“Just Write More Essays”? Rethinking Strategies for Deliberate KS5 Writing and Exam Practice

With so little time to play around with in lessons, what can we do to help prepare students with their essay practice and exam preparation?

This year, rather than the blanket instruction to “just write more essays”, I’ve begun to hone in on particular elements of essay planning, writing, and the deconstruction of questions in order to make the best use of our remaining classroom time.

It’s an approach that follows on from principles of essay writing I’ve outlined previously (see here) and of framing revision as deliberate, rather than just repeat, practice (see here).

It also relies on the timed practice of elements of essay writing, which is summarised below. In short, this approach treats essays not as one single piece of work, but as a series of steps which, when broken down, can be systematically practiced without investing a full 45 minutes or longer in writing a full answer. Doing so not only saves time where there isn’t a full 45 minutes to spare; it also allows students to begin deliberately practicing elements of essay writing that they find hardest. This approach is summarised in the “15-Minute Fixes” slide below. (It does not, of course, mean that students can prepare without writing any full essay questions!)

This post follows a process we used in a Year 13 lesson this week. I hope it may give an indication of the possibilities of intense essay writing sessions which focus on elements of essays, rather than simply “an essay”. In this case, our writing revision lesson focused on four tasks, involving:

• decoding and planning essay questions
• writing introductions, conclusions, and topic sentences
• recognising the role and importance of themes (is the question social, economic, political, or cultural in its broad focus?)
• recognising the role and importance of command words

Thank you to our fabulous Year 13s for agreeing to have their work shared!

 

Task 1: Decoding and Planning One Question

I began the lesson by presenting students with one essay question to decode:

“By 1881, the emancipation of the serfs had brought profound social change in Russia.” Assess the validity of this view. [25 marks]

Giving students two minutes to identify the theme (social), focus (the relationship between the emancipation of the serfs and social change), timeframe (1861-1881), and the key modifying word (“profound”), I asked them to pull the question apart.

Then, in three minutes, I asked them to plan, using the following steps:

1. Identify all possible factors
2. Narrow these down to three, one for each paragraph
3. Place these factors on a continuum, in order to establish how “profound” the change for each actually was

The efforts of two students are given below:

 

Task 2: Write an Introduction, Topic Sentences, and Conclusion

Students then were instructed, in 4 minutes, to write an introduction to the question. As the timer ticked down, I scanned the room and selected one example to show under the visualiser, asking students to mark up on theirs as they went with the key features of a good introduction:

• clear thesis (overall argument)
• three factors
• reasoning/line of argument for each factor

The effort of one student is given below. Note how they have numbered their factors as part of the self-reflection process:

Students then wrote the first sentence (topic sentence) for each paragraph, focusing on including the factor, its importance in relation to the question (was it a sign of “profound” social change?) and a reason for this. This has consistently been an area of difficulty for many students.

Again, one student’s effort is included below:

Task 3: Flipping the Theme

It’s all very well for students to know what a question does ask them, but if they are to really grasp the underlying structure of the exam, students also have to know what questions could ask them. AQA guidance from Keith Milne ahead of last year’s KS5 History exams included the valid observation that there are only so many questions that can be asked of a particular topic. In this case, students would do well to consider which questions could be asked of their topic in question.

One possible way of doing this is by asking students to reframe a question to change its thematic focus. For instance, the question:

“By 1881, the emancipation of the serfs had brought profound social change in Russia.” Assess the validity of this view. [25 marks]

has a clear social theme (students’ answers must be directed towards how society changed). How could they manipulate the question itself to change this theme? And what would that do to their possible essay answers?

I asked students to circle the word denoting the theme of the question and consider possible substitutes. What else might be asked of the emancipation of the serfs?

After discussing in pairs, they added their suggestions to the board. We then discussed as a class. Which would be the most plausible in the exam?

“Political”, “economic”, and “cultural” all clearly work, since they are the other three central themes to our course. “Class” would also work, since it directs students clearly to a social and economic focus and it relatable to the content (the emancipation of the serfs). “Religious” is just about plausible, but would give students so little to write about I’d certainly hope the exam board never consider it! Others are clearly less suitable, either because they give no clear thematic focus (“revolutionary” and “further” makes it unclear what aspects of change students are supposed to focus on), or because they make little real sense in the context of the emancipation of the serfs (“autocratic” and “reactionary”).

