PE+ Part Two: Initial Evaluation

It's been a term since I resolved to do what I could to stop students' writing becoming formulaic, using the PE+ paragraphs I developed with @ACCooke5 as the main tool to do this. You can read the initial blog I wrote in October here:http://borismcdonald.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/pe-part-one-down-with-peeal.html . This shows you some of the resources we created to aid students with the new approach, as well as outlining my plans for actioning it in my classroom.

In this blog, however, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on my teaching of PE+; I want to investigate whether it has achieved what I was after and look at how I could develop my teaching of it in the future.  That being said, it is already noticeable (in assessments at KS3 and KS4) how the PE+ model gave more able students a more flexible model to develop their ideas through as well as giving less able students a structure that encouraged them to add more detail into their analysis of literature.

Teaching Students How to Use It

When doing this, modelling was vital.  Where I trialled the method without first modelling what to do, students really struggled to get to grips with what to write.  Even now, when going back to PE+ after a couple of lessons away from it, I still quickly model how to write the key components of the paragraph.  This includes giving a choice of sentence starters for less able students (I teach mixed ability) to give them a start for their response.

Likewise, it was helpful to students to have a differentiated version of the PE+ mat (which you can view in my previous blog). I projected this onto the board and restricted the amount of questions for each section as well as providing an optional order to write them into (thanks, @TeachMNU, for that suggestion).

As you can see, here I used the hexagon model (you can see more examples on my Twitter account) to get students to plan their work before writing it up. This encouraged many students to go into more detail than usual, as they were motives by filling in the boxes.  After writing into a paragraph, they then highlighted and annotate the various sections to demonstrate which areas has detailed explanations.

Using these hexagons to plan was also beneficial when getting students to consider an overall essay structure: we did group work where they would link each other's hexagons together to create a group essay plan and then did their own as a plan for their assessments. This example is from a year 8 student:

Areas to Develop

As this was a new concept, I expected some teething issues and the main one concerned students' desire to fill in every box. For some students, this meant that they added in random contextual factors without really relating them to the point: in future I'm planning to go over the important of linking everything to the point and only filling in the relevant sections as part of the modelling process. 

It is also true that, for less able students, the need for an order (what order to write sections in) led to some evidence of formulaic responses. However, I feel that this is something that they might grasp with practise and it is important to note that these students were still producing a more detailed explanation/analysis than they did with PEEAL.

Lastly, there were some issues applying the method with my Year 11 class, who has difficulty grasping the method.  For them, I reverted to PEEAL (mainly due to the time constraints when it comes to preparing them for the exams).  However, I'm going to trial using the group essay planning activity when revision texts for the Literature GCSE, replacing the section names with the relevant assessment objectives (for example, AO4 instead of context).

Next Steps

I now want to focus the development of PE+ to apply it to the new GCSE specification, so that it will be beneficial for essays written in exams (where detailed planning is not an option).  As we are currently doing GCSE style assessments with our year 9 students, this is an ideal time to start.

Moreover, I'm going to create a series of flipped learning videos for different sections of PE+. These could be used both to teach students the overall method as well as serving as an independent study guide for students who need extra help (to be accessed at home or through mobile devices in the classroom). 

PE+ Part One: Down with PEEAL!

"The most important thing I've learnt in English this year is PEEAL."

Year 7 Student

The Most Important Thing

It was the end of NQT year and I felt like I wasn't the only one who needed to reflect the year's achievements.  My Year 7 class had made a massive journey: bridging the gap between primary and secondary; learning to give a speech in front of the class; learning research skills; exploring how language is used effectively by other writers and in our own writing.  However, when I asked them each to fill out a postit to say 'the most important thing' they'd learnt in English, the majority of my students referenced PEEAL paragraphs.  For those who aren't aware, this is a variation on the popular PEE format that adds dedicated space for analysis and links.  In my school, we also use mats to help students use this structure; these give helpful sentence starters as well as a brief description of what each part of the paragraph should contain.

PEEAL and the mats we used were invaluable to me last year. It gave the students a structure to remember what to include when analysing texts, as well as ensuring that they fulfilled certain AFs in their work.  Yet the problem with structures such as this (which has been rightly pointed out by exam boards) is that they are too formulaic and restricts students from developing original analyses.  I also found that students' depth of analysis was stunted, as they would usually write one sentence for each part of the paragraph before moving onto their next point.

