If you can help them to revise in a way that doesn’t feel like a non-stop conveyor belt of information passing in one ear and out the other, you’ve made a decent start.

We’ve rounded up a selection of tips, tricks, games, worksheets to help with this year’s English language GCSE paper. Check them out to see if anything might help your class study more effectively and efficiently.

Past papers for GCSE English Language revision

Just as we included them in our roundup of GCSE English literature revision resources it makes sense to start here with past papers.

Whichever exam board your school uses, you’ll find old papers at Revision World.

GCSE English Language revision worksheet

This two-page worksheet activity will encourage your GCSE pupils to focus on close analysis at word level.

First you need to read an extract from The Invisible Man by HG Wells, before picking out certain word classes. Then you fill in some incomplete sentences, analysing the author’s language choices.

Getting students to revise

English teacher and author Chris Curtis explains how to get your English students past the old ‘I can already read and write’ fallacy when the time comes for them to revise…

English can be a problematic subject to revise because it is so rich. The most highly motivated and driven students will attend revision sessions, complete practice papers and succeed. However, students in the middle can be very ‘middling’ in their attitude towards revision.

They are the students who, with just a few small changes, could make huge strides in their progress, if only we could get them to revise.

Booklets

What should students revise? How should they revise? These were the two questions we asked ourselves when addressing revision.

Having decided that practice and spaced practice were more important than copious notes, we produced a termly booklet of tasks that made the students practise a skill, or directed students to revise a particular aspect.

“We produced a termly booklet of tasks that made the students practise a skill”

Its contents related to the forthcoming mock exams and consisted of the following (5 of each):

• Romeo and Juliet exam questions
• A Christmas Carol exam questions
• Pages for collecting key quotations
• Tasks related to the reading section of GCSE English Language Paper 1
• Photographs for planning Question 5 on Paper 1
• Sentence structures to copy, imitate and practice
• Banks of words to learn and practise in a sentence
• Mind maps to create
• Spaces for making notes from viewed YouTube videos
• Spaces for the pupils’ own revision notes

We distributed the booklet towards the start of the term, and we didn’t give out any other homework. We explained to students that this booklet was designed to help build good habits in terms of revision and promote the strategy of ‘A little, often’.

On the front of each booklet was a grid, and for each task they completed they ticked off a square. We tracked their work across the term and monitored their progress towards achieving the goal of completing all 50 tasks by the end of the term.

The tasks themselves were largely short activities that didn’t involve the student having to write lengthy pieces or marking on the part of teachers.

We were looking for evidence that the students had engaged with the tasks, rather than producing the swathes of copied-out notes and highlighting that are often a poor proxy of revision.

“We were looking for evidence that the students had engaged with the tasks”

This approach transformed our approach to setting homework and monitoring engagement in the subject. It was particularly helpful for our weakest students, providing a supported, structured approach to revision that generated some excellent results.

Place the emphasis on students

We also changed the way we structured our curriculum.

Previously, in the run-up to the exams we would dedicate entire lessons to specific set texts or elements of the paper. We would break down the lesson schedule and produce a formula to cover what we felt was important:

‘Right, we have ten lessons left – so that’s three lessons for Macbeth, four for A Christmas Carol and two for the language papers…’

We abandoned this approach completely, in favour of placing the emphasis on students from an early stage.

Teachers are naturally kind, and in our kindness we’ll give students safety blankets. It used to be that if they didn’t revise, they would have at least had these last few lessons to help plug the gaps.

From the start of Y10, we made it clear that there was to be no more plugging of gaps or quick solutions. All students were given a cheap copy of the texts. They were responsible for making annotations in their books and keeping them safe.

“We made it clear that there was to be no more plugging of gaps or quick solutions”

We opted to now focus on the importance of all lessons, since there wouldn’t be another lesson going over the same things again at a later date. If they didn’t take in the material during this lesson, they’d just have to do more work later.

Things also changed in Year 11. Lessons now start with regular questions on all the texts, which serve to highlight gaps and areas for the students to work on – ‘Tom, you need to work on Macbeth; Jasmine, you need to work on your poetry.’

We were working to highlight gaps and direct students towards what they should focus on.

Keep parents in the loop

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.

“I did have one student tell his mother that ‘revision homework was optional”

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.

Chris Curtis is author of the book How to Teach English, published by Crown House Publishing. Visit his website at learningfrommymistakesenglish.blogspot.com.

Kray twins lessons

Use this Kray twins Powerpoint, two reading extracts, worksheet and example answer to explore and practise skills for both Paper 1 and Paper 2. There’s enough materials here for three lessons.

Key terminology recap

This bundle of resources from TeachIt helps students recap key words and terminology for GCSE English Language. Go over important skills for the exam by playing some tried-and-tested games and activities, like this printable language board game.

Run a ‘lecture-style’ intervention programme

When Rainham Mark Grammar School head of English Mark McDowell decided to implement mini revision lectures in his school, he had no idea how well they would be received…

At my school we decided to offer 12 bespoke lectures for students to attend every Thursday afternoon, from January onwards. They were unashamedly academic in tone.

Two lectures would run, for between 30 and 40 minutes – one for English Literature and one for English Language. They would drill into a facet of the exam paper or area of a text.

All attendees would leave with a concrete skill or piece of knowledge that they could take with them into the examination. For example:

• The Didactic Tone of Dickens: Exploring the Moral Messages of the Novel
• Develop your understanding of Dickens’ intentions in writing the novel. This will help with context and exploration of authorial intent.
• Apples and Oranges? Comparing Non-fiction Texts across the Centuries
  Develop your ability to compare two non-fiction texts 100 plus years apart. This is ideal for Paper 2, Question 4.

Of course, these could be tailored to the context of any particular school.

Planning and preparation

Teacher workload was a key consideration. Six teachers would plan two lectures each; that was it.

I had a wealth of experience in my department (76 years of English teaching experience – including two GCSE examiners, which I was at pains to let the Year 11 cohort know!) and this felt like a logical way to utilise that experience effectively.

In a department meeting, we discussed the areas we felt students needed help with. This is what informed the titles and content of the lectures. Teachers would deliver each lecture twice.