This is now the kind of activity I would expect students, especially those gunning for top grades, to consider doing as part of their revision. Once all existing questions have been planned, and at least some attempted, what alternatives are out there? By considering this carefully, they can be planned for most eventualities.

 

Task 4: Flipping the Question Stem

There is another way students can be encouraged to manipulate questions and consider alternative possible questions. This is by changing the question stem, the word or words which tell them how they are to construct their answer.

For AQA History (1H), our question stems include:

• How significant…?
• How effective…?
• How successful…?
• To what extent…?
• “Statement.” Assess the validity of this view.

Knowing what these mean and what they demand of students is clearly pretty important to students writing a good essay in the exam.

So I presented students with another potential essay question, with a different stem:

By 1881, how significant was the emancipation of the serfs to stimulating political change in Russia? [25 marks]

The stem “how significant” is an interesting one because, unlike all others, it actively invites students to consider issues other than that named in the question. In this case, the emancipation of the serfs was one factor stimulating political change in Russia by 1881. But in order to consider its significance (read: importance), students have to be able to compare its impact to other factors. In other words, this question stem provides students with a stated factor and demands they offer two other relevant factors of their own.

This is different to all other question stems to the exam, and is something that frequently runs students into trouble, either because they attempt to answer the question using only the stated factor (which is very difficult), or because they attempt to answer questions with other stems by bringing in non-named factors (which makes their answers for these questions irrelevant).

We first drew out, as a class, the difference between this and other question stems, planning a potential answer:

Then, after circling the question stem, I asked students to re-write the question in as many ways as they could. How would they approach answering these questions?

Their attempts (including almost all question stems) are here. All are potential and plausible exam questions. Most importantly, considering how they might be answered forces students to consider the implications of the question paper asking a question in one way and not another:

Concluding Thoughts

What opportunities do these approaches open up for students practicing their exam technique ahead of final KS5 exams?

Firstly, and most basically, it provides a different way of managing time. While we might hope that students “just write more essays”, the reality is that there isn’t enough time for this to be the only, or even the main, way of practicing written skills. Breaking down essays into their component parts (decoding, planning, introductions, conclusions, topic sentences, and individual paragraphs) makes more sense. (Not that students should not write full essays to time, as well! My current thinking is that, for every 4-5 essays planned, one should be written in full.)

Secondly, students need to think carefully about how questions are framed and constructed. Decoding a question is only one way of doing this. Once students are really confident with doing this, the next step is for to begin considering how questions could be framed and constructed and ask themselves, “How would I answer this?”

Cities, Railways, and Revolutions: Drawing the Links

In the late-Tsarist period, an urban revolution hit Russia. Major cities exploded in size. The population of St. Petersburg, the imperial capital, trebled from just over 500,000 in 1864 to 1,500,000 in 1900, rising to 2,500,000 by 1917.

It wasn’t just Russia’s capital city that was on the rise. By 1917, approximately 20 percent of the population of the entire empire lived in cities. Some of the most remarkable examples of city growth took place in Siberia, a traditionally underpopulated (by Slavic Russians, at least) region of the empire. And it was here, especially, that another factor came into play. Transportation.

At the same time as Russia’s dramatic urbanisation began, another revolution was underway – a transport revolution. Its most impressive aspect was the growth of Russia’s railways. By the 1890s, the prime example of Russia’s railways was the Trans-Siberian (or “Great Siberian”, as it was called at the time) railway.

Both urbanisation and railways were intimately linked, and in ways not always entirely obvious. These twin features of late-Imperial Russia are important to teaching Russian History before 1917. They give an opportunity not just to examine two distinct, separate developments, but also to delve into their connections.

This is the purpose of this brief post.

 

The Trans-Siberian and Urban Development

In the 1890s, the Trans-Siberian railway began to transform Siberia. Built in six monster segments beginning in 1891, its original route stretched 5,000 miles, becoming the longest single line in the world. And despite its faults (slow trains and uncomfortable carriages foremost amongst them), it brought huge and significant change to the towns and cities through which it passed.

