Help Your Learners Write Better Essays with Mike Gershon’s Essay Writing Toolkit
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🎯 Techniques and activities you can use to improve your learners’ essay writing skills.
🎯 Suitable for secondary (mainly KS4 and KS5).
🎯 Refresh your approach to teaching essay writing and discover new strategies to use with your learners.
🎯 Bring novelty, variety and renewed interest to your lessons.
🎯 Simplify your planning and save time. The Toolkit contains 60+ strategies, activities and techniques you can use to develop effective, enjoyable lessons for every class you teach.
I created the Essay Writing Toolkit when I was teaching GCSE and A Level.
My goal was to bring together strategies, activities and techniques I’d used to help my learners with their essay writing, as well as ones I’d seen used successfully by colleagues.
Across the Toolkit, you’ll find thirty entries and 60+ strategies in total.
For many of the entries, I’ve included three examples of how you can help your learners improve the quality of their essay writing.
Easily Plan for Improvement and Save Time
Dip into the Toolkit whenever you’re planning a lesson that involves some element of essay writing.
Weave the techniques that resonate into your existing framework for teaching essay writing.
Or use the Toolkit to spark off new ideas and creative approaches to essay writing that you know will land well with your learners.
The Toolkit is FREE to download and FREE to use.
It is published by Gershon Learning Limited under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Creative Commons license.
That means you can download it, freely share it and redistribute it with attribution and a link to this site, but you cannot use it for commercial purposes or create any derivatives of it.
Download The Essay Writing Toolkit Today
Here’s the PDF version for you to download FREE:
What’s Inside?
Here’s a sneak peak of some of the thirty entries you’ll find inside The Essay Writing Toolkit:
- 🎯 Alternative Plans
- 🎯 Writing Guides
- 🎯 Read Aloud
- 🎯 Speed Debating
- 🎯 Silent Debate
- 🎯 Evaluation Tables
- 🎯 First Sentences
- 🎯 Model Answers
- 🎯 Group Essays
- 🎯 Viewpoints
- 🎯 Cut and Paste
- 🎯 Critiquing Arguments
- 🎯 Purpose
- 🎯 Essay Planner
- 🎯 Introductions
- 🎯 Different Arguments
Using The Essay Writing Toolkit in Your Planning
The Essay Writing Toolkit is non-directive and curriculum agnostic.
You can use the resource any way you like.
Here are three ideas to get you started.
✅ Create a framework for teaching essay writing by pulling together a selection of strategies contained within the toolkit.
This is especially useful if you are a new teacher, or if you are teaching essay writing for the first time.
✅ Diagnose where your learners are most struggling with their essay writing and use the Toolkit to identify suitable strategies and activities you can use in response.
✅ Share the Toolkit with your learners and invite them to identify strategies or activities they think would most help them to develop the quality of their writing.
For me, this is a technique I would only use at A Level.
Part of the reason for using it is to get learners thinking about the different aspects of essay writing (as exemplified in the Toolkit), as well as having them self-assess what they need to focus on to improve.
P.S. You can access all my resources in one place on the free resources hub page.
