Sixth form: How to Improve

The first step to improve both your working habits and your attainment in School is to identify where you need to improve.

Is it your knowledge and understanding of the material ?
Does your attitude sometimes hamper your progress?
Is it skills you need to develop for effective learning?
Do you need to cement in routines and habits which will help to make learning easier?

1. Knowledge and Understanding

Feedback from your teacher is essential for improvements in your knowledge and understanding. Your teacher will seek to find out what you know and understand in every lesson. Whether it is verbal (often the best kind), written, peer or self-feedback; thinking about what you are trying to learn, reviewing it and identifying how to improve is crucial to ‘feed forward’ your learning. Reading and acting on your learning will make a difference. Just speak to your friends and family if you need convincing.

To become more competent in your knowledge and understanding it helps to improve your metacognition. Reflecting upon what goes well and then using this information to direct your learning. Developing your metacognition is important as you will then appreciate what you should know and understand to make improvements. To read more about this, follow the metacognition link underlined above.

THE 4 Bs

It can be difficult to know what to do when you are ‘stuck’.

However, you can use the 4Bs: Brain, Book, Buddy & Boss (which you will see around school) to help fix this problem.

2. Attitude

Changing your attitude can be a tricky one ...

pomodoro technique

In the 1980s Francesco Cirillo came up with a way to help you with your learning. It is called the Pomodoro Technique and yes, he did invent the tomato-shaped timer! Could it be a way to change your habits and attitude when facing difficulties in making improvements?

how to eat a frog

This famous saying by Mark Twain has inspired a number of books telling us how to ‘eat that frog’. An addition to this quote says, ‘and if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first’. This is a useful approach when you are trying to improve both your working habits and attainment. Start with the work that you are most anxious about and maybe after 25 minutes it may not be such an awful frog after all.

Martin Seligman, a psychologist, introduced a term called ‘learned helplessness’ which is not what we want for any Waconian. You may also know that intrinsic motivation is considered by researchers as more valuable for life-long learning than external motivation. We want you all to develop your intrinsic motivations. You will need resilience and grit to do it. Yet, changing our attitudes can be more complicated than outlined here so we plan to continue to develop this site in the future to help you understand and find strategies to help you when at times the ‘elephant’ or ‘frog’ becomes too big.

3. Skills

Anyone can continue to learn because the brain allows you to. Don’t believe it? Watch Jared Horveth’s YouthTED talk about how amazing your brain is.

We have standards and expectations at CHS and if you are to exceed these you need to know how to do it. Even with a positive attitude and the necessary knowledge and understanding you need to understand ways to make those improvements. Here are some skills you can develop ...

If we are to keep making improvement in our learning, we need to to actively retrieve our learning at regular intervals. In lessons your teachers may talk about the importance of encoding, decoding, retrieving and deliberate practice. All of these things are skills which you can improve.

Jeffrey Karpick is just one of a number of psychologists who has helped teachers understand how important it is to retrieve your learning at regular intervals for you to make improvements in your learning.

tests

Tests are a key opportunity for you to make improvements. To improve your attainment in tests you need to work on your retrieval techniques. 'Planning backwards’ before any End of Unit Test is important as by giving yourself plenty of time to prepare and revisit your learning you have a better chance of moving your learning from your working memory to your long-term memory.

End-of-unit tests, essays and also what we call low-level testing all provide inter-leaved opportunities for you to retrieve your learning. You may not even notice low-level testing in lessons as they are quick quizzes and questions which occur throughout the lesson. They are equally important though as by revisiting current and previous learning your teachers are helping you retrieve prior knowledge and understanding from other topics. This will help you embed and deepen your knowledge and understanding.

4. Habits & routines

If you want to continue to make improvements, you have to make learning a habit i.e. part of your normal routine. Homework is an opportunity for you to focus and develop your learning whilst regular practice of your learning can help you to gain gain those crucial marginal gains.

Creating the right Learning Climate takes planning and is essential. Here is a summary of the habits and routines you could develop.

deepen the learning

The Feynman Technique (developed by Noble-prize winning physicist Richard Feynman) is an interesting idea which suggests that if we wish to improve and develop our deeper understanding we also need to keep things simple.