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55 E N G L I S H teachwire.net/secondary WHAT PARENTS NEEDTO KNOW + The date of each exam or mock + The texts students should be revising or rereading at that time + Where students can find resources + What materials you have given students to help them revise + What revision sessions are available for students + Details of any revision guides you recommend students towards what they should focus on. What revision should be Finally, after Christmas, when everything was covered, we changed the structure of lessons. Instead of going through all the literature texts and trying to pick out characters or scenes needing work, we covered all the texts in lessons. We’d give students a sheet with quotations from A Christmas Carol , Romeo and Juliet , An Inspector Calls and William Blake’s London . We’d then look at a theme featured across all the texts, such as religion or class. The lesson would focus on how the writers presented said theme, and their reasons for presenting certain things differently. Students were thus able to revise several texts and explore one theme within one lesson. Simultaneously, they were making little connections and subtle points of understanding – something often lost when you spend a whole lesson looking at one character. Do parents know what their children’s revision looks like? Schools throw the word ‘revision’ around with aplomb, but don’t spell out what revision should be and what it should look like to those people best placed to see it in action. We therefore started regularly emailing parents about revision, beginning with a short email spelling out what students should be revising at that point and what they had been given to help them. Later, I’d email parents telling them about the mock after the holiday, what it was on and where they could find some supporting resources. This soon became a regular thing, and made sure that the same messages got home. It also helped to ensure that some students weren’t pulling the wool over their parents’ eyes – I did have one student tell his mother that ‘revision homework was optional.’ Parents want to help their child, but we need to communicate what things should look like in practice. Homework and revision are two external factors that are largely out of our control. Turning revision into a public relations event has really helped us and our students. We are now much clearer about our expectations and what, for us, revision looks like. Changing attitudes to revision means having a clear vision of revision. All too often, we leave things to chance. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Chris Curtis is an English teacher and author of the book How to Teach English , published by Crown House Publishing; for more information, follow @Xris32 or visit learningfrommymistakesenglish. blogspot.com