With the kind of intrinsically motivating projects that we’re building here, there’s a very good chance that the children won’t want to produce anything other than their very best work. To make absolutely sure of this, though, there’s one more layer that we can add to support our drive for incredibleness.

We’ve already looked at how authentic outcomes and critical audiences can impact on the children’s desire to produce professional-looking work, but there should also be the recognition that very little of any value is ever created with ease or, at the very least, at the first time of asking.

I’ve already mentioned Ron Berger and his brilliant book An Ethic of Excellence. Along with his suggestion that we look for the kind of critical audiences that won’t tolerate rubbish, he is also interested in creating a culture in which children don’t settle for their first attempt at a piece of work, or even their second or third.

The process of producing multiple drafts is not a new thing and most of us have been up to something like this when planning writing units. In fact, you can’t actually deliver the English curriculum without building in time for editing and redrafting. What hadn’t particularly occurred to me was that this might be an approach that we could use across the whole curriculum. Thanks to the legacy of trying to cover everything, in almost every subject other than writing we’d only ever go for a second draft if the children had messed up their first attempt to the extent that it was completely unrecoverable. With our ‘less is more’ approach there wasn’t the same excuse, and with more time, we reckoned we could use the idea of creating multiple drafts more widely.

In terms of this even being an option, everything we’ve looked at in terms of the concept-based learning approach and building authentic outcomes is essential. If we’re considering moving towards multiple drafts, then the children have got to care about what they’re doing. If they’re not bothered about their work (or don’t see the purpose), then making them redraft it is painful for everyone involved. They won’t want to do it and will resent you forcing them into it. On the other hand, if they are immersed in their project and are desperate to produce something amazing, then they will be willing to produce draft after draft to make sure their work is as good as it can possibly be.

For this to work effectively, there needs to be clear guidance throughout the whole process. There’s no point creating a first draft if you have no idea where to start, and it’s just as pointless producing more drafts unless you’ve had some very specific feedback on how to improve. Rather than this coming solely from the teacher, the use of rubrics (a posh word for success criteria) and critique promotes high levels of independence from the children. Work always starts with an exemplar (sometimes called a WAGOLL – What A Good One Looks Like), which is then used to generate warm and cool feedback (which we will come to shortly). Berger’s mantra for making sure that the feedback is good enough is that it must be ‘kind’, ‘specific’ and ‘helpful’.1

To make sure that the process of generating feedback was properly embedded we spent a long time practising it. This sounds like common sense, but thanks to the ridiculousness of the school improvement culture, quite often, if you’re not implementing something and demonstrating its impact within a matter of weeks, you’re written off as a failure. For reasonable people like us, it’s obvious that this is complete rubbish – to do anything properly takes time, and for us, this meant devoting an entire term just to getting the language right.

To get off on the right foot, seeds need to be planted with even the very youngest children in the school. For nursery or Foundation Stage 1, there isn’t any formal use of the critique process because it isn’t appropriate. What is important, though, is to begin the groundwork that will make life easier for the children as they get older. This really boils down to one little phrase that carries an incredibly important message. We’re usually delighted with anything our four-year-olds do. This is fine, but there’s a chance that our loveliness and positivity about the picture they’ve made from three dried pasta shells and two litres of PVA glue might be giving them the wrong message. It’s important that we’re still positive with them, but instead of saying, ‘What an amazing picture!’ a shift to ‘That’s an amazing picture – what a great start!’ could begin to embed a subconscious understanding that there are always improvements to be made. At this stage, ‘What a great start’ is nothing more than a phrase, and I wouldn’t for a second make a four-year-old redraft their pasta picture – for starters, they’ve probably used up all the glue. What we’re after here is the slow drip-feeding of an attitude – the beginnings of a culture that can then be developed.

To continue this process into reception (Foundation Stage 2) and up through the rest of the school, we began by building the children’s use of warm feedback language. In my experience, children are pretty good at providing critical feedback, and while this is useful, we didn’t necessarily want it to be their default setting. To start with, we used stock phrases that we wanted the children to replicate. These sentence starters were displayed in every classroom (always on pink card) and we took every opportunity we could to use them.