That meant I had 12 weeks of high-quality additional provision planned that could accommodate 60+ students a week. I also gave over one hour of directed department time to the planning of these lectures.

“I had 12 weeks of high-quality additional provision planned that could accommodate 60+ students a week”

How better could I use that time than allowing my department to plan – in some cases collaboratively – a suite of lectures to enhance the subject knowledge and skills of our students? It certainly beat going over data.

The lecture schedule was printed out and given to all Year 11 students as well as being emailed to parents. Posters were put up around the department and I also pushed it at assembly.

Additionally, guidelines on lecture etiquette were typed up on the sheet. The students needed to know that rocking up with a bag of Doritos and an energy drink was not going to happen. They were to arrive on time, and behave accordingly.

A flying start

I waited with bated breath. Would they really come in January for revision? Well, yes, they would. It’s early days, but so far the programme seems to have been a real success.

“Would they really come in January for revision?”

We had a full house on the first session. So, a third of our cohort had an additional lecture on either the presentation of women in Macbeth or how to compare two non-fiction texts. I was over the moon.

I’ll hand over the last words to one of our students, Christopher Key (Y11):

“The English Lectures have been a very positive contribution to revision. It is clear from my position as a student that a lot of effort has been put into organising the timetable. The English department has managed to fit in two lectures a week and they will be repeated so you can go to both before the exam.

“The lectures have attracted all levels of ability in the year and even the ‘cool’ students are making an effort to go. What more could you wish for?”

I’ll take that.

Revision tool archive

At getrevising.co.uk you can filter through the hefty bank of resources and narrow it down by level, subject, examining body and curriculum area. This means you can get exactly what your class needs.

More GCSE English revision techniques

English advisor Zoe Enser sets out the practices and strategies that will see your students triumph on exam day…

I’m always quick to move students away from busy and inefficient revision practices, like reading over the text, or using heavy streaks of highlighting without consideration of what said highlighting is for.

Instead, I use regular, short sessions to complete the below activities:

Revision clocks

This involves giving students an outline of a clock, divided into 12 blank segments (A3 size works well). They then add information to the segments, taking five minutes to complete each one (out of the 60 minutes represented by the clock).

This breaks their revision down into manageable chunks.

This activity can work well in any subject, though for English I’ll get the students to complete revision clocks based on key themes, concepts and characters.

It’s important to not cover too wide a topic, or else the completed segments can end up being rather superficial.

I’ll get them to practise doing this in class after modelling the process, so that they can see how it works. I’ll insist that they spend their full allocation of time really thinking hard about the concept, rather than moving on to another topic too quickly.

This is done ‘closed book’, so that they’re encouraged to retrieve as much as possible. Since they’re the ones selecting the information they want to include, they’re drawing on a generative learning process.

Having spent time focusing on the concept, we’ll then look at an exemplar, perhaps developed as part of the learning process, and note where the gaps are.

Flash cards

Similarly useful across a range of different subjects, these are especially handy for internalising bodies of knowledge and key English terminology.

Writing flashcards for specific texts that contain key quotes relating to, say, certain themes and ideas can be a powerful revision process in itself.

You can then couple this with the principles of spaced or distributed practice, getting students to organise the cards into different piles they can return to on different days.

If you can ensure that the information on the cards is indeed stored, you’ll have the makings of something really powerful.

Remember that it’s important for students to see where they’re struggling and where their knowledge gaps are. Allow them to decide which chapters in a text to return to, or what vocabulary they may need to revisit.

“Remember that it’s important for students to see where they’re struggling and where their knowledge gaps are”

Cornell notes

This note-taking system can be a really useful way of helping students organise their revision notes, while also providing them with opportunities to self-test.

It can work particularly well when reading through chapters of a text, watching a Shakespeare play or listening to a lecture.

Students simply divide a page into three sections – notes in a larger main section, key questions or revision topics down one side and an optional space at the bottom for summing up.

The main notes might comprise bullet points, sentences, diagrams and maps or some other generative activity that’s reliant on selecting, organising and integrating information into their schema.

The space at the bottom is there to provide a quick summary that students can use to review key topic information.

If, for example, students were to produce a page of Cornell notes for each poem in a series, chapter of a book or character in a play, they would eventually have their very own home-grown revision booklet, complete with quiz questions at the side of every page for ‘check and answer’ purposes.

Doing this will also let teachers quickly check if there are any misconceptions.

English Language tips

The above revision techniques are easy to apply to literature topics, where there’s a clear body of knowledge to accompany each text, but they can seem less practical for the largely unseen texts and tasks of English language study.

However, language still involves learning specific vocabulary – the structural or rhetorical devices specific to non-fiction texts, for example.

There are also processes when approaching language questions that are quite distinct from essay-style literature responses, which students need to be familiar with.

Self-testing techniques are still very much relevant when it comes to achieving the fluency and agility demanded by language papers in the exam room.

Students should get used to completing deliberate practise tasks for both language and literature topics. They should take the opportunity to read and annotate, plan their responses and answer longer questions as part of their revision.

“Students should get used to completing deliberate practise tasks for both language and literature topics”

It can be useful to turn these into distinct homework tasks and encourage the systematic approaches above, so that they’re able to focus on knowledge and retrieval. This will help them considerably when they come to attempt those longer exam responses that are designed bring their knowledge together.

Whatever they end up doing, your students need to be making sure that information is being retrieved, reconsidered and then stored all over again.

The more they do this, the more they’ll ultimately retain. The more intricate their schema, the more the new information will adhere to the old.

Metacognition

More importantly, good revision relies on elements of metacognition. Students need to be aware of what they have available to them in relation to a text and the knowledge they possess.

They then need to be clear where they may have gaps, and ensure they have the materials – be it lesson notes or revision materials you’ve provided – they need to restudy.

Above all, they must be clear that they’ll need to test themselves repeatedly to ensure this information remains available to them when they need it. Not just tomorrow, or next week, but during the mock, the actual exam in summer and any time after that.

This calls for a careful and systematic approach, and will involve hard work. There are no shortcuts.

