Persuasive writing: testing two openings on 200 pupils at a partner school before writing a bulletin article.

Year 7 are writing a piece urging pupils to swap single-use plastic bottles for the new refill stations, which a partner school in another town is fitting this term too, and the article will run in both schools' bulletins. This time they test their writing on readers they have never met. Over two lessons, each group of four first writes two rival openings in a shared Google Doc, one built on a statistic and one on a short story. The teacher puts all eight pairs of openings into one anonymous Microsoft Forms survey that form tutors at the partner school run in tutor time across Years 7 to 11, asking only the respondent's year group, which opening in each pair would make them change bottles, and an optional one-line reason. Around two hundred responses are back by the second lesson, and the partner school's Year 7 class has added comments beside each pair of openings in the shared Google Doc, approved by both teachers, saying what would and would not work on pupils in their school. Each group reads the split for its own pair by year group, with the reasons and comments, then rewrites its opening and plans the rest of the article around what persuaded its readers, sometimes keeping the losing opening's best line. Groups finish with a draft annotated with the evidence behind each choice, and the two teachers pick the article for both bulletins from the strongest.

Tools: Google Docs, Microsoft Forms Nine ideas for your own version in Generate