TS-9.3

44 teachwire.net/secondary REVISION SESSIONS COUNT ShaunAllison highlights the research, techniques and strategies that can help ensure your revision sessions are doing what they need to improving the end result; if you succeed in mastering the individual elements, the end result will take care of itself. Therefore, rather than endlessly practising past exam papers in full, focus on specific types of question and get the students to become really good at doing these. A great example of this can be seen in professional football. FC Barcelona haven’t become great by practising whole games. What they do is endlessly practise the fine elements of the game, such passing and moving, which is demonstrated brilliantly when they do ‘tiki taka’ on the practice pitch – take a look at an example via bit. ly/fcb-tiki . Instead of seeing your revision sessions as forms of ‘whole exam’ practise, think of them as tiki-taka! Spaced Practice There’s a strong body of evidence from cognitive science which indicates, perhaps counterintuitively, that we all need a little ‘forgetting time’ in order to remember things. We’re best off coming back to material we’re trying to learn having left some in between – we call this ‘spaced practice’, which you can read more about via bit.ly/rb-spaced. With that in mind, rather than trying cram in lots of revision sessions close together, it’s best to space them apart. Most school timetables will thankfully do this for us, but it’s worth thinking about in our planning. Practice testing There’s also a large body of evidence which suggests that the act of having to retrieve something from your memory strengthens the memory, and in turn the long-term retrieval of that information (you can read more on this via bit.ly/ rb-retrieval ). Taking this into account, it makes sense for us to use revision sessions for retrieval practice, but going over content from throughout the course. Useful activities here might include: • Quick retrieval quizzes at the start of the lesson or revision session • Creating a mind map from memory, maybe with some cues • Filling in a blank knowledge organiser. Worked examples Put simply, a worked example is a completed (or partly completed) problem that students can see and refer to while working on a similar problem. Worked examples allow students to concentrate on the specific steps they need to follow in order to solve a problem. What makes them effective is that they reduce the cognitive load of a task, which means that students don’t have to hold as much new information in their working memory. This is a good activity to use in revision sessions, since it will help build students’ confidence with tackling a particular style of exam question. The trick, of course, is to gradually withdraw and eventually remove the worked examples as students become increasingly confident and competent at tackling the area in question. You can read more on this via bit.ly/ rb-worked . Metacognitive strategies The Education Endowment Foundation’s ‘Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning’ guidance report (see bit.ly/eef-meta ) , is a great resource that can support teachers with implementing metacognitive strategies in the classroom – i.e. the way students monitor and purposefully direct their learning. The report contains seven recommendations that are really useful when it comes to structuring revision sessions for students having to tackle a particular type of exam question. Worth noting in particular is what it suggests around needing to support students with memorising a strategy we’ve modelled to them – for example, by questioning. We should then model it A s Y11 students and their teachers start to think about the upcoming GCSE exams, soon will arrive those inevitable revision sessions led by teachers. Now, whether these should take place during lesson time, after school, before school or at lunchtimes is a debate to be had elsewhere – and probably best left for schools to decide themselves. The reality is that these sessions will be happening, so how can we use research evidence to ensure that this precious time is used efficiently? Here are some ideas for activities we can be doing during revision sessions that will most likely be effective. Deliberate Practice The purpose of revision sessions should be to support students with what Anders Ericsson calls ‘deliberate practice’ (see bit.ly/ts-deliberate ) . The idea is to concentrate on a specific element and repeatedly practise that element under guidance, rather than concentrate on Make those Editor’s note This piece was commissioned and produced prior to the measures adopted by the UK in response to the COVID-19 outbreak