Revision Prompts

If you have any great ideas about how to encourage students to revise, leave a comment…

 

Read about what one school is doing…

Tuesday, 26 January 2016

Top tactics to make revision unavoidable for Year 11 students

It’s still five months before the first GCSE English exams and 1 in 5 of our Year 11 have already attended at least one voluntary after school revision session.

Now, not for a second am I complacent about this. What will impact student achievement this summer is sustained hard work – both in and out of lesson – but I am taking a moment to have a demi-smile that this year group clearly want to do well and are upping their game when it most counts for both them and the school.

I was asked by the lovely @cazzwebbo how we go about getting these students to attend such additional revision sessions. I can only reply with a slightly scattergun and naggingly persistent approach that uses two main tactics:

 

• MAKE REVISION UNAVOIDABLE AT SCHOOL
• We display posters on the doors of all form rooms and class rooms.
• We have daily announcements over the P.A. system at the end of the school day to say where revision is starting.
• We give reminders in year team briefing for form tutors to pass on and ensure these messages are repeated in assembly.
• We have a form group league table updated on a weekly basis to show which groups have attended most frequently and then award prizes to encourage a competitive element.
• Our HoY has a loyalty card scheme which unlocks access to the prom and then further Vivo rewards.
• Revision session reminders are also displayed on TV screens around the school.
• We provide free buses for students to get home twice a week to ensure every child can access the after school sessions.

 

• MAKE REVISION UNAVOIDABLE AT HOME
• We give all parents revision class timetables on Year 11 Parents’ Evening. Class teachers then refer to this in their discussions with parents to clarify expectations about which sessions their child will attend.
• We send text messages to all parents to remind them when revision sessions are taking place.

We call home or post letters when target students are not attending and clearly need to be.

• MAKE REVISION COUNT
• We make sure that when students do attend that their time is well spent by teaching well-structured sessions. All teachers ‘opt-in’ to lead the sessions they are most confident delivering. This helps ensure that they come back!
• We give every student a timetable showing the topics that will be covered on each day so they can ensure they can address areas of weakness. We hope that this encourages them to divide their time sensibly between revision for other subjects. Note: we remove the teachers who will lead each session as students sometimes only want to go to the ones ‘their’ teacher leads!
• We liaise with Maths to ensure that students can attend revision in both core subjects.

Of course, this only scratches the surface of our revision strategy. I haven’t even begun to mention the revision bags, QR code revision sheets, revision book marks, half term and Easter schools, intervention days, walking/talking mock exams, use of website or Twitter, or our deployment of an English Support teacher. I’ll save that little lot for another blog.

Happy New Year!

Welcome back to the new term. Stuck for resolutions? Why note commit to contributing to our blog. You can send posts or useful resources to any of the Lead Practitioners to add to the Blog for you. For those of you who are already confident bloggers, drop me a line for access rights and become an author.

In the meantime, check out this interesting article about what teachers should ditch from their daily practice:

what teachers should bin

Agree? Disagree? Discuss! 🙂

Merry Christmas

Wishing all staff and their families a very merry and restful Christmas break.

Blind Blogging

Frazer and I are on a journey that we want to share. We are both learning Braille and both working out how learning can occur despite limited sight. My hope is that he will, at some stage, work on this Blog with me – although when I talked to him last week about giving me feedback and discussing my progress, he did that 13 year-old boy thing: mumbled and tried to run away!

This week’s topic: Converting Tests

Test 1 : Make it bigger

Ok so I ‘select all’ and change my test from font 16 to 78 right?

Wrong!

The test was really long – 100s of pages and the time to move from one sheet to the next meant it was meaningless. Furthermore, the diagrams were still too small to see.

Test 2 : rewrite it with fewer words

Font 78, but this time I re-wrote it with fewer words and each question was on one sheet – 57 pages. I then did a separate test for the reader with instructions on what to describe. I was very proud of myself, Success! (Or so I thought.) Three hours later, Mr D’Silva returned, having not quite completed the test and then Denise J from the Borough ( who knows me really well and is very encouraging) said: “that wasn’t great – who thought that was a good idea?”

I’m not sure what Frazer thought, as by this time I had lost the desire to ask him.

Test 3: send it to the expert

This time sent the test to Denise at the Borough and she converted to Braille. But first I rewrote it so it could be checked and just get converted to Braille… Surely that would work? Um, not exactly!

10 emails later Denise politely said: “can I just see the original test (in other words no rewrite from me) only it could help me rewrite it so it’s in a format Fraizer can understand.”

I got the message! This time she has converted it. Did you know that GCSE tests can be specially converted for sight impaired students? It is always worth contacting the exam board to see how they convert diagrams and ask about graphs etc.

Also, the tests can be converted to large print, MP3 – so you hear rather than read, and Braille. Each format needs special thought to make sure it is meaningful.

