You would struggle to find a greater advocate for using What How Why, or, for the acronym fiend within all of us, WHW. I use it all the time. I use it as a way to scaffold how we approach or think about a text. I use it as part of retrieval Do Nows. I use it in my own modelling. I advocate that my students use it. I cheered when it got a mention in the GCSE Lit Examiners Report. Indeed, one of my most popular posts is all about how I use WHW and why I think it’s so valuable.
But, I’m also very aware how even the greatest things can undergo lethal mutation. Whilst I don’t think this is where we are with WHW (yet) my hope in writing this is to guard against possible future misuses so that it never becomes just another PEE.
What Makes WHW Different to PEE?
But first, it would be valuable to outline what’s great about WHW. What exactly makes it different to PEE so we can make sure this keeps being the case? Whilst it is true they both appear superficially very similar, there are to my mind fundamental differences.
As I’ve outlined elsewhere, the difference stems from the fact that unlike PEE (and its variants) WHW is organic to the way in which we already write and think about literature. It flows out of our disciplinary traditions in a way PEE doesn’t. It models the same process that we as expert readers go through, often without realising, when we encounter a text for the first time. For example, it is completely natural for us to ask ourselves when encountering a text what it make us feel or what is happening and we may well find ourselves, pen in hand, contemplating how language is being used or how we are being made to feel the way that we are. We might also find ourselves musing on why the writer may be doing it in that way or why the text seems to be expressing itself in quite this way. What we are not likely to ask ourselves is what point the text is making, where is the evidence, and what can I say about this evidence, but yet this is the analytical process that is often foisted on students in the name of ‘better’ writing.
The point here, for me, is that PEE is artificial. Concocted to satisfy the apparent desires of an external examination body, PEE is not germane to our thinking about texts, but a mechanistic and reductive supplement. Another way of thinking about this is that WHW, in a really fundamental manner, is part of how we conceptually work our way through a literary text: it begins with the ideas and reactions we have to the text and then provides a way of translating these natural and organic reactions to written prose. It a a set of prompts designed to scaffold and make explicit the already existent process of expert reading we hope to generate in our students. PEE, though, begins with a desire to produce paragraphs of writing and works backwards. WHW places thinking first, PEE begins and ends with a paragraph.
I often think of WHW first as a thinking tool and second as a writing tool. It is best utilised when we think of it in this sequence. The reason it works at all is because it is helping the student to generate, in the moment of writing and beforehand, a series of prompts that will help to scaffold their understanding of the text. It’s not an empty procedure to be applied but in itself a set of cues for working through one’s reaction to the text.
However, it’s here that we most run the risk, I think, of getting it slightly wrong and turning WHW into something we probably don’t want it to be.
So, What Could Go Wrong?
The precise reason that WHW works so well is that it is a tool to think about the text before it is one to write about it. If we fall into the trap of reversing this sequence then WHW could easily become just another PEE. This risk perhaps most manifests itself or exerts its influence in thinking about a ‘WHW paragraph’ like we might think about a PEE paragraph. Inadvertently, we might find ourselves introducing WHW as a way to construct a paragraph of analysis or as a way to write an essay. Or we might find ourselves deconstructing a paragraph of writing and along the way asking our students ‘what makes this a good “what” point. This has the potential to bring us right back to PEE territory. We begin to see WHW as a unit in which to measure paragraphs of writing.
Rather, as above, WHW works best as a thinking frame that happens also to help us to write paragraphs and essays. For example, a student wants to write a paragraph about the Inspector in an essay about responsibility in An Inspector Calls. How do we teach this? The option I think we ought to be wary of might begin by asking them to write a ‘WHW paragraph’ about the Inspector. We tell them to begin with ‘what’ and then talk about ‘how’ before addressing ‘why’. We talk about it in terms of saying this is what comes first and then this is what comes next and we ask our students to follow this formula or template. In the student’s mind, WHW becomes a way to write a paragraph, it becomes a paragraph shaped block of writing in an essay.
The alternative, and it is a very subtle but I feel crucial difference, is to place emphasis first not on the act of writing, but on the way in which WHW helps students to generate their thoughts about the text. This is not to suggest we don’t take great pains to model, rehearse and practice writing (of course we do), but rather to frame WHW first as a way of thinking about a text and then, as a natural outcome of this process, to write about it. Thinking first, writing second. We ask them to consider what the Inspector seems to represent. We ask them to consider how Priestley achieves this and why he presents him in this manner. They may write about it in that sequence, but equally, because it’s just a series of prompts, they may not. The point though is the paragraph is a paragraph about the Inspector that is prompted through the WHW. It’s not a WHW paragraph. WHW helps the student to get there, but it isn’t in itself the function of the writing.When we model this or students practice it they aren’t practicing writing a WHW paragraph but rather they’re practicing writing about the Inspector with WHW. It seems a trivial difference, but an important one I think.
This shift in thinking about and framing WHW might mean, for instance, something as subtle as not saying when live modeling ‘OK, now I’m going to write the “what” section of the paragraph’ but instead ‘OK, I want to begin by thinking about what the Inspector might suggest and so I might start with…’. Again, a very subtle distinction between the two, but one leads to thinking about WHW as synonymous with a chunk of pre-fabricated essay writing and the other a way of organsing our thoughts as and before we write. The consequence of thinking about WHW in the former terms is that it could quickly become PEE-ified: rigid, hierarchical, manufactured, and a structure supplanted onto the text and not growing out of it.
The key, I think, is to do lots of work with WHW at the conceptual level. This might be the way in which we use the language of WHW during classroom discussion or questioning. It might be the way in which we set up a quick retrieval task based around asking students ‘what’, ‘how’, ‘why’ questions. Or it might be how we verbalize our approach to essay writing, using these same prompts to help scaffold our analysis. When students write they too can use these questions to shape their responses, and almost as a kind of metacognitive guideline through the essay they might ask themselves ‘Ok, what does the Inspector represent…How is Priestley doing this…Why do I think he’s doing it like that…?’ By doing this, and not by asking themselves ‘So, what should I put in the W bit of my WHW paragraph’, their analysis will be more authentic, flexible, and, probably, better.
By decoupling WHW from the paragraph they would also be able to use it to think about the smallest part of the text (maybe a single image) or the largest (the whole text.) And they, and we, would have avoided, PEE-ifying WHW.
codexterous 