Some years ago, I was privileged enough to work closely with an English teacher, Amy, in a comprehensive secondary school in order to help her overcome some difficulties she was having. Please don’t misunderstand this, I was not brought in as part of a competency process or because the school had concerns about her practice. There were no concerns at all, and she was a very effective teacher. It was in fact our idea that we would work together simply because we wanted to learn. She was quite young and had only recently qualified and this level of concern for her own professional development clearly shows that she had a very bright future in teaching.
Amy was having difficulty with a Year 7 class (11/12 year old pupils) who regularly seemed to lose interest in writing answers about Michael Morpurgo’s novel Private Peaceful. She was experiencing a problem that I know many teachers face: the difficulties pupils seem to have when writing formal answers to open-ended discussion-based questions. The institutional and departmental response to her challenges, while also aspiring to inculcate pupils into good writing habits, was to suggest that she train her pupils to use ‘PEE’ paragraphs to ‘scaffold’ their writing. PEE paragraphs have become a ubiquitous technique in schools for helping pupils to structure written responses and aims to ensure that paragraphs contain a point (P), some evidence for it or an example (E) and an explanation of it (E). Curiously, the pupils loved the book and engaged in dialogue and oral discussions very effectively but when it came to recording their thinking and organising it into PEE paragraphs, the pupils became restive, reluctant and occasionally rambunctious.
There seemed to be a repetitive pattern to this. Whenever Amy set the pupils PEE paragraphs to write, a forest of hands would go up and she would have to repeat the instructions over and over again. As she dealt with individual problems inevitably some pupils were left waiting with hands up and nothing to do presenting opportunities for mischief and bad behaviour. Amy began to feel after a while that the pupils were in fact raising their hands pretending not to understand what to do so that they might get her to do it for them or create opportunities for more mischief. Towards the end of one of these lessons when pupils had been disruptive and despite many re-caps, Amy gave the following reprimand to the class.
Amy: Right, let’s just have a little word with everybody please, facing this way quietly before we go to lunch. Can I have your attention, stop writing while I just have a word with you please. I’ve not been impressed with you if I’m being completely honest with a lot of you. You’ve been very chatty, you’ve not been very nice to other members of the class and you seem to me to that you should be back in primary school as your behaviour isn’t very fitting of a Year 7 in Radnor at the moment. This work is hard, PEE paragraphs are new and they’re hard. Some people do not understand them – some people will not understand them until they get to Year 8 or 9 and that’s why, to be fair to everybody else, we need to focus on our own work for ourselves, we need to be ensuring we do our best work, so when I mark this and give you a level on it and that level goes home, it genuinely reflects how hard you are working in English at the moment. If you want to produce your best work, you can’t be talking to other people and you can’t be distracting other people, because that’s not very fair and it means that no one is going to produce their best work, so let’s make sure that in the last 2 or 3 minutes we are taking responsibility for our learning, we’re looking through our sheet, we’re working out where we’re up to, because I don’t know where you’re up to because I don’t know what you’ve written. There’s something written on this board here which is going to help you if you’re not really sure how to structure your paragraph, that will help you so let’s have the last few minutes before lunch with some real hard work.
Pupil: How long till lunch?
So when Amy read this back to herself some time afterwards, she looked quite embarrassed and recognised that this was not at her best. In sharing this here it is not the intention to embarrass Amy or anyone else who may have indulged in reprimands like this. We spent some time reflecting and thinking about it and those discussions genuinely helped us both to learn. In the end it is what we learn that is important. I will attempt to encapsulate some of the points in those discussions here.
Amy and I considered this to be an example of poor practice and definitely something to be avoided in the future. There are several reasons for this which although they may be obvious are worth spelling out. The indiscriminate address to the whole class is one problem because there were individuals who were working without any problems who have been lumped together as in need of a reprimand. This is clearly unfair and feted to turn those pupils who were supportive against the teacher. The reference to PEE paragraphs being hard and that ‘some’ won’t understand them until Years 8 and 9, is open to the question, which was not voiced, ‘why are we learning something we won’t be able to understand?’. Actually from looking at the work of pupils, it was clear that they did and could have understood them so Amy was underestimating unnecessarily the pupils’ abilities and in using the word ‘some’ was highlighting that a group of individuals are slower learners than others. This may have been true but it is often indiscreet to underline it so publicly. The reference to assessment levels going home reflecting how hard the pupils have worked is also given as an implied threat. The link between assessment and potential humiliation, pressure, threat, and fear is made very obviously here and causes many problems for children. It is contrary to the intention of much assessment research as it turns assessment processes into a crude stick to beat children with.
I have shared this now with many practitioners, teachers and trainees and used it to highlight other issues beyond just the above points. In some of these sessions, and it has not been many, some have defended this reprimanding approach and suggested that it should not be avoided at all if it is necessary. I summarise the points sometimes given for this view here. Firstly, that teachers and pupils are engaged in a cat and mouse game in the classroom. Teachers are trying to get the children to work and the children are trying to find ways to get out of doing the work. Teachers should be clever about finding ways to encourage children to do work, but if the children refuse to do it, in the end teachers have to exercise their authority to force them to. Therefore it is important for teachers to make displays of their authority in this way. Secondly, children are not actually learning anything unless the work is hard and difficult and requires a lot of effort. If the children find something easy then they won’t learn much from it so teachers should make things difficult for pupils so that they learn more. Thirdly, assessment levels being sent home or officially reported which grade learners’ submissions and enable comparisons to be made with others happens all the time throughout one’s educational career. This is just a fact and we can’t dress it up, if there is any humiliation or threat involved then this is good because it motivates people to avoid it or let it not happen again.
I therefore end this post in asking readers to involve themselves in a discussion about this. I have given my own views and I do disagree with the contrary position but as always in any respectful discussion we must be open-minded – and there are likely to be thoughts and reflections that had not occurred to us.