Investigating teachers’ use of exemplars: Difficulties in managing effective dialogues

Abstract

Exemplars are sample texts chosen to illustrate levels of quality or competence (Sadler, 2005). They are typically used to help develop student understanding of criteria and standards of assessment (Hendry, Bromberger, & Armstrong, 2011) and have been shown to improve the quality of subsequent work (Rust, Price, & O'Donovan, 2003; Wimshurst & Manning, 2013). A common issue cited in the literature, however, is that students often see exemplars as models to follow and there are teacher fears that students might copy unproductively (Handley & Williams, 2011). Despite the benefits of exemplars, there is still relatively little known about how teachers share and use exemplars in their teaching. The aim of this research was to explore how teachers managed the use of exemplars with their students. The study adopted a constructivist grounded theory methodology to theorize how teachers manage the use of exemplars. The study involved observations and pre/post interviews with twelve participants who were all teaching English for Academic Purposes (EAP) at a university in Hong Kong. The findings revealed a wide range of practices with regard to exemplar sharing. There were noticeable differences in exemplar decisions, including the source of the exemplars, whether or not to modify them, and the number used. There were also differences in the extent and manner in which assessment criteria were explicitly highlighted before or after students’ analysed exemplars. Iterative cycles of data analysis enabled the construction of a typology of three exemplar sharing approaches; a structured approach, an exploratory approach and a dialogic approach. Irrespective of approach, all the participants found dialogues difficult to manage; the most dominant practice in the findings being dialogue as closed questioning. The implications for practice revolve around the issue of managing dialogue about exemplars. In order to reduce teachers’ concerns about copying, a dialogic approach is recommended (Carless & Chan, 2017). Yet, there are tensions that exist between the effective utilization of pre-set assessment criteria and the promotion of co-constructed criteria with students and tensions around the choice and sequencing of exemplars. Dialogue is likely to be enhanced if preset criteria are withheld until after students have co-constructed criteria with their teachers, and if students have already written an outline or draft of an assignment before they analyze and discuss exemplars.