Teach Secondary Issue 14.2

have students carefully consider the key ingredients of evaluative work. Writing in the journal Teaching History , Rachel Foster and Sarah Gadd acknowledge that analytical objectives ought to involve more than simply creating paragraphs; the challenge should be centred on helping students with their “ Organisation, construction, methods, and extended analysis” . Foster and Gadd go on to argue that students need “ Criteria by which to select information in order to deploy it as evidence, or to judge its strength ”. ‘Judgement and strengths’ thus become part of the analytical process, with the objective being to, “ Appreciate the disciplinary distinctiveness of history as a form of knowledge. ” Yet this ‘disciplinary distinctiveness’ that forms the analytical process isn’t stemmed within any of the various PEE strategies. It’s established afterwards, through dialogue with the teacher, as a kind of ‘post- game debate’ learning experience that falls outside of the scaffolded game. Disciplinarydialogue We know frommeta-analysis how important the learning environment is for academic success. PEE strategies might sometimes correlate with high grades, but it’s surely teachers’ broader disciplinary dialogue that produces this added value. PEE strategies don’t even seem compatible with what exam boards are looking for. Can they encourage students to, as required by OCR in 2023, “ Develop independent and critical thinking? ” Or, as OCR previously wanted in 2022, help to underpin a “ skills-based approach, building confidence in developing and articulating a fresh, individual response” ? Do these scaffolds, “ Inspire, challenge and motivate every student, no matter what their level of ability ”? Because that’s what AQAwas calling for in 2022. As Louisa Enstone observed, by training students to follow a mapped writing stem, we are failing to help themnavigate a form that requires “ Expert thought, understanding, processing ”. We can see for ourselves how examiners feel about PEE scaffolds in AQA’s 2022 ‘English Literature Modern Prose and Drama’ examiner’s report: “ Some students, who potentially might have worked at a higher level, were rather limited and constrained by overly formulaic [PEE / PETAL- type] approaches. While there may be some virtue in such methods for students looking to move into level 3, for those aiming higher, these approaches tend to militate against the extended development of ideas, which is necessary for access to the higher reaches of the mark scheme. ” A reductive approach Learners often lack sufficient prior knowledge or cognitive structures to effectively discover new knowledge on their own. Analysis has to be explicitly taught, but many teachers don’t possess the experience or subject knowledge needed to effectively teach ‘analytical domain’ writing. The onus is therefore on departments to formulate discipline-specific models showing what good analysis looks like. On their own, command words like ‘explain’, ‘analyse’, ‘evaluate’ and ‘link’ are insufficient to cover the different disciplinary routines often grouped together under ‘analysis’. Good analytical writing demands a holistic approach, but ‘the PEE paragraph’ method is reductive. The one element isn’t indicative of the whole. It’s akin to defining ‘flowers’ by their ABOUT THE AUTHOR Aaron Swan is an English teacher, Language For Learning, and has been a head of department final intended objective – we overlook the root, stem and leaves that must exist before that objective can be reached. So how do we define, describe and set out, formally and accurately, what the analytical process actually is, for teachers still needing such instruction? In teaching circles, there’s still almost no referent for this analytical skill, and so there remains a pedagogical need that outlines exactly what is expected when we are asking students to analyse. 65 teachwire.net/secondary E N G L I S H