“There are no shortcuts”

It doesn’t matter if their revision materials look pretty (unless that makes it more likely that they’ll actually use them). But they will need to be focused, designed for regular practice and able to get the relevant information stored in their heads for life.

Zoe Enser is a specialist advisor for English at The Education People.

Study guide

Here’s a handy 17-page PDF guide that takes you through each of the questions on both papers.

Geoff Barton resources

This page from Geoff Barton contains various resources for GCSE English that he has put together from his own teaching over the years. The revision archive includes Handy Revision Hints, ‘Interestingness’ and more.

Online GCSE English Language revision tips

This concise and well-presented revision guide should be well suited to young people’s tastes.

BBC Bitesize

One of the many benefits of the BBC Bitesize site is how well it is laid out. It’s so easy to find everything you need. And you know that it will all be formatted in a way that’s, as the site name suggests, easily digestible.

One of the other benefits is the the wealth of high-quality videos. These can be a great means of digesting information rather than students trying to cram in every note they’ve made, work they’ve done and handout you’ve created over the last year.

So, this video, for example, and its accompanying guide, takes pupils through the influence of poetry and rhyme on modern rap music.

Englishbiz

This set of skills-focused resources lets pupils test their skills at analysing poems, pieces of writing and more. They can also create their own piece.

The post GCSE English Language revision – Best resources and ideas for teachers appeared first on Teachwire.

Retrieval practice is a “simple research-based teaching strategy” that involves students retrieving and bringing information to mind. The challenge of remembering this information produces durable long-term learning.

In this episode of The Cult of Pedagogy podcast, Jennifer Gonzalez speaks to Pooja Agarwal about what retrieval practice is and how you can start incorporating it into your classroom right away.

JUMP TO A SECTION

• How to boost information recall in the classroom
  • Embed multiple-choice questions into your classroom practice
• Retrieval practice examples
  • Ancient Greece retrieval practice quiz example
• Retrieval practice activities
  • Mistakes to avoid
• Kate Jones retrieval practice templates
• More retrieval practice teaching methods
• Using retrieval practice as a revision tool

How to boost information recall in the classroom

If your pupils struggle to recall yesterday’s lesson, prompt them to retrieve information from memory by embedding regular quizzes into your curriculum design, with these ideas from Jon Hutchinson, director of training and development at the Reach Foundation…

Back in the 1880s, when Hermann Ebbinghaus measured the rate that information is lost after initially learning it, the conclusions were clear: everybody forgets things unless they revisit that information regularly.

“Everybody forgets things unless they revisit that information regularly”

These results have since been repeated in multiple contexts and under a huge variety of conditions.

In the classroom, this means that we shouldn’t be entirely surprised (or cross) by our pupils struggling to recall their initial learning from yesterday’s lesson. Indeed, it is an inevitable and perfectly natural part of the learning process.

Our job is to interrupt this forgetting, by using effective strategies to prompt children to retrieve information from memory.

Embed multiple-choice quizzes into your classroom practice

It is for this reason that, as part of our curriculum design at Reach Academy Feltham, we have embedded regular multiple-choice tests and quizzes into our curriculum design to help us reap the benefits of retrieval practice.

Aside from Ebbinghaus, our decisions have been influenced by more recent research into retrieval practice, spearheaded by professorial power couple Robert and Elizabeth Bjork (very much the Beyoncé and Jay-Z of the cognitive science world).

Retrieval strength and storage strength

They suggest that any information tucked away in our memory can be measured in two ways.

First, there is the speed at which you can recall some fact or skill: the ‘retrieval strength’.

Second, we can consider how well connected and robust the knowledge is – known as ‘storage strength’.

New information which is not linked to anything else stored in your long-term memory will have a low retrieval strength, as well as a low storage strength.

This is the reason that they write the hotel room number on your card when checking in: you will probably forget it.

By the end of the week, the retrieval strength of your hotel room number will have increased, by regularly having to recall it. However, the storage strength is likely to remain low; you probably won’t be able to recall it in a year or two.

Other information – perhaps the name of a child in your class back at primary school – could have a high storage strength (they are connected to tonnes of other memories) but a low retrieval strength (what was their name again? Patrick? Peter?).

Finally, information can have both high retrieval and high storage strength. An example might be the name of your current best friend.

This, of course, is what we are aiming for in what we teach. And based on what we know about how memory works, we think that the testing effect is an indispensable tool to achieve it.

Retrieval practice examples 

There are a few different ways that we can capitalise on this within lessons.

First, always begin a lesson with retrieval practice – a short quiz, including five, multiple-choice questions of previously learnt material.

Beginning with a retrieval practice technique ensures a calm, focused and motivational start to the lesson.

Let’s take an example. In the first lesson of our unit on Roman Britain, the class learn about how Romulus killed his brother to found the city.

Within that lesson, there will be some key facts that we don’t want the children to forget. So the very first thing that we do at the start of the next lesson is ask all children to answer the question, “According to myth, who founded Rome?”

These quizzes are no stakes. That is to say, we don’t collect in any scores, and we don’t tell children off or express disappointment if they get a question wrong. That is not the purpose.

Instead, what we are trying to do is deliberately interrupt the forgetting curve. It is better to think of this regular quizzing as a student learning event in itself, as opposed to an assessment.

“What we are trying to do is deliberately interrupt the forgetting curve”

It doesn’t really matter whether the children get the question right or wrong; they benefit either way from this effective learning technique.

Ancient Greece retrieval practice quiz example

1. In what year did Ancient Greece’s ‘Golden Age’ begin?

• 2500 BCE
• 480 BCE
• 480 CE
• 1480 CE

2. How many citizens had to vote for someone to be sent into exile?

• 6
• 60
• 600
• 6000

3. Name one Greek philosopher

4. Where were the first recorded Olympic games held?

• Athens
• Crete
• Olympia

5. Name one Greek City State

Retrieval practice activities

Writing good multiple-choice questions is devilishly difficult. Ours focus on the most important things we want children to remember from previous lessons.

A knowledge organiser is a good learning tool to start from here, as it should include the core information.

I often begin planning a lesson by asking myself, “What are the five things that I want all children to remember by the end of this lesson?” These then become the targets for quiz questions in the following lesson.