Lessons learned:

Your tests can be converted for you by the Borough! Simply e-mail them to Denise and she will work on them. However remember it’s a really difficult process that will require her to spend time to convert to a meaningful format and it will be a two-way process where she needs to have the original test and may need to ask you a question or two. This all takes time – which is why she asks for things two weeks in advance.

djames2@hgfl.org.uk

Michele Gibbons

 

 

 

 

Twilight feeback

Now that the Twilight sessions are over, we welcome your feedback and suggestions for future sessions.

Please do leave a comment about your experience. Many thanks!

Winter draws on…

The evenings are closing in, vests are going on and the bugs are getting a hold. So it’s a good time to focus on our wellbeing. Whether it’s taking vitamins or catching the odd early night, it’s important to take good care of ourselves. But that’s a lot easier said than done for busy teachers and perhaps especially those who are new to the profession. A helpful time management resource is TM4T (pronounced Time for Tea.) a website aimed at providing a wealth on resources to promote well-being.

Here’s their simple but useful guide to getting up in the morning!

Getting up. Doncha just love it? Especially in the dark mornings of late autumn, as the sleet and rain sluice down the gutters outside your bedroom. And it’s 9B first period. Heck, another ten minutes snooze won’t hurt, will it? No, another ten minutes won’t hurt and most teachers are totally entitled to a lie in now and then. Before we dive into detail, we should emphasize one piece of less-than-profound advice: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. It is perfectly normal NOT to leap out of bed every morning. There are though, three reasons why teachers might consider investing effort into changing how they get up in the mornings: a. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence to suggest that creativity blossoms in the early hours, and that the benefits of early rising are not restricted to those who are by nature larks rather than owls. If you have a creative workload, it is worth a try. b. The pattern of our sleeping and waking is frequently established in childhood (without our permission) and may not, in fact, represent what we need or prefer. As working teachers, we need more control and it is logical to choose the option which is actually best for us. c. For some of us, the pattern of our sleep affects our moods in a bad way, in depressive episodes similar to Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). So… here are six tips for getting up in the morning… 1. Go to bed at the right time. I apologise for stating the obvious, but sometimes obvious answers are missed: You should have a reasonable idea how many hours sleep you need each night, and if you know what time you want to get up, then the maths is not difficult. 2. Understand your own chronotype The mythical average person sleeps eight hours, prefering to fall asleep shortly after midnight, but people differ greatly. The TM4T time management method involves doing the right work at the right time; and this means that you should know your own chronotype and when you do different kinds of work best. You can find out your chronotype easily – complete an online questionnaire and receive a personalised e-mail assessment. Details are online here. 3. Address any real issues. If your sleeping pattern generates moods which are counter-productive in the classroom (irritability, anxiety etc) then don’t be afraid to seek medical advice. You may be asked to complete an MEQ questionnaire to evaluate the extent of your eveningness (yes, that is a real word – the spell-checker is wrong). An example of the standard (MEQ) questionnaire is here. Remember that in Western society – and therefore UK schools – work patterns are aligned to the needs of slightly early risers, and for most of us it is NORMAL to be slightly dopey at the start of the day. 4. Experiment Heck, there’s no pleasing those guys at TM4T is there? We rattle on about the importance of routine, and then we want you to change it. The point here is that some of us are extreme creatures of habit, and that our ‘preferences’ are really just a reflection of what-we’ve-always-done. If you have no adult experience of getting up at 06:00 instead of 08:00, give it a try. Who knows what creative demons may be unleashed… 5. Match the solution to the problem If you don’t have a serious sleep issue, but you’d just like to make getting up a bit easier, then there are plenty of tips and whimsy to try. Put the alarm clock (set extra loud) just outside the bedroom door. Prepare your clothes and breakfast the night before (to break the mental association of getting up = chores). Morning stretches are a favourite: deep breaths and smile, smile, smile. Cold water is also recommended by some. 6. Design your morning. We are conditioned, in western society, to associate evenings with social and pleasurable activities, whereas mornings… well, mornings just happen. This is even more true if, like most teachers, you do not face mornings alone. Grumpy partners and fractious children can make us dread breakfast; never mind the rain-soaked journey and then 9B. To counter-act this, put some effort and thought into making mornings more pleasurable. Prepare (the night before) a pile of your favourite music to listen to. Get some exotic food, just for you, just for breakfast. Get up 30 minutes early and grab some you-time.

Twilight Training

Thank you to everyone who attended the training on Tuesday and for the extremely positive and helpful feedback we have received. Don’t forget, you can find material from the training here on the blog.

The Lead Practitioners are here to support you, so do please invite any of us along to see your classes for informal and friendly feedback.

You can also book us for specific guidance on any of our areas of expertise including literacy, classroom environments, solo taxonomy, questioning strategies, blogging, hooks, planning etc.

Simply post your request in the comments below and we’ll contact you to arrange a suitable time to meet with you. In the meantime, please feel free to send material and suggestions for the blog to any of the LPs via email. MAny thanks

Joe, Andy, Rachael and Carina 🙂

Kids don’t learn from teachers they don’t like!

This was an inspirational start to the term…