This point was also highlighted by our Director of English and Head of English, who highlighted the concern when they delivered training on the new KS3 curriculum last July.  Instead they proposed that we start to use less formulaic approaches for most students, the main suggestion being the idea from a recent SLDM.  This approach had the 'Point' and 'Evidence' in the centre (as they should still lead the analytical paragraph), surrounded by possible areas to develop further: word, analysis, context, impact, audience and purpose.

Creating Resources

To me, the idea seemed vague.  I realised that freedom was needed to get students to explore more original responses, but I also appreciated that students would need support in using the new concept.  To support the teaching of it, @ACCooke5 and I sat down to create a new, anti-PEEAL mat for students to use as an aid.  We agreed that the sentence starter ideas from the PEEAL mats were useful, but we also felt that students could get better responses if they were given questions to explore in each section.  This was the final product:

Teaching PE+

One of @ACCooke5 's students coined the term PE+ as the name for our new paragraph structure, which I taught in a similar way to PEEAL: through modelling.

In the first few lessons of using the new concept, I would model my own PE+ paragraph on the board, using the laminated mat and getting students to help me with answers to the questions for each section.  This allowed us to talk about how I could structure my paragraph in different ways, before we then labelled each segment to show what we had included from the mat.

When introducing the new concept, students were generally elated to be using something new that wasn't as restrictive as PEEAL.  They were told that they needed to include their point and evidence (as always) but after this, they could pick whichever areas were relevant to develop in the rest of their paragraph.  I also stated that the length of each section could vary (depending on how much there was to be said).  Additionally, for those students who still needed a structure to 'complete', I would ask for certain areas to be filled in (as befitting the AFs we were covering in that lesson).  Fairly rapidly, I noticed that students' explanations were more developed and that they were choosing how to structure their paragraph so that each idea followed on from the last.  For example, they might explore the use of devices (analysis) and their effect on the reader (audience) before going on to discuss key words (word) and then going back to the effect on the reader (audience).

Nonetheless, there were still some students who stated that they felt more confident with the PEEAL format; they had the chance to access the PEEAL mats they were used to and completed their work using this structure.  The way I see it, this was them choosing a method of support that worked better for them and this was important to them generating their responses.

Structuring an Essay and Linking Points

I was keen to use this structure with my Year 10 class the start of September, as they started to prepare for the four hour GCSE Literature controlled assessment (comparing poetry with 'Romeo and Juliet').  However, if I were to do this it would be crucial to ensure that they were making links between the poems and the play: something previously facilitated by the 'link' in PEEAL.

To help with this, I drew something from the ideas I have come across whilst exploring SOLO taxonomy: hexagons.  However, rather than linking individual ideas (one idea on each hexagon), I thought the PE+ model would convert perfectly into a hexagon shape.  Therefore, the plan for each paragraph could be created on this template:

Throughout our lessons, we would fill the boxes in the hexagon with ideas, before then writing up into individual paragraphs.

The next step was to get students making links and using these to create a flowing argument across their paragraphs.  For this, I introduced Janus-Faced sentences (which I discovered through John Tomsett's presentation at a Teachmeet last summer).  We started by completing the relevant sections of two hexagons before then finding a way to link two of the sides.  Students would then create a Janus-Faced sentence to link the two paragraphs together, which they used in their actual paragraphs.

This meant that their final plans would be a tessellation of hexagons (their homework this half term is to work on this essay plan before we start writing in the first week back).

Moreover, I have used the same idea with a Year 7 class to create a whole class essay plan based around T.S. Eliot's 'Macavity the Mystery Cat'.  Below you can see how each student filled out an individual hexagon before they linked together their ideas to create their essay plan.

If they were then to write this (which is the next step for my Year 10 class), they could simply plot a path through the hexagons, using the links to create a structure that flows and ignoring any points that go off on a tangent from the main concept.

An Ongoing Project

Obviously, this is a concept that is still being developed both my myself, @ACCooke5 and our colleagues who are now using the PE+ mat and hexagons in their own lessons.  Yet, so far, they've been successful: though the use of modelling has been key to this success.

Bearing this is mind: I'd like to make an invitation for feedback.  If you have any ideas on how to improve this, I'd be really grateful.  It might even be that you already use a similar idea and have been implementing it in a different way.  Any ideas are welcome (just tweet me at @BorisMcDonald).