heart of heartlands lessons

“I don’t know how to revise”

“I only revise a couple of days before the exam”

“What’s the point in revising, it never works for me anyway!”

“I don’t need to revise, I read my notes”

“There’s too much! I don’t know where to start!”

Sounds familiar in the lead up to exams?

For months we had been trying to get our students in Year 11 to revise a large amount of content as part of the new History GCSE changes, but found that we were often met with these comments - and I’m sure this is the case in a majority of subjects. With the GCSEs becoming more challenging and students being expected to remember a lot more content in all of their subjects, cramming a couple of days before the exam was not going to be enough. As Alex Quigley writes on his blog, The Confident Teacher, “A successful approach to revision needs to be deeply rooted in subject knowledge, and sustained over time”.

Reflecting on the comments we would always hear from the History students and after reading Quigley’s blog, we decided to dedicate an evening not only teaching the students how to revise, but also their parents! It was clearly not enough to simply tell students and parents different revision techniques, but instead we needed to show students and parents the different revision techniques. Why parents too? Students need to be supported through this process and often parents aren’t equipped with the tools to do so- especially in a subject they had never learnt before.

So what did we do?

After giving every student a revision folder which included the PLCs, a revision guide for all four modules, structures and sentence starters for all question types and the interleaving revision programme, we now needed to show students and parents how to use all of these resources. This consisted of explaining to both parents and students what is included in the revision folder as well as the expectations of the interleaving revision programme, so that the revision was “sustained over time”.

The revision programme followed three simple steps: Create, Test, Practise (CTP). Not only that, revision experts were identified in the Year 11 cohort who had been successfully revising and were then asked to teach both parents and students how to CTP with a station dedicated to each step of the revision programme. Many parents did not bat an eyelid when they were given flashcards on the way in, but we were met with bewilderment when the parents realised that they were creating flashcards, mind maps and testing their children on reasons why Sir Francis Drake circumnavigated the globe!

Nevertheless, the program equipped students with different revision techniques to explore when following the interleaving revision programme, and also empowered parents with the tools to support their children during a very intense period. So now, rather than asking their child “have you revised?” parents could pick up the flashcards and ask their child with confidence, “why did the Germans feel stabbed in the back by the Weimar Republic in 1919?”.

Moving forward

It is clear that this an issue that needs to be tackled very early in a child’s school career, because GCSEs are not the first and will not be the last exam (for most students) they will need to revise and prepare for.

On a departmental basis, we have brought forward the interleaving programme to the very beginning of Year 10. This is to ensure that students have more time to become familiar with the modules of the course, and that they feel comfortable with preparing for their exams, in order to limit the stress of GCSEs as much as possible. There has also been a conscious effort to dedicate time in Key Stage 3 lessons to teaching and practising revision techniques, whilst also setting task specific interleaving revision Home learning in the weeks before the exams.

The Humanities faculty plan to organise for September a revision skills “marketplace” evening for students and parents. Having said this, why not think bigger? Why not on a school basis? Why not have all GCSE students and parents come in to learn how to revise for all subjects?