“What are the five things that I want all children to remember by the end of this lesson?”

In the example about Roman Britain above, we would include the correct answer (Romulus), but then also add in plausible distractors. These would include Remus, Julius Caesar and Tiberinus (the god who saved Romulus and Remus from the river).

Children rack their brains, circle what they think is the correct answer, then move onto the next question.

A few minutes later, I’ll switch to the next slide which has all of the correct answers on, and pupils can self-mark, correcting anything they got wrong.

While this takes place, I’ll whizz around the classroom and make a note of any common misconceptions. The whole episode takes around five minutes.

So, while quizzing may not be the flashiest or most fashionable classroom activity, there is an abundance of science outlining the learning rewards.

Mistakes to avoid

When I first began using test-enhanced learning I made a few mistakes that reduced the effectiveness of retrieval practice.

The first was using funny or wacky answers within the distractors.

Since I very much consider myself to be an as yet undiscovered comedian of world-class talent (who is, frankly, wasted on primary school children), I can’t resist popping in a humorous answer to elicit a giggle.

When asking the pupils “Why did Alexander the Great weep?” I’ll want to include an option like, “because the Nando’s in Persia had run out of chicken” (wasted, I tell you).

The problem with adding in these silly options is that they distract children from what you actually want them to remember (that “there were no more worlds to conquer”).

They’ll tell you about how funny it was to think about Alexander having a Nando’s. Some children may not get the joke and actually think Alexander the Great did eat Nando’s.

The correct answer, a wonderful piece of cultural knowledge and a useful window into the success and ambition of the Macedonian King, gets lost somewhere in laughter. The kids just remember Alexander eating a Nando’s.

“Some children may not get the joke and actually think Alexander the Great did eat Nando’s”

The second mistake is to let children look back at their notes. In doing so, we kill the benefits of the testing effect, because children are not having to try and recall from memory; they are just rereading and copying down the answer.

It may seem counterintuitive, but that effortful struggle is exactly what produces the strengthened retrieval in future.

Kate Jones retrieval practice templates

Teacher and author Kate Jones explains how to use her retrieval practice challenge grid at the start of your lesson...

I designed the retrieval practice challenge grid to help you purposefully revisit subject knowledge and content previously studied.

The questions differ based upon when the subject content was taught. The further back this was, the higher the number of points on offer.

I use this approach at the start of a lesson as it includes a wide range of questions that require students to recall information from last lesson, last week and even further back – it’s a simple and efficient way to begin.

Five a day method

We are all familiar with the ‘five a day’ message as it applies to including portions of fruit and/or vegetables as part of our daily routine to stay healthy.

This concept can be applied to the classroom with a twist, focusing on daily review of five a day to promote healthy retrieval. It could simply be five quiz questions to start the lesson.

Another idea is to have five keywords on the board. Students must define each one or write a paragraph summarising previous learning including all five words. Alternatively, they can create five questions where each keyword is the answer.

Below you can see examples of teachers using retrieval practice tests in a number of different ways to encourage effective retrieval practice.

More retrieval practice teaching methods

Make sure your students can actually use the information you’ve spent all that time putting into their heads with these helpful tips from teacher and author Paul Wright…

Recall checks

Look at your scheme of learning for a half term. Decide what the key takeaway concepts or vocabulary are in that time.

Design five to eight questions that help students practise retrieving their knowledge on the topic from memory and applying it to answer the question.

Over the course of the six weeks, continue to cover the same five to eight concepts, theories or terms in your questions, but pose the questions in different ways.

Alternative dimensions

Challenge learners’ knowledge security by presenting facts from another dimension and asking them to compare these to ours, stating what the equivalent is in our dimension.

For example, say ‘In this universe, the sky is pink. What colour is it in your universe?’

Learners can select the correct answer from memory (higher challenge). Alternatively, you can scaffold the activity by making it multiple choice.

Try throwing in some questions where the answer is already correct (ie where something is the same in both dimensions) and see if they notice!

Memorise this…

Prepare a three-slide presentation:

• 1 – show things you want the students to remember
• 2 – black screen with a countdown timer in the centre
• 3 – space for items to be written in or revealed

Explain that the students will be given time to look at the first slide and store the information in their minds, without writing anything down.

When the screen goes black, the timer starts. Pupils must write down as much information as they can remember. When the timer ends, reveal the third slide and ask the learners to share what they’re able to recall.

What stuck?

Stand your learners behind their desks a few minutes before the lesson ends. Tell them that you’ll dismiss each person in turn when they can tell you something that has stuck with them in your lesson.

This challenges their short-term recall and allows you to challenge their ability to succinctly express knowledge they have retained.

Be fair and allow one repeat, but students can’t repeat the same thing as the person that spoke before them.

Using retrieval practice as a revision tool

Science teacher Adam Boxer explains that while retrieval practice isn’t the easiest way to revise, it’s definitely the most effective…

As teachers across the UK become more and more evidence-informed, we’re learning to ditch revision games, posters, highlighting, re-reading and mnemonics.

Instead, we’re replacing these with powerful teaching strategies such as frequent retrieval practice and low-stakes quizzing on core material.

“We’re learning to ditch revision games, posters, highlighting, re-reading and mnemonics”

In fact a paradigm shift is occurring around revision itself. We’ve moving away from a system where we teach a sequence of lessons, have a revision lesson and then a test.

Instead, we’re moving towards a system where we remove the revision lesson and replace it with frequent opportunities for retrieval practice built in to the main sequence of lessons.

These changes are possible because of how well-researched retrieval practice is. Cognitive scientists have spent decades investigating its use as a memory technique. Though nothing in science is ever beyond question, the positive results across a vast number of studies certainly seem to suggest it’s an effective method.

New discoveries

There are, however, aspects that you might not be aware of. For example, Hungarian researchers tested whether or not retrieval practice could help mitigate the debilitating cognitive effects of being in a high stress environment.

Psychologists (and teachers!) have known for a long time that a little bit of stress is a good thing in terms of student performance. However, too much stress can be debilitating and hinders performance.

The researchers found that the power of retrieval practice to prepare students for tests held even when they took the tests under extremely stressful conditions.

