Stop PEEing!

A side-effect and hangover of generic skills based curricula has been the rise of transferrable sentence starters. In history examples are ‘one the one hand’, ‘furthermore’ and ‘moreover’.

Teachers  who use these, of which I have been one, typically deliver substantive content and then provide these generic phrases and words to help pupils structure their writing.

This is worrying. At best such an approach results in functional, workmanlike answers and at worst it results in a tick box approach in which pupils are led to believe they should always follow the same formula regardless of what they are writing about. I think this is also true of formulas such as PEE, PEA and PEEL, on which many pupils have become completely dependent, with a really depressing question I’ve been asked far too many times being “how many PEE paragraphs should we write?”

Perhaps this wouldn’t be as much of a problem if such genericisms were disciplinarily authentic but , of course, they are not. Marc Morris does not begin arguments with ‘on the one hand I believe’ and I’m sure Mary Beard’s editor does not send back her manuscripts annotated with comments like ‘this does not follow PEE, please rewrite.’ While Daisy Christodoulou has convinced me that stages of learning should not resemble the desired end result, I remain worried because for many pupils such generic frames have actually become the ends rather than the means.

This sort of practice is not solely the fault of teachers. In a context in which exam results have come to be seen as the absolute aim and purpose of all education, it is quite logical to look for the most efficient methods of maximising marks. Generic sentence starters and connective phrases are often drawn from exam board mark schemes, which then cascade down through the years until every pupil in every class, at whatever stage they are at, is aiming to write to meet the requirements of the schools chosen exam board.

Generic formulas are also, I think, reassuring to non-specialist SLT who are able to grasp them more easily than they can do substantive or disciplinary material outside their own area of expertise. An SLT member with a Mathematics background is much more easily able to absorb and understand the formula PEEL than they can historical disagreement around the severity of the Treaty of Versailles or literary controversy around the meaning of Lord of the Flies. This can lead to a disproportionate emphasis on generic writing tools, frames or phrases in lesson observation, book scrutiny or other accountability measures, which can cause specialist teachers to adopt such approaches even when they don’t really want to.

To free ourselves and our pupils from the chains of genercism we must first accept that good writing is contingent on what is being written about. They are not separable. The shape and structure of our argument should be influenced by the content we are concerned with to avoid creating unhelpful and misleading distortions. An argument about the extent of change and continuity after the Norman Invasion should be structured differently to an analysis of King John’s failings as a king.

If we are to accept this, and we should, then we must also accept that sentence starters and other phrases should vary according to the material pupils are writing about. This open up rather exciting avenues to explore. In history, Rachel Foster and Jim Carroll have, for a long time, been advocating the use of more historical scholarship in schools. We should all be doing this because by doing so we show pupils that the substantive content they have been studying has been interpreted differently by very clever people and expose them to the specific phrasing they use to form their arguments. This is in keeping with the vision that all pupils have an entitlement to learn ‘the best that has been thought and said’, because for this to be more than an empty catchphrase pupils must learn and understand the disciplinary as well as the substantive.

Perhaps even more importantly, crafting sentence starters and other phrases that are informed by the content pupils are writing about creates greater opportunity for really beautiful writing. This became clear to me yesterday at a Doug Lemov workshop on writing, in which the examples of sentence starters he and his colleague Colleen Driggs shared were tailored specifically to the material. In the videos used to support the examples I as struck by how often the teachers used directions such as “write a beautiful, artful sentence” and how disingenuous such an inspiring instruction would be if a teacher followed it with “remember to write in a PEA paragraph!”

Instead of asking pupils to begin an argument on the Treaty of Versailles with “On one hand..”, how much more inspiring would it be to begin with “The severity of the Treaty has been the subject of ongoing, profound historical disagreement because..”?

This is something I will continue to think more about and trying to incorporate more into my own planning and teaching.

Other people’s thoughts are, as always, very welcome.