‘I really liked the way …’

‘What jumped out was …’

‘My favourite part is …’

‘My eye was drawn to …’

These might seem a bit contrived, but that’s because they are. I’m not usually a fan of this level of prescriptiveness, but in this case, we wanted the children to see the critique process as something new and important, rather than as an opportunity to have a chat about the bits they liked.

In terms of practising, there were plenty of opportunities across the curriculum. The list below is not meant to be exhaustive but it is a start.

Art: A sketch, drawing, illustration, painting or sculpture.

Design technology: A diagram, blueprint or finished product.

English: An extract from a novel, book or particular genre of writing.

Geography: A map, plan, model, diagram or report.

History: A replica document, an artefact or an explanation text.

Maths: A calculation, solution, table, graph or chart.

PE: A film clip of a professional gymnast or athlete.

RE: A piece of scripture (e.g. psalm), an illuminated manuscript or an illustration.

Science: A diagram, report or table of results.

The exemplar pieces of work were either created or found by us, which meant that we were able to make sure our expectations were high enough. Of the three key elements to successful feedback, being kind was mostly sorted because of the innate niceness of the children. The other two took quite a lot of work to get right. Beyond the difficulties of just pronouncing the word ‘specific’, the children also found it hard to generate feedback that did the job that was needed.2 To get around this, we treated the process as if it were any other area of the curriculum that was proving tricky and modelled it for them.

English: Extract from a novel

‘I disappeared on the night before my twelfth birthday. July 28, 1988. Only now can I at last tell the whole extraordinary story, the true story. Kensuke made me promise that I would say nothing, nothing at all, until at least ten years had passed. It was almost the last thing he said to me. I promised, and because of that I have had to live out a lie.’

Michael Morpurgo – Kensuke’s Kingdom3

Focus: Identify sentences that create mystery or intrigue.

Exemplar critique – warm feedback:

‘I really like the way that he uses the word “extraordinary” to let us know straight away that what we’re going to read will be amazing.’

‘My eye was drawn to the opening sentence. It’s a simple sentence and it grabs the reader’s attention – someone disappearing is dramatic – I want to know what happened!’

‘What jumped out was the way that he uses more than one way of adding mystery – I want to know how he disappeared, who Kensuke was, why he had to make a promise and why he had to wait ten years.’

Science: Table of results

Object Height of bounce (cm)
Tennis ball 25.5cm 23.0cm 24.5cm
Golf ball 38.0cm 35.5cm 36.5cm
Sponge ball 12.5cm 14.0cm 13.0cm
Cricket ball 15.0cm 16.5cm 16.5cm

Context: The children are investigating how what material a ball is made from affects the height of its bounce.

Focus: Recording results in a table.

Exemplar critique – warm feedback:

‘I really like the way they have repeated the experiment to get three sets of results for each ball. This will make it more reliable.’

‘What jumped out was how they had measured accurately to the nearest half centimetre.’

‘My eye was drawn to the way that the table is set out. The columns and rows are labelled so it’s clear and easy to understand.’

Over time (remember this was the focus for a whole term), the children started using the warm feedback phrases without any prompting and got better and better at providing statements that were actually of some use. In Key Stage 2, the vast majority of the children wrote their own feedback on some pink sticky notes we’d bought in specially. In Key Stage 1, there was more of a mix, with the teachers sometimes scribing the feedback for the children (as a whole class) and at other times letting them have a go for themselves.

With the basics in place, we then taught the children how to turn their warm feedback into statements for a rubric. Given how confident they all were this was fairly easy, and within the space of a few weeks they got the idea of taking their feedback, sticking a verb at the front of it and adding it to their rubric.

