Short Write

Contributed by:

Musostudy

Intended Learning Outcome:

To improve confidence with academic writing

Tool:

To encourage students to write, can set them small writing tasks in class. These could become part of a final assessment essay.

Activity:

Compile a list of headings for students to write about, relevant to your session/module topic or something in the music-business news.

Set a time limit, say 10 minutes, for students to write.

Students swap their work with a peer and they review and discuss each other’s writing.

How:

You could have different headings so a few subjects are covered in the session or you could repeat this process over a few weeks leading up to assessment time.

You may want to scaffold this with extra information on the knowledge to be written about.

Examples:

‘The health and safety implications for being a bass player that I consider important are.’ Students may write about posture, RSI etc. This writing will form part of their practice diary.

Large Group Teaching:

This is a solo activity however you could get students to review each others work in small groups.

Online Teaching:

Students could paste their text into Zoom personal chat to share with their peer or they could email it to each other.

Success:

Students are confident at expressing themselves through their writing.

Next Steps:

Get students to come up with their own subjects based on your module.

Once students are more confident writing you could use the Sentence Starters for Critical Writing TLA to encourage them to write in a more academic style.

A fun way to make this interesting is to Synthesise the writing. Once they have written a paragraph each they pair-up and, together, rewrite just one paragraph covering their points and arguments (which may be contradictory). This way students learn how to weave other points of view into their writing.

Links to other activities:

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Acknowledgements:

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Resources:

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