Another fascinating finding relates to “participant prediction of recall”.

Participants in a study used either re-reading or retrieval practice to learn material, but in varying amounts. After they had a set amount of time with these techniques, they were asked to predict how well they thought they would recall that information in a week or so’s time.

Participants who had done the least amount of retrieval practice thought that they would recall the most. Participants who had done the most amount of retrieval practice thought they would recall the least.

As we can probably guess by this point, results for the actual test showed the exact opposite. So participants who thought they had learned the least, actually learned the most.

Rich rewards

I think the best way to explain this finding is by thinking about the relative difficulty of the two tasks.

Re-reading is, cognitively speaking, easy to do. Reading is easy. When we re-read material we have a voice in our head saying, “Yes, I got that”, no problem.

But there is a difference between understanding something and committing it to long-term memory.

You can probably understand this article very easily, but if you sat a test on it next week would you remember all, or even most, of its details? Probably not.

“When we re-read material we have a voice in our head saying, “Yes, I got that””

In order to prepare yourself for such a test you would have to expend serious mental effort. And in the short term it would certainly feel like you weren’t getting anywhere. It would feel painful, slow, and frustrating.

But what if you did put in that effort, and it worked out? What if you persevered through that short-term pain and feeling of frustration? Imagine you really committed yourself to retrieval practice, and were duly rewarded in a test.

What would that feel like?

No doubt, you would probably feel quite proud of yourself. You would start to feel competent in whatever subject you had decided to really commit to.

And psychologists point to competence as an incredibly powerful driver of long term motivation. As we get better at things, we start to enjoy them more.

“In the short term, your students will hate retrieval practice”

In the short term, your students will hate retrieval practice. They will hate the feeling of not knowing an answer or getting things only partially correct. But the science is clear: it works.

If you can build a culture that looks beyond that short term pain and understands that it’s worth it in the long-term, your students will truly fly.

The post Retrieval practice in the classroom – Boost long-term knowledge retention with this powerful learning strategy appeared first on Teachwire.

This fantastic resource was created by Kate Jones, a teacher, leader, author, blogger, keynote speaker and podcaster.

Evidence-based education resource

Simply download this editable Powerpoint template, fill it in and then display it at the start of your lesson.

Aim to include a range of questions that will require students to remember information from last lesson, last week and even further back than that.

This powerful learning strategy is great for revision sessions when you want to recap and go back over lesson content.

If you’re teaching a mixed-ability class, try and include some questions that all students should be able to answer. You can also include some more challenging ones that require more in-depth answers.

You can also download blank versions of this template that students can fill out and give to each other to complete.

Whether you’re a history specialist or you teach politics, RE, PE or something else entirely, you’ll find this template useful.

This retrieval practice grid doesn’t include multiple choice options. This is because, according to Professor John Dunlosky, “students will benefit most from tests that require recall from memory and not from tests that merely ask them to recognise the correct answer”.

How to use the grids

The tweets below show how a wide range of educators of different subjects have put the template to use in their classroom.

Turn the grid into a bingo-style game by asking pupils to choose any four in a row to attempt.

If you’re a MFL teacher you can use the grid to help pupils remember vocabulary they’ve been taught.

We’d love to see how you put this practical Kate Jones retrieval practice resource to use in your school. Tell us about the impact of retrieval practice in your classroom by tweeting us at @teachwire.

We’ve also got lots more advice for teachers about the benefits of retrieval practice and how to implement this effective learning strategy.

Read Kate Jones’ book

Kate Jones has written a practical book called Love To Teach: Research and Resources for Every Classroom, published by John Catt.

It has a chapter about using retrieval practice at the start of lessons. It also outlines other effective, evidence-informed ideas to try in your classroom.

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Smart Revise is an online course companion containing hundreds of original exam-style questions that help teachers recast revision as a continual practice throughout the course. Unique to Smart Revise are algorithms that address the forgetting curve and encourage mastery of core concepts.

The latest Smart Review content focuses on the Edexcel 1BS0 course, enabling it to be used for baseline assessments, end-of-topic tests, homework assignments, to identify learning priorities, for interventions, low-stakes quizzing, mastery and even online mock exams.

Smart quiz

Students often forget what they have learned over time. Smart Revise presents them with their own personalised, spaced, interleaved and diagnostic multiple-choice questions that encourage mastery of the core principles of business.

Teachers can give students control, or opt to gradually increase the available content.

Smart terms

These are more than simply electronic flashcards. In ‘reflective mode’, students RAG rate their understanding of subject key terminology. In ‘interactive mode’, students are challenged to write definitions.

Both modes will present teachers with a rich set of analytic reports that are ideal for baseline assessments and topic reviews.

Smart advance

Smart Revise features more than 450 original exam-style questions and 11 case studies (with command word help and guided marking for students) written by experienced teachers.

These are accompanied by mark schemes carefully curated by a lead examiner, to ensure that students are encouraged to frame their answers correctly.

Smart tasks

Questions can be set using the categories of ‘Quiz’, ‘Terms’ and ‘Advance’, with teachers able to track completion and record outcomes while reviewing and analysing their students’ performance.

‘Quiz’ uses algorithms to automatically select questions based on prior performance, while ‘Tasks’ allows teachers to set the same questions for all students.

Get in touch

For further details of how you can try Smart Revise for free today, email admin@craigndave.co.uk or visit smartrevise.craigndave.org

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Teaching resources

This download includes 20 lessons’ worth of material, including Powerpoints and supporting resources for each session. The lessons are designed to prepare students for the Shakespeare question in their GCSE English Literature exam.

In the exam students will be expected to:

• Read, understand and respond to texts. Use textual references, including quotations, to support ideas
• Analyse language, form and structure using the correct subject terminology
• Show an understanding of the relationships between texts and the contexts in which they were written
• Use a range of vocabulary for clarity, purpose and effect, with accurate spelling, punctuation and grammar

You also get two lessons focused on academic reading.