The route of the Trans-Siberian railway

These changes are revealed in a contemporary source, Asiatic Russia (Aziatskaia Rossiia), published in 1914. Amongst other information on Siberian towns and cities, the encyclopaedic volume listed their changing populations between 1897, when the first empire-wide census had been taken in Russia, and 1911.

Growth of Siberian towns and cities in the early 1900s. Source: Aziatskaia Rossiia (1914)

Overall, towns and cities in Siberia appear to have seen a consistent and remarkable growth. But take a closer look, and you’ll see a more subtle trend.

All major towns and cities grew. But some grew far more significantly than others.

The populations of Krasnoiarsk, Omsk, and Vladivostok roughly trebled, that of Irkutsk grew by 150%, and Chita’s grew by almost seven times. Most spectacularly, Novo-Nikolaevsk (today Novosibirsk) boomed out of nothing to become a city of over 63,000 people. By contrast, Tobol’sk and Iakutsk grew marginally, while Tomsk’s population slightly more than doubled.

The reason for the discrepancy in urban growth lies in these towns’ and cities’ location, and, more specifically, their proximity to the Trans-Siberian line. All those cities whose populations grew most rapidly were on the main line. All those whose populations barely grew were not. Tomsk, whose population did grow significantly, but far less quickly than cities like Krasnoiarsk, Omsk, or Novo-Nikolaevsk, was on a spur of the Trans-Siberian line, and not on the main line itself.

This fact struck observers at the time. In 1897, one suggested that Tomsk would be left “stranded”, with the “doom of the city almost sealed” by the fact it was not on the mainline. “This”, notes historian Janet Hartley, “was an exaggeration – Tomsk remained an important administrative, commercial and cultural center – but some of its economic importance did shift to Omsk”, the city main city to the west, which was on the Trans-Siberian line.

 

Growing Cities, Changing Cities

Just as important as the growing importance of cities along the Trans-Siberian was their changing character. City life, along with populations and urban environments, was transformed along the railway line.

Most obviously, cities grew – sprawling in an often unplanned and chaotic manner – to accommodate new arrivals. In many cases, these new arrivals were workers associated with the railway itself. A case in point is the city of Krasnoiarsk, which developed two new districts, called Nikolaevsk and Alekseevsk, that quickly became the home to blue-collar workers and their families.

Krasnoiarsk city map, c. 1905. Note Nikolaevsk district to the west of the city centre. Alekseevsk district is directly to the north of Nikolaevsk.

The workers’ districts, which were constructed “at an American tempo” (i.e. extremely fast), lacked many of the urban amenities of Krasnoiarsk’s city centre. Divided from the main city by the railway line, they were quite literally “the wrong side of the tracks”. Yet for Krasnoiarsk’s politics, they would become extremely important. It was here that a revolutionary movement, led by radical Social Democrats, would emerge in the city, helping it become an important player in both the 1905 and 1917 revolutions.

Urbanisation, therefore, was crucial to cities’ political radicalisation.

 

Teaching the Railway and its Impacts

The development of Russian cities and railways – and more specifically Siberia and the Trans-Siberian line – is a key issue to consider with students. A lesson attempting to do just this can be found here.

What do students need to know? Here are a few suggestions.

1. Urbanisation went hand-in-hand with Russia’s transport revolution, which in turn made Russia a world leader in railways.
2. Cities close to main railway lines rapidly grew in importance, overtaking those further from railways.
3. The character of cities – demographic, economic, and political – rapidly changed, something that would have great significance for how future events including the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 would play out in those cities.

Selected Further Reading

Alistair Dickins, "Spaces of Revolution: The Spatial Tactics of Urban Socialism in a Siberian City, c. 1895-1905", Revolutionary Russia 36, 1, pp. 1-33: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09546545.2023.2208041

Janet M. Hartley, Siberia: A History of the People, Yale University Press (2014)

Ivan V. Nezgodine, "The Impact of the Trans-Siberian Railway on the Architecture and Urban Planning of Siberian Cities", in Ralf Roth and Marie-Noelle Polino, The City and the Railway in Europe, Ashgate (2003)