Generate exemplar responses before students start writing

Generate exemplar responses before students start writing

Setting a task without showing students what success looks like is asking them to hit a target you have not drawn. Most teachers know this. The reason it does not happen on a Wednesday afternoon is that writing three exemplars (A, C, and E) from scratch is a full free period of work. This prompt does the draft in two minutes so you can run a comparative-marking warm-up before students write a word of their own.

The prompt

You are a senior [SUBJECT] teacher in an Australian secondary school with twenty years of experience teaching [YEAR LEVEL] in [STATE]. You know how students at this year level actually sound on the page, including the moves the strong ones make and the shortcuts the struggling ones take.

I am about to set the following task for my class:

[PASTE THE FULL TASK BRIEF, INCLUDING ANY STIMULUS, SOURCES, OR PROMPTS THE STUDENTS WILL SEE]

The marking criteria are:

[PASTE THE RUBRIC OR CRITERIA. IF YOU DO NOT HAVE A RUBRIC, LIST THE 3-5 THINGS A STRONG RESPONSE MUST DO, EACH IN ONE SENTENCE.]

Constraints on the response:
- Length: about [WORD COUNT or NUMBER OF PARAGRAPHS] for each exemplar.
- Voice: plain Australian English. Sentence length and vocabulary appropriate to a real [YEAR LEVEL] student, not a university essay and not a chatbot.

Write three exemplars in full:

1. An A-standard response. A strong student who has met every criterion well. Not perfect, not robotic. The kind of response that would make a marker write "this is exactly what I was after" in the margin.

2. A C-standard response. A student who has read the task and engaged with it, but is meeting roughly half the criteria. The shape is there. The depth is not. Include one or two specific moves that are almost-but-not-quite (an undeveloped point, a citation without analysis, a vocab choice that is close but imprecise).

3. An E-standard response (or equivalent low standard). A student who has answered something adjacent to the task with shallow engagement and at least one clear misreading. Not gibberish, not insulting. The kind of response a student writes when they have skimmed the brief on the bus.

After each exemplar, list 4-6 bullet points naming the specific sentence-level decisions that put it at this standard. Quote the words. A teacher should be able to point at the page when explaining why.

Finish with a short "how to run this in 15 minutes" note. Assume students will rank the three exemplars in pairs before writing their own, and that the teacher wants the conversation to land on the criteria, not on surface features.

What it does well

Forces the model to commit to specific student moves at each standard, with quotable evidence, which is what makes the comparative-marking conversation actually work. It also stops the very common failure mode where the C-standard exemplar reads like an A-standard exemplar that someone took the conclusion off.

Where it falls over

The A-standard draft will often lean a little American or a little university-coded, even with the constraint. You will want to trim two or three sentences before showing it to students. The E-standard exemplar can also tip into caricature, which students will spot, so a quick humanising pass matters. And the model does not know your actual class, so a student who writes very differently to the year-level average will not see themselves in any of the three.

Try it like this

For a Year 10 history source-analysis paragraph: paste the source, paste your three rubric strands, ask for 180-word exemplars.

For a VCE English text-response paragraph: feed in the passage, the prompt, and your school's analytical paragraph structure, and ask for one body paragraph at each standard.

For a Year 7 persuasive writing piece: feed the topic, the audience, and the three things you want them to do (clear position, two reasons with evidence, a counter), and ask for 250 words at each standard.

If you only have five minutes before next period, skip the rubric paste and just list the three things a strong response must do. The exemplars will be rougher, but the comparative-marking activity still works.

Run the comparative-marking warm-up before students write a word of their own, not after.