With our Create Template feature, teachers can easily take existing templates and tweak them by adding additional frames and leaving prompt-specific advice and instructions within the frames themselves. It’s like having a guided discussion with your students about how to tackle specific types of paragraphs and essays as they write.

This feature provides a laser-focused scaffolding experience for students. Young and emerging writers get the hand-holding they need, and more proficient students can be given more complex directions that allow them to take their writing to new heights.

Good question! This is done in the teacher's essay dashboard. Have a look --

The template will appear accompanied by the prompt and criteria. Notice that there are just four writing frames in the original template and that the helping text within each frame is somewhat generic and not related specifically to the prompt. You will build your custom template based on this structure.

Using the pulldown menu, the teacher may begin adding frames to the customized template. You notice here that we added a hook as we'd like the students to provide some thoughtful background information before diving into addressing the prompt. We've also added a second set of evidence and analysis as we guide students to go back to the literature and find more text evidence to support their claims.

You'll also notice that with the custom template feature, teachers can write prompt-specific guidance and instruction directly into the writing frame area. In this instance, we're asking students to specific strategies to create their hook, and reminding them to mention the name of the poem and the poet in their thesis statement. You can be as specific as you want to be, and whatever you set up will appear in each student's writing area.

With this structure, we wanted to guide students through the composition of a formal letter of complaint to a company or organization. Notice the components we were able to require (including counterargument and rebuttal) and the detailed, prompt-specific guidance we were able to provide within the frames. Keep in mind, this only took about ten minutes to create and the resulting letters were very impressive.

A science teacher had a specific approach to writing lab reports, so he took an existing essaypop template and created the structure she wanted. Have a look --

And here is what the template looks like on the student end.

Any essay-specific template or structure can be created on-the-fly. So have fun, and trust us, you'll see the positive results in your student's writing.