Exploring big ideas in Macbeth

Use worksheets to explore the following topics from the play:

• Ambition
• Appearance vs reality
• Gender
• Guilt
• Supernatural
• Violence

These resources has been designed to help students consider the big ideas explored by Shakespeare in Macbeth. This will give students the chance to:

• read, understand and respond to texts
• maintain a critical style and develop an informed personal response
• use textual references, including quotations, to support and illustrate interpretations
  

Key extracts

Use the key extracts booklet to explore key parts of the text from Acts 1-5. The quotes are included, as well as suggested activities, or there’s a template to make your own extracts booklet.

Students can work their way through the booklet, reading important extracts from the play and completing the activities that follow.

The activities have been designed to help pupils understand the text as well as Shakespeare’s purpose, and there are also ‘Extra Challenge’ tasks for eager students.

Pupils should read through the extracts and highlight what they deem to be the most important quotations. They can then copy these onto flashcards and explain why they are important to know. How do Shakespeare’s language choices help him get his message across to an audience?

Students can also link each of the themes in the booklet to the context of Macbeth and explain why it was necessary for Shakespeare to include these ‘big ideas’ in his play.

Bite size revision

Help your students with the following GCSE Macbeth printable revision guides and activities:

• Scene-by-scene bitesize revision activities
• 100 questions sheet
• Knowledge retention battleships game
• Quotation drills
• Thinking and linking grid
• Thinking quilt

Also included is an Easter revision booklet.

Crucial characters

Included are character revision booklets for:

• Macbeth
• Lady Macbeth
• Banquo
• The Witches
• King Duncan
• Macduff

There are a number of ways that students can use this booklet to help with their revision for ‘Macbeth’.

Firstly, they could work through the included activities, considering what each character is like physically, emotionally and psychologically. There are knowledge retrieval questions to complete (with answers at the back).

Some of the exercises will help pupils to expand the vocabulary they use when writing about each character. There is a glossary at the back to help. Students are asked to link the character in question to other characters in the play, as well as the play’s themes.

Another way the booklet could be used is focusing on the quotations box. Pick a quotation and explain what is happening in the play when it’s said.

As well as completing the vocabulary exercises in the booklet, students might also want to take the words from the list for each character and explain how the character links to that word. It may be through something they say, their personality or something they do.

You’ll also find character adjectives sheet and a character connections worksheet included in the download. With the second of these, it’s up to students to think of the connections they can make between characters and explain them in as much detail as possible.

For example, there’s more to say about the connection between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth than just, ‘they are married.’

Stuart Pryke is an assistant principal (teaching and learning) and English teacher. Follow him on Twitter at @spryke2 or visit englishteachersnotebook.blogspot.com. Browse great ideas to help with GCSE English Language revision.

The post Macbeth GCSE – Complete teaching and revision resources appeared first on Teachwire.

However, even the busiest of teachers can help to break down the challenge of revision by tackling it using short, interactive strategies in the classroom, enabling memory skills to be developed progressively. Crucially, this ‘drip-feed’ approach means that information is being revisited systematically, thus avoiding the common problem of students not fully engaging with revision until it’s too late.

The incremental nature of this type of revision draws on key research by Professor Robert Bjork, who found that ‘desirable difficulties’ in learning can actually strengthen memory. Specifically, he recommends:

• Spaced practice
• Interleaving
• Testing (generally via regular, low stakes quizzing)
• Varied revision methods
• Generation (recall) rather than reading

Stage 1 – Motivate and activate your students

When it comes to revision, there’s obviously some work to do in terms of boosting pupil morale and motivation. I recommend sharing with them the following statistic – that by the age of 16, pupils will have spent approximately 10,500 hours or 2,100 days at school. Revision is the penultimate hurdle; that one final push to help them over the finish line of the exams. It can be reassuring for students to consider that, in a very real sense, the hardest work is already done.

Itemise and incentivise the process of revision by introducing a scoring system, whereby completion of distinct revision tasks earns students a set number of points. For example, use of a mind map might earn them 5 points, and the completion of a past paper 10 points.

Arrange the class into teams, set up a ‘revision league table’ and encourage the teams to compete to see who can place top of the league. Ask them to regularly update their scores and share their revision materials to sustain the momentum.

Stage 2 – Quick revision activities during lessons

One of the key problems with revision is the sheer scale of the task, and the extent to which it can feel overwhelming for many students. The approaches suggested below are designed to break revision down into manageable chunks, and can be quickly and easily incorporated into lessons.

Whilst subject teachers will often be rightly mindful of the pressure on them to cover the full extent of the curriculum, it can be reassuring to see students retaining, and indeed finessing their knowledge in the short to medium term, rather than setting aside a chunk of time for revision practice at the end of the course.

In my opinion, spreading this out across the term or year is well worth spending the five minutes of class time here and there that it will require – because that’s roughly the amount of time these strategies should take to complete.

1. The Threshold Challenge

This literally involves ‘going over’ prior learning. At the start of the lesson, place a piece of paper in the classroom doorway, on which is displayed some form of prior learning. Examples might include:

• A key term or ‘trigger word’
• An anagram of a keyword or phrase
• An image
• A question

When pupils step over, and potentially read aloud this ‘threshold prompt’, challenge them to go straight to their seat and spend 3 minutes recalling as much as they can about it. This could be done individually, or potentially in pairs using the ‘word tennis’ (my turn, your turn) approach.

At the end of the lesson, repeat the process as pupils leave the classroom – only this time, turn the paper over so that you’re challenging pupils to recall, rather than simply read the prompt. This activity can be an effective way of bookending a lesson with revisiting prior learning in the first 3 and final 2 minutes of the period, leaving the bulk of the lesson time free for them to learn something new.

2. Beat your Personal Best

A simple, yet powerful strategy that’s designed to improve pupils’ stamina and indicate to them where they’re making progress. Provide students with a blank piece of paper and a randomly chosen heading that describes a revision topic. Set a timer for 60 seconds, and then challenge them to see how many ideas and how much detail they can remember about the topic in that time.

After their time runs out, ask the students to record their score and then repeat the activity later in the same lesson or later that week. This time, challenge them to beat their previous score.

3. Bring it back

Call up a slide or resource from a previous topic, but make it so that certain words are blanked out, as if the material has been redacted. Drop this resource into that same lesson without warning, and ask the students to provide a choral response, where they all call out what they think the missing words are.

