Power 3 Planning

Power 3 Planning

This technique is designed to support pupils with planning the structure for a piece of extended writing that may have detailed sentences and paragraphs. I have continued to find this beneficial over the last few years.

I first observed this technique when I was fortunate enough to travel to Ontario, Canada as part of the DfE funded TIPD scheme. I owe a debt of gratitude to the Simcoe Muskoka Catholic Dostrict Board for their hospitality and range of exceptional ideas. We saw the power 3 planning tool being used in an elementary school with grade 2 pupils who were around 7 years old. Pupils were completing some writing about their favourite activities to do at the weekend. With guidance and modelling from the teacher, pupils offered ideas such as going to the park. This was extended by explaining the the swings were fun as you could go really high. Pupils independently added two more ideas of their own to build the plan for their paragraph. What struck me as powerful was that once pupils had the keywords listed, they wrote cohesive sentences with little support from the teacher.

Since returning I decided that this would be especially useful to support pupils when planning assessments. I often find that the pupils struggle to know how to develop and link evidence about places. Another problem is waffling and repetition. Using the power 3 helps them to establish links and plan out their paragraphs independently. If pupils are allowed to plan collaboratively this can benefit mixed ability groups. I also find that when pupils complete plans on A3 paper in teams, these can be beneficial if a pupil has missed the planning lesson as the A3 plans can be bluetacked around the room for use during the assessment. Stem words can be provided to help support pupils, or completed Power 3 plans can be critiqued by pupils, this worked especially well when the power 3 plan was deliberately muddled as pupils were able to reorganise information to establish better links between facts and create paragraphs that made more sense.