I have been a teacher for 25 years, a Headteacher for 10 years and, at the age of 49, this much I know about teaching students how to plan stonkingly good essays!
The art of essay planning is difficult to learn. Too many students get to A level and claim that they’ve never been taught how to write essays and that they don’t like to plan, I just write it.
Maybe too many students can’t plan essays well because they have never been taught how to do it well. Teaching the art of essay planning is often a case of training students to:
Underline the key words in the title;
“Thought-shower” their ideas;
Group together similar ideas;
Take each group of ideas as a paragraph;
Put the paragraphs in order;
Write the essay…
all underpinned by the ubiquitous PEE paragraph structure: Point-Evidence-Explanation. The odd Mind Map might be…
View original post 1,466 more words
The Echo Chamber 