4. Putting the pieces back together

Select several key images from previous topics and photocopy them, before then chopping them up to form several simple jigsaws. Place the pieces making up each jigsaw into envelopes and distribute one each to different groups in the classroom. As the groups work to reassemble their image, challenge them to:

• Recall the topic from where their image originated
• Take it in turns to each describe something they recall about the topic

5. Memory markers

Keep revision at the forefront of your classroom by using physical memory markers. A simple version of this might involve using colour-coded Pringles tubes (or similar) to function as mini time capsules that can be used to store summarised key information collated when a topic was initially taught.

I’d recommend using a blend of trigger words, images, questions and other such material. Later, you can challenge students to:

• Recall which colour tube might relate to which topic
• Pull out a challenge and complete it – ‘How much can you recall about….?’

6. Introduce new revision tools

Research has shown that variety in revision is vital for boosting memory, though I’d argue that it’s equally important for motivating pupils. An innovative strategy such as the Frayer model can be completed using existing knowledge in just 8 minutes.

Claire Gadsby (@RevisionExpert) is a leading educational author, trainer and director of Radical Revision – a cutting edge revision skills programme for exam success in all subjects. For a free trial, visit radicalrevision.co.uk

The post GCSE Revision – 6 ways of making it more manageable for students appeared first on Teachwire.

My usual response, with typical teacher’s wit, is “That’s why it’s called revision – otherwise, it would just be called vision.”

My students have yet to find this remotely amusing, but the point stands. You can’t revise something unless you know it first. But as I sit here reflecting on our first examination-based GCSE results in three years, it’s become clear to me that revision isn’t the determining factor in a students’ success.

Dental flossing

I was always rubbish at revising. At 16, I had no awareness of how I worked best, and always struggled when sitting alone in silence with my class notes, because that’s what I thought revision was. I now know this to be the kind environment that does nothing for my efficacy levels, so it’s hardly surprising that I ended up learning Spice Girls lyrics when I should have been memorising chemical symbols.

I’d go as far to say that revision is like dental flossing. People say they do it, but often don’t – or at least not properly.

Have you ever taught a student who achieved astounding academic results and attributed their success predominately to revision? Or known students who had supply teachers all year, only to make up the lost ground by being prolific revisers?

A pedagogical approach that primarily emphases revision is one that’s fundamentally flawed, because of how much misconception there is among students around what actually constitutes meaningful revision. Over the years I’ve lost count of how often a conscientious (and almost always female) student will present me with a beautifully highlighted lever-arch dossier of notes, only to find that they haven’t actually retained any of the details they’ve so dutifully annotated.

They have, however, sacrificed their free time and wellbeing in order to convince themselves that they’ve revised – as though racking up a full time-sheet will automatically result in a grade 9.

Heavy lifting

Done well, revision can do much of the heavy lifting of knowledge acquisition. Done badly, it can be detrimental to student wellbeing, and allow misconceptions to take root unchallenged.

In my experience, students almost always lean towards the latter. Granted, revision can play a key role in students developing the independence and self-regulation they’ll need to succeed at KS5 and beyond. Yet it’s an ambitious curriculum and quality first teaching that will make the biggest impact on students’ grades and life chances, and no amount of revision can compensate if either are lacking.

Similarly, the extent of students’ vocabulary, cultural capital and support networks will impact far more upon their eventual attainment than their ability to revise. Like so many skills, meaningful revision has to be explicitly taught, re-taught, modelled and resourced.

Making connections

How much time do schools dedicate to the actual teaching of revision? Many will facilitate externally- run workshops – of the sort where students learn how to memorise key facts about a set topic – but skilled and systematic revision involves so much more than just remembering.

It’s prioritising, translating and making connections, all whilst self-evaluating. It requires motivation, aspiration and self-discipline; skills that students don’t innately possess. Revision is skilled work that requires a degree of metacognition and self-awareness. It’s a creation of teaching and teachers, rather than learning and learners.

Ultimately, we need to invest more in, and assume less about revision, the demands of which can end up feeling like a separate micro-curriculum altogether. Like so many seemingly accepted pillars within education, it might be time to review, reassess, or at the very least rethink the impact that revision has on our students.

Tracey Leese (@MrsqueenLeese) is an assistant headteacher at St Thomas More Catholic Academy in Longton, an advocate for women in leadership and co-author, with Christopher Barker, of Teach Like a Queen (Routledge, £16.99)

The post GCSE exams – Revision is skilled work, not just a process appeared first on Teachwire.

30 Second Briefing

The place: Stroud High School was an early adopter; Smart Revise has now been used by over 68,000 students.

The challenge: Tackling the ‘forgetting curve’ – a phenomenon whereby students forget what they have been taught over time, as investigated by Ebbinghaus in 1885 and later measured by Murre & Dros in 2015.

Getting started

As we return to a new, post-pandemic ‘normal’, attention will again be turning to preparation for those all-important terminal examinations. When should students start their revision? After Christmas? At February half term? At Easter?

Evidence suggests that the very best practice is to establish revision as ongoing preparation throughout a course, not just at the end.

After all, that’s how marathon runners prepare to run a race. It takes years and months of preparation, with gradual increases in distance and performance improvements over time.

Similarly, we need to apply the same approach when preparing for school exams.

What we did

As practising teachers, we recognised several problems our own students were experiencing as they were learning. It’s common to go through the content of a course in a linear fashion. Not necessarily in the order of the specification, but certainly one topic at a time.

More recently, it’s been suggested that interleaving concepts, instead of blocking learning, might have a positive impact by frequently returning to previously taught material and building upon it.

This requires careful curation of the scheme of learning, as students can get lost in the journey if it doesn’t match the specification and published textbooks.

“We thought there must be a more effective way to retain knowledge over long periods of time”

We found it frustrating that regardless of approach, students could sometimes forget the basics – the very foundations upon which their knowledge should develop.

In computer science, for example, we might ask, ‘What is the purpose of the memory address register?’ – only for students to forget this days and weeks later. We thought there must be a more effective way to retain knowledge over long periods of time.

