A 2-Hour Lesson Using tutor2u Essay Writing Resources: A Step-By-Step Lesson Plan

I love resources. I horde them away happily and think “that will be so useful for X topic”, and then when it comes to it, I don’t really use them…

I was fortunate enough to take my Year 13 students to the tutor2u Strong Foundations day in November. We picked up a lot of great stuff, as ever, from the tutor2u team. What was most interesting, however, was seeing the resources used as they are meant to be used, and when in the following month, I attended the Departmental Results Booster CPD Event in London and was given a ridiculous amount of material, I was determined to find a time to put them to good use.

So many of us are slaves to the specification, and of course, we are driven by the desire to get through the content as quickly as possible. By some miracle, I have recently completed all three of our optional topics for Paper 3 (Forensic, Stress and Cognition and Development) and while there are still some loose ends to tie up, I felt the time was right for getting them to improve their essay writing in a meaningful way. I use the tutor2u marking grids, based on the AQA mark scheme criteria, and my students and I can talk meaningfully about feedback such as “focus”, “elaborate” and “specialist terminology”; I use the same language in their handouts, to make everything more accessible.

I have put together an accompanying lesson (based on some of the tutor2u essay writing materials), which you can download here (PowerPoint, Handout). If you want to run the session yourself, it could take between 2 – 3 hours of lesson time (I used two double lessons to teach this, with each lesson being 35 to 40 minutes long. In my case, the lesson went as follows:

Starter: Students were encouraged to engage in a little metacognition to start. I wanted them to reflect on how the lesson might be useful to them, not just in Psychology, but elsewhere.

Pre-Activities: Unpredictable Questions

I started by pointing out to students that essay questions are not all straightforward and part of this is to prepare for the ones that might catch them off guard. I have prepared a list of questions (see handout) that I felt might confuse some students.

Activity 1: Assessment Objectives Explained

I wanted to start with something straightforward. My students are pretty happy with the different Assessment Objectives; using Bloom’s taxonomy is a helpful way of visually representing how assessment objectives one to three increase in sophistication.

Extension: Students who finished earlier were asked to mark the essay and suggest improvements

Feedback from students: One pupil replied that it was useful because it highlighted to her how much AO3 was required.

Activity 2: Essay Deconstruction, Planning and Structure

My guys aren’t always the best planners, and they don’t necessarily think about how content relates to the question. This is a fantastic activity which highlights the importance of structure. Two questions on obedience, one concerning research into and one looking at explanations of.

Extension: Again, students who finished earlier were given a tutor2u marking grid in order to assess the quality of the essay and suggest improvements. It is important to point out that both essays in this activity are out of 12 and therefore I suggested to my class that they used the two answers as a base and considered how to extend them into essays answers out of 16.

Activity 3: Specialist Terminology in Essays

I was fortunate that this particular resource was relevant to our topic area of Forensic (Discuss neural explanations of offending behaviour), but it would be straightforward enough to create one relevant to another if needed. It is a top band essay with specialist terminology removed and while students have access to a Word Bank as part of this activity, I didn’t let them have it until they had exhausted their knowledge to start with (nice bit of differentiation…!)

Extension: I pointed out to students that this is a top band essay and encouraged them to use the mark scheme to figure out why. Learning to recognise what makes a good essay, is all part of the process.

Feedback from students: One pupil felt that the use of specialist terminology was overlooked and this was a good way to remind them of how to do it.

Activity 4: Essay Elaboration and Stressful Evaluation

In the end, I didn’t have time to run the first part of this activity completely, but because it is the same essay used in Activity 3; however, it was interesting for students to reflect on the signposts used and consider the structure of the essay in question.

The second part is a newer tutor2u resource, which again was relevant to one of our Paper 3 options and was considering the flow of arguments in evaluating/discussing the use of drugs to treat stress. My students are constantly forgetting to join up their evaluation and this was a perfect way to take it further.

Activity 5: Devil’s Advocate

This is one of my favourites; mainly because it is the expression, I use to explain how they should approach discussion in essays. The class paired up and divided the cards evenly, putting any blank ones to the side. They then took in turns to read out the stimulus card and their partner would have to come back with the counter-argument.

Extension: Students were told to come up with new points for the blank cards and were also given a copy of the accompanying Answer sheet and told to complete as part of their revision as a way of creating a bank of potential counter-arguments for their essays.

Feedback from students: “I really enjoyed that!” (which is high praise indeed!)

Plenary: Metacognition

And to finish, come back to the start. What did they get out of it? Did it fulfil expectations? How was it useful. Make them conscious of their learning so they can take it further.