Teach Secondary Issue 14.2

The problemwith PEE When it comes to teaching students how to write essays, we can do better than the ‘point, evidence, explain’ approach, says Aaron Swan ... M y own high school education finished in 2000, without me ever once hearing the term ‘writing scaffolds’. The period between the end of my education and the start of my teaching career, however, saw the emergence of ‘point, evidence, explain/explore’ (PEE) paragraphs. As early as 1998, SEND and ITT specialist Margaret Mulholland highlighted the “ Danger that pupils will use [writing scaffolds] without recognizing that it is merely a technique to develop extended writing which, with practice, they will develop for themselves. ” Yet despite this prescient warning, PEE- related scaffolds have spread like ground elder. Defining the PEE strategy As every English teacher is sure to know, PEE paragraphing is a scaffold for framing students’ analysis by ‘stepping’ their objective into a series of short, easily replicable phrases. This analysis might be one that students can perform verbally through back-and- forth dialogue with a subject specialist – but for them to do the same in their written responses, teachers will need to (re)acquaint themwith some basics. What is a paragraph? What shape is it?What purpose does it serve? Mulholland’s early work on PEE paragraphing (then called the ‘evidence sandwich’) sought to help students, “ Recognise for themselves where they have slipped into narrative [writing] , ” and out of the analytical style they’ll have spent time developing collaboratively in class. The PEE scaffold directs students to first make a Point , supported with Evidence (or a Quotation ). Depending on the practice being followed, that final E may require students to Explore , Explain , Evaluate or Analyse the point in question. The PEE scaffold has been adapted and modified in various ways over time. Attempts at incorporating ‘ Link ’ into the scaffold has previously given us the PEAL. Other variants have included the PEGEX ( P oint, Ex ample, Ex plain) technique, and a different spin on the original ‘evidence sandwich’ concept via Dale Banham’s HAMBURGER visualisation. To that we can add Claire Riley’s work on the concept of ‘inference layering’, and more recently, the ‘Statement, Quote, Inference’ technique adopted by HarperCollins for its Reimagine series of KS3 teaching materials. I’d bet there’s evenmore lurking out there… Whyuse PEE? On the surface, at least, the PEE scaffold and its ilk give off the appearance of good pedagogical practice by tickingmany of Rosenshine’s educational principles. They can be a useful aide-mémoire for students, by essentially removing the cognitive load associated with transcoding internal and abstract thinking into concrete written statements. This has the potential to lower the germane load of a given writing activity. Some teachers now believe that without such detailed guidance, their students will end up lacking awareness of the nature and requirements of argumentative, analytical writing, and become unable to generate genuine causal arguments. There is, however, some literature on the shortcomings of PEE paragraphs from teachers who have found them limiting – see (Foster, 2013), (Teo, 2015), (Evans, 2007) – and to these detractors, I would add my own voice. I believe that paragraph structuring acronyms are ineffective at producing analytical essays. The principle issue with these scaffolds is that, by focusing only on the tripartite line level of student responses, the wider logic and sequence of essay writing is never considered. Writing in the NATE journal Teaching English , Louisa Enstone remarked that, “ As an examiner, I was disheartened by the lack of knowledge and understanding demonstrated by these…meaningless ‘PEE paragraphs’ . ” Enstone went on to observe how “ PEE formula prevent convincing and sophisticated written expression, and limit opportunities for the creation of individual, detailed and powerful arguments. ” This is a point made elsewhere by history teachers Jennifer Evans and Gemma Pate, who argued the effect of these mechanical responses is that ultimately, “ Students atomise things, and lose a sense of what was being examined. ” Scaffolding the scaffold This poor essay writing performance prompted by PEE formula has, though, encouraged some teachers to undertake their own grassroots classroom research and attempt to develop some alternatives to the PEEmodel. Howmany of us have had to ‘scaffold the scaffold’ through dramatic expression, interpretive dance or fancy PowerPoint visualisations? The moment your scaffold itself needs scaffolding is the moment that PEE’s failure should be obvious. Reading back through the literature, I worry that the true intent behind PEE scaffolding was never to help students develop analytical skills, but rather to get them to write something passable . Margaret Mulholland has described how she tried, “ Persuading pupils to reason for themselves, and to develop independent argument. ” Personally, however, I feel we’d be better off exchangingMulholland’s investigative prompts for questions such as ‘ What is an argument? ’ and ‘ What constitutes analysis? ’, and “By focusingonlyon the tripartite line level of student responses, thewider logicand sequence of essaywriting is never considered” 64 teachwire.net/secondary