Breaking free of P.E.E. – by Georgia Thomas

‘Death to the PEE paragraph,’ they said, seven weeks into the PGCE English course.

I cried.

With shock and horror, I wondered if it was too late to turn back. What evil villains would so casually and cruelly rip from my tightly clutching fingers the one tool with which I had learnt to write essays?

Reluctant – and more than a little defensive – I took my seat in our subject studies seminar and I picked up our reading, ready to discredit every word of it. PEE couldn’t really be wrong, could it?

And as I read, I seemed to be justified. Every argument they threw up against the PEE, I had something to refute it with – this wasn’t my experience of it, this wasn’t how it had to be used, these teachers were just doing it wrong, it wasn’t PEE’s fault! And yet…

Niggling in the back of my mind, their arguments began to stick, and to make me think about what the true purpose of PEE was. More than any reading, more than any lecture, it was the voices of my fellow PGCEers, those who had been taught like me and hated it, those who had never heard of it and were aghast at the idea, those who had turned their back on it, that began to sway me. Not entirely, to be sure, but enough to make me wonder. What would a world without PEE look like? If we took away any structure, allowed students to think and to write how they liked, what would happen? There was only one way to find out.

My anti-PEE experiment came about rather unintentionally, with the loveliest of Year 7 classes who just so happened to teach me more than I taught them in this particular lesson.

‘Teach them a bit about the different ways of reading,’ their class teacher asked me, to round off a reading-heavy lesson. So we started with a competition to hunt down a list of quotes from the chapter we’d just read, as an exercise in scanning. A roaring success! But close reading… that would be harder.

How to get them, in the last ten minutes at the end of the lesson, to really read a text and find their own way into it, to have something to say? This was no time for PEE, that was for sure. It was time to get inventive.

For this highly mixed-attainment class, it would not be enough to ask them to think about one set question in relation to an extract, or to find and explain the function of a particular literary device – they worked at such different levels. So I started to think about the thinking that goes into creating a good analytical response to a text.

What questions do you have to ask yourself to get to a good answer?

I began to list them, with the intention of distributing them across the class in relation to prior attainment ranges. But then I realised that I had no right to decide which students would be able to answer which questions. Why not let them do that for themselves? So I typed them all up onto a grid, I gave them space to ask their own questions if they didn’t like any of mine, and I handed them out for the last bit of the lesson, expecting to have to pick it up again in the next lesson as we’d run out of time.

Five minutes. That’s all they had.

And yet their answers were incredible.

Everyone had picked a different question, everyone had given a different answer, and – and this is the most important bit – everyone wanted to tell me what they had chosen. They were actually excited to explain to me what they found interesting in this page of text from ‘Private Peaceful’. They wanted me to know that this particular quote was exciting because they’d realised it meant this or that or anything at all.

So we did pick it up again in the next lesson, not because we had run out of time, but because there was so much they wanted to say. We talked about explaining why something was important, and about linking up their answers to multiple questions if they had the same why. And then we talked about how they might use these to answer questions about the text, and everyone had a go at writing the essay question that they’d be answering with these explanations and I realised… this was essay-writing without PEE.

They had found their own way into the text, into what they found interesting and exciting, and that was the driving force behind their responses, not any attempt to conform to some arbitrary structural prison that provided no motivation for independent thought.

This first use of the guiding question grid changed my view of essay-writing so entirely that I wonder what would happen if I used this repeatedly with a class throughout the year, shifting the focus or increasing the independence of it until they are asking these questions of themselves without my prompting. What kind of individual and interesting essays might this class be able to produce by the end of the year? It saddens me that, with this particular class, I may never know, but its potential is, nevertheless, so very exciting.