One of the most useful things a student can learn is how to recognise quality.

Because if you can understand why one response is stronger than another, you are already halfway towards improving your own work. It’s why I use this framework quite often in my tuition.

In this lesson, we weren’t practising a poetry question.

We were translating the mark scheme into plain English, applying it to two model answers I’d specifically written for the student, and then building an action plan from what we discovered.

The purple notes on the slides aren’t mine. They’re the student’s.

That’s the important part.

My goal isn’t to hand students better answers. It’s to help them develop their judgement, to recognise what makes an answer better in the first place.

The poem was Storm on the Island. The lesson was something much broader.

Thinking freely is only half the job. The other half is learning how to evaluate your own thinking honestly.