Instructors give individual students or student teams a template of sentence stems that provides the shape of a short essay, but not the content. Students complete the sentences, expressing their ideas in their own words, but they do so within a clear and organised framework. No teaching tool can guarantee that students will engage in hard, rigorous thought, but templates can stimulate and shape such thought, guiding them through the steps that constitute analysis and critical thinking and requiring them to make the key intellectual moves that they may not do on their own.