Learning is a messy process. It’s disorganised and slow. As Graham Nuthall’s book The Hidden Lives of Learners shows us, it can be hard to know exactly what students do and don’t know and how they reach the conclusions they do.
This fact doesn’t sit very well with the urgent pace at which schools tend to operate. In every lesson, 30 students sit before you, while leaders want to see tangible outcomes. It is understandable that teachers may want to speed up the route through learning, in order to reach something that is tangible and comparable.
In English, where most of our “proof” about what students have and haven’t learned comes in the form of their writing, acronyms have often seemed to provide a solution.
Asking students to remember “AFOREST” when writing to persuade, or to structure their paragraphs according to “PEE”, “PEAL” or “PETER”, seems a neat way to organise and clarify the learning process, making outcomes easier to measure.
We want to see what students know and can do with a text, so we synthesise learning into neat little paragraphs, where we can tick off each part and move on to the next thing.
Complexity of learning in English
However, English is much more complex than this. The learning can’t sit in neat little boxes, no matter how much we might want it to. Instead, students need time to process a literary text and carefully consider what they know about it.
Students need time to think about what a writer is trying to say to us, how they are saying it and why they chose to say it in the way they did. They need time to internalise how other people have expressed their ideas about the text, both verbally and in writing, and they need time to practise how to write about what they think in the most appropriate way.
We need to be careful we aren’t rushing students to the endpoints of our subject too soon. It’s not helpful to get students writing before they have had time to think, refine and explore. They need to have the right tools before they begin to craft.
We have to remember that literary criticism essays are the end goal of teaching English literature, and that these are pieces of writing that need to be crafted.
GCSE English literature prepares students to write diluted versions of such essays. It’s only after exploring a huge range of texts, discussing them and tentatively trying out different ways to write about them - including becoming familiar with using academic language and sentence construction that may not be used in other subjects - that students will be in a strong position to pull an essay together.
Acronyms should be used as support
A similar process is needed for GCSE English language. Students can only hope to construct an effective argument, description or story if they have built up their understanding of these things over time. Writing to AFOREST, sadly, won’t do the trick. If you try to analyse an effective persuasive speech against this acronym, you’ll be left with plenty of gaps. And yet the writing is still effective.
I am not suggesting that some students won’t benefit from having a structure to write to. Giving them a formula of what to include can sometimes be really helpful. But I’d argue that this should come later in the teaching sequence, after they have already had ample opportunities to think, explore, try and fail. Acronyms need to be a support, not a straitjacket.
There is a sweet spot we have to hit, where the complex intellectual demands of the subject align with the practical world of book looks and exam practice. That spot might be different for different cohorts and settings.
However, let’s remember that the road we take students on won’t always be straight, clear and as neatly laid out as a PEE paragraph. If we want learning to be the best it can be, it’s important that we take things slowly and don’t try to rush students to the end too soon.
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