacher  created a text with the "good bits" highlighted. This then involved the pupils working in pairs to create their own success criteria based on the highlighted text. Once the pupils had finished their text, I got them to peer assess their work using the WWW (What went well?) and EBI (Even better if...) structure to provide feedback for them to then act on.

By giving pupils the option to 'Surprise Me' it allowed the more creative/able to go away and search dictionaries or simply look back in their book to find better constructions or bring previous vocab back to the forefront.

However, with my year 8 French group I took away the support. The pupils were simply handed a text and we then discussed what we'd need to look for in order for it to be deemed 'good'. I gave them 10 minutes to complete annotations on the text with the aim of them feeding back and eventually producing their own text. Bearing in mind that only see these pupils for 50 minutes a week, I was really pleased with their work and ability to recognise tenses and include them in their own work!

I carried out a similar activity with year 10 but they have been drilled much more thoroughly in the idea of what makes a good text and are obviously familiar with more tenses. I originally got the girls to complete a series of reading questions on the text so I was sure that they had fully engaged with it and read everything that they needed to. I again gave them 10 minutes to annotate and was presented with these wonderful results. 

This is a fairly low effort activity to create but has had great outputs. I must also add that their written pieces have been far more accurate and complex due to this activity so all round it's a win win!

The WAGOLL also has a negative brother the WASOLL (What A Shocker Looks Like) and yes, I did think what you thought at first. Although I haven't tried this one out yet, I'm keen to give it a go in the future with pupils re-writing the text and adding tenses, higher level structures and opinions to improve.