As part of my schools professional development programme all
teachers have to undertake some action research throughout the year. I decided
I would use my year 10 BTEC class, which is a boys only class, as I wanted to
improve the standard of their written work for their assignments. I was
teaching the Leadership unit and was finding their descriptions and
explanations of the skills, qualities and responsibilities of sports leaders,
were very limited. They had the gist of the content, but due to poor literacy
skills were unable to get near the merit criteria.
I collaborated with one of the English teachers to discuss
methods they used to get students to be able to explain something in detail. I
discovered through this that one of the core skills that students need to be
successful in their English Language exam was writing to explain (along with
describe and persuade which should come in handy during further tasks) and that
students spend lots of time working with a specific technique in order to do
this. They use P.E.E. paragraphs as a writing frame to help students to structure
their writing in order to explain effectively. P.E.E. paragraphs can be broken
down into
P=Point
E=Evidence
E=Explain
In some schools they sometimes use P.E.E.D., P.E.A. or
P.E.E.L., with the D standing for development, the A standing for Analyse or
the L standing for Ling, but I decided to stick to P.E.E. due to it being a
technique widely used within the English department.
In order to introduce this to the students we started by
discussing how important it is to use the skills that they are developing in
English across all of their subjects in order to gain the C grades in English
that most of the class are striving for. We then looked at the P.E.E. burger
diagram and discussed how we could use this within our written tasks in BTEC
Sport.
We then looked in detail at writing a P.E.E. paragraph for
Communication. We started by collaborating together to come up with our own
sentence starters that people could use if they wanted to with it broken down
into a P.E.E. paragraph. We came up with the following breakdown.
P-Point- Communication
is ........
There are two different types of
communication ........
Verbal communication is
..........
Non-Verbal communication is
.........
E-Evidence - You may
use verbal communication as a sports leader when ........
An
example of when you use non-verbal communication as a sports leader is..
E -Explain- It
is important for a sports leader to be able to use both verbal and non-verbal communication because.........
This technique proved to be very successful with what is a
group that love practical, but hate writing. Their enthusiasm for writing
improved as they were able to link what we were doing within lessons to their
English skills, so the perceived importance of the tasks grew.
The piece of work below is from a student who was previously
able to write one sentence for his explanation of communication. As you can see
he is starting to hit some of the merit criteria within his answers.
We then progressed it further to add in the L from P.E.E.L.
when we were looking at comparing and contrasting two sports leaders. The
students had to link this to a professional and amateur sports leader and
compare and contrast how each used this skill, quality or responsibility within
their roles.
Using this technique the class have been able to complete
this task on average a grade higher than their target grade, so it has proved
to be very successful.