Warm feedback Rubric statement
‘My eye was drawn to the opening sentence. It’s a simple sentence and it grabs the reader’s attention. Use a simple sentence to grab the reader’s attention.
‘I really like the way that the “ten” is recorded clearly underneath the line.’ Record the ‘ten’ clearly underneath the line.
‘What jumped out was how they had measured accurately to the nearest half centimetre.’ Measure accurately to the nearest half centimetre.

When the children were happily writing their own rubric statements based on warm feedback, we then introduced them to the language we wanted them to use for cool feedback (this time on blue card) and repeated the whole process again:

‘Could you …?’

‘Why don’t you try …?’

‘A good idea would be …’

‘Have you considered …?’

‘Have you thought of …?’

Even though we were deliberately taking things slowly, this part was quite quick because the children understood what was going on – they were simply extending what they had done before, and the same rules around being kind, specific and helpful still applied. At this point (about two terms in), the children were independently writing their own rubrics based on feedback they had generated for themselves. When we’d started the process, we were most interested in the end point – getting to the stage where the children could provide peer critique to each other. What we’d overlooked was the impact of the steps in-between: the independence involved in creating rubrics for themselves had made a massive and unexpected difference to the children. It turned out that they actually used the rubrics when they were producing their own work.

We’d always used things like success criteria, but these had always been written by the teacher and given to or shared with the children. Although this has long been considered good practice, I’d always had a sneaking suspicion that the children only ever pretended to use them. This will be a familiar scenario to most teachers who have experienced using some form of success criteria with children. The checklists spell out what the children need to include in their writing: we share it with them, teach it to them and print out a copy so they’ve got it next to them before they start their ‘big write’ or whatever else we call it. From a quick survey of the class at the end of the writing session, we start to get pretty excited about the quality of their work as it appears they’ve all ticked off everything on the list. We then take the work home to mark and discover that they’ve lied to us. They might have ticked off the items, but it bears absolutely no relation to what they’ve actually written.

I don’t know exactly why producing the rubrics for themselves made such a difference, but it’s probably to do with the fact that because they created them, there was ownership, and as a result, they actually cared enough (and also remembered) to use them. The form this process took was dictated by the age group we were working with. Whilst the older children were capable of writing the rubrics for themselves, in Key Stage 1 and the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) the children often worked as a whole class, jointly suggesting ideas which the teacher then wrote up as they went along.

By this stage (about term three-ish), everything we needed to get to the peer critique was in place. To ease us into this, we used a technique called ‘gallery critique’, which basically involved displaying the children’s work around the classroom and allowing them to move around and leave feedback on each other’s work. This is a good way to start; because it’s anonymous, the children found it non-threatening and they loved going back to their work to find the feedback that had been left. In the excitement that came from being allowed to move around the room, sometimes the quality of feedback tended to slip, but just as before, we used this as an opportunity to model the specificity we wanted.

The peer critique part was the last layer. We kept up with the gallery critique because this whole-class approach is a brilliant way to check the quality of feedback being given, but when you’ve got to this stage, there’s no reason why the children can’t select their own critique partners and go through the process for themselves.

Exploring this approach over the course of the year threw up some interesting thoughts around the sequencing of learning and the importance of using critique at the right time. For example, for the feedback to be specific and helpful, it needs subject-specific knowledge or skills to back it up. In one piece of work, a group of Year 5 children were creating pencil drawings of a zebra’s head. Given that stripes feature quite heavily in any representation of a zebra, it wasn’t surprising that it was something they spotted in the exemplar piece that was shown to them. And the reason we know they spotted them was because they said so quite explicitly in their warm feedback:

‘I really like the stripes.’

Now, as an observation, you can’t fault it, but as a helpful piece of feedback that could be turned into a rubric statement, the best you could end up with would be ‘draw stripes’. This is where having specific knowledge and skills – in this case in art – really makes a difference. If the children had already learnt about the principle of contrast, then they could have used this to create much more specific and therefore helpful feedback:

‘I really like the way the spacing between the stripes creates contrast.’

And from this, they’ve got the chance to generate a statement for their own rubric that will actually make a difference to their work:

‘Use spacing between the stripes to create contrast.’

Recognising the link between specificity and knowing or being able to do stuff can also help us to identify which bits of the curriculum we can easily have a go at and which bits might be left until later.

Writing is a good example of something that we were initially tempted to use critique with until it dawned on us that this is actually a pretty complicated area. For it to be of any use, the children would need enough grammatical knowledge to ensure that any feedback given was specific and helpful. If their knowledge and understanding of grammar were sketchy, then they would just end up making nice comments about the quality of the presentation or handwriting rather than anything that would actually improve the quality of the writing.

A quick and easy way of ensuring that the children use their prior learning (and a good way of double checking that they actually know what they’re talking about) is to encourage them to add an ‘e.g.’ to their feedback.

If we take writing as an example, a child could give the following feedback:

‘My eye was drawn to the adjectives that were used.’

As a piece of feedback, it’s not doing a particularly great job in terms of specificity, and it’s also possible that the child has written it because at some point they’ve heard that adjectives are a good thing to put into writing; whether or not they actually know what an adjective is, though, is anyone’s guess.

With an ‘e.g.’, you demonstrate that you actually know what you’re talking about:

‘My eye was drawn to the adjectives that were used, e.g. “sinister” and “menacing”.’

This could be classed as adding the ‘what’ – the e.g. tells us that they remember what an adjective is. To develop the feedback further we could also add a ‘why’:

‘My eye was drawn to the adjectives that were used to describe the main character, e.g. “sinister” and “menacing”.’

What we’ve got here is something that would definitely make a difference. The pupil has picked the adjectives out of an exemplar or another child’s work, they clearly understand what they’re talking about (because they already know it or they’ve just learnt about it) and they know why they’re useful words to include. In terms of redrafting, whether it’s in English, art, science, geography or whatever else we decide to apply this to, we’ve now got a structure that gives us a clear idea about what we’re aiming for, as well as a means of getting there. The more work that goes into helping the children to fine-tune their critique, the better and more useful their rubrics will be, and the greater chance there is of them producing multiple drafts of increasing quality.

This process fits perfectly with the idea of the children working on authentic outcomes, and also does away with the often frantic way in which we deal with children’s work in school. When I first started teaching, displays needed to be changed at least every half-term. This was hard work, especially if you had a lot of boards to fill, so because of the inevitable rush, I don’t think I thought too hard about what was going up, as long as it was double-mounted and not too wonky.

If the children care about their work, and they’ve been through the process of redrafting, they will produce stuff that deserves to be displayed or exhibited for longer than six weeks. We’ve got some work in school that’s been up for years because it’s incredible, and most work will be displayed for at least a year. With the photography project I mentioned earlier, the work was exhibited in a public gallery for two weeks. After this, it came back to school and was displayed in the corridor for another twelve months. Along with the pride this generated in the children, it also meant we had a ready-made starting point for similar projects in the future. If a different class or the following year’s cohort were looking for exemplars of high quality photography to begin the process of critique, then we had them. When the children create brilliant work, we keep hold of it because it feeds directly into the production of more brilliant work, and year on year, the quality is pushed higher and higher as the children’s expectations are edged upwards.

It might seem that the year we spent embedding all of this was a little excessive, but I think approaching it cautiously and building bit by bit is probably one of the best decisions we made. As a direct result of adding critique to our concept-based learning approach, we’ve got children who have developed an almost obsessive attention to detail and the ability to speak articulately about the learning process. The sense of pride that comes from producing incredible work is addictive, and before they know it, they’re trapped in a cycle of brilliance that’s impossible to escape.

1 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWMH_X4IvOk.

2 It’s not just the children who find this difficult – how many of the comments used in written marking by teachers are specific enough to be useful? And even if they are, do the children understand it sufficiently and have the time to do anything productive with it? I don’t want to get into marking and feedback, but it’s definitely an area we need to be thinking about. How much of what we’ve traditionally done has any impact on learning?

3 M. Morpurgo, Kensuke’s Kingdom (London: Egmont, 2017 [1999]), p. 1.