How we improved

Frequent, low stakes quizzing on all previously taught material was the answer.

It’s important to find time in busy lessons for knowledge recall, but that can be quite a challenge when you only have just enough time to cover the course content. This is where technology can provide a solution.

Many online quizzing tools will only create short quizzes of content from a single unit, but Smart Revise is different. It automatically interleaves and melds questions, in response to the teacher enabling topics as the course progresses.

Crucially, it also creates a never-ending differentiated question playlist that is personalised for each student. Adapting over time with a focus on mastery, these question sets will change dynamically for each student in real-time as they engage with Smart Revise.

Since the questions prioritise and cycle in an infinite loop, there is no fixed number of questions. Instead, students always have another question to answer, with teachers free to choose how long they wish to spend on the activity.

Find out more by emailing admin@craigndave.co.uk or visit smartrevise.craigndave.org

The post Smart Revise for computer science and business appeared first on Teachwire.

Smart Revise is a course companion and sandbox assessment system built to address the forgetting curve, enabling students to retain more knowledge over time.

1) Careful curation

Students can access hundreds of multiple choice, short- and extended-answer questions independently, or join a class where teachers can direct their learning by expanding content throughout the course.

Smart Revise content is carefully curated to ensure an exact match with each point of the specification, taking the subtle nuances of every individual course into consideration.

After each examination series, the content is adapted to ensure a perfect fit going forward.

2) Personalised low-stakes quizzing

Smart Revise silently adapts to each student, presenting them with their own unique, never-ending playlist of multiple choice questions based on their current understanding.

With a focus on continually revisiting taught material, low-stakes quizzing has a remarkable effect on addressing the forgetting curve over time, helping students remember more of the fundamental knowledge they need to excel in their examinations.

Smart Revise is ideal for lesson starter activities and homework.

3) Encouragement of mastery

Smart Revise calculates which aspects of the course each individual student needs more practice in, and will focus on those areas.

A progress bar shows the student how close they are to answering a question correctly three times in a row and mastering it.

However, because the question set adapts dynamically, a student cannot know when they will be asked the same question again. Even when a question is mastered, it will occasionally reappear to confirm retention.

4) Identification of learning priorities

Discover the top ten least- and most-understood questions. Drill down into topics and focus on the misconceptions that Smart Revise has automatically identified.

Use class matrix reports to identify topics that need to be revisited and individual students who may need more support.

Smart Revise incorporates a complete range of question types and can be used in many ways – including for baseline assessments, end-of-topic tests and even online mock exams.

5) Time and money savings

Smart Revise saves teachers time by automatically creating and marking differentiated, personalised quizzes.

Additionally, teachers can set the same multiple choice and extended-answer questions for whole classes in under five minutes using the simple task creation wizard – which allows for easy submission of answers electronically, with no printing or photocopying required.

There’s no need for teachers to upload their own content or class lists, while innovative reporting allows teachers to focus their interventions without engaging in complex data analysis.

Key points

• Harness Smart Revise’s in-built algorithms and personalised course content – including a never-ending list of low-stakes quiz questions – to help students beat the forgetting curve
• Use hundreds of original extended-answer questions throughout the course, complete with command word help, guided marking and model answer videos
• Smart Revise isn’t a crowdsourcing platform – all content is carefully curated by a select team of experienced, practising teachers and examiners
• By signing up for a free trial at smartrevise.online, you can get to try out all of Smart Revise’s features for yourself today, using a small question set with your students

To find out more visit smartrevise.craigndave.org or email admin@craigndave.co.uk

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Back in March 2020, most settings were busy scrambling to navigate the brave new world of distance learning. Two years later, we now find ourselves in a place where most schools are capable of delivering hybrid learning provision that combines in-person lessons with education received at home.

That might make some of us fear for the future of the ‘snow day’ – will we ever again be able to down tools and join our charges in sledging down the nearest big hill, sharing in the joys of a bonus day of fun? – but it must be said that some incredible opportunities are now being presented to us when it comes to exam classes.

Where we are

In the past, we’d rely heavily on arranging interventions and exam classes in the hope that those pupils needing them the most would actually attend. It was hard to chase those that didn’t, and near impossible make them compulsory, since most would take place during extracurricular school hours.

Yet we’re now in the position of being able provide comprehensive support at our pupils’ and parents’ convenience in a number of different ways.

Accessibility

Most students own, or at least have access to one or more digital devices, with those that previously didn’t now much more likely to, in the wake of the government’s laptop funding schemes. More access means more incentive for schools to continue developing their hybrid learning provision so that it encompasses livestreamed and archived, on-demand revision classes.

Targeted support

We’ve seen further government funding support for the rollout of Microsoft 365 for Education and Google Classroom in trusts and specific settings. This has given schools more options when it comes to delivering, supporting and monitoring their learning, and enabled interventions to be more succinct and better tailored to pupils’ individual needs.

Better inclusion

Post- pandemic, there’s been a notable increase in persistent absenteeism and a reduction in consistent attendance. What distance learning provides is a way of reassuring those who can’t engage in person feel that they aren’t being left behind, that their academic outlook isn’t hopeless and that they don’t have to give up – because they can now access the same learning at the same rate as their peers.

Granted, this might not be a one-to-one substitute for being present in a classroom, but it certainly goes a considerable way towards helping them make meaningful gains in their final months of school and develop confidence in their abilities. It also provides further scaffolding opportunities for SEN pupils.

Parental outreach

There can be times when parents aren’t able to support their children because they’re unable to understand what it is they actually need help with. By allowing parents to review the same lessons their children have received, we’re dramatically increasing the scope for home support.

Seeing concepts explained clearly by staff, rather textbooks, can empower parents to provide their children with extra help, and hopefully deter them from thinking that a particular subject or topic is simply beyond them.

The modern learning platforms now in place at most schools can also help teachers instantly communicate to parents those areas they feel would be helpful for students to work on, thus making schools’ revision support more informative and responsive.

Cost savings

While some students might still prefer working with tangible materials, largely gone are the days of printed revision guides. Online platforms allow guides, notes, directions and documents to be stored digitally, reducing the photocopying workload and producing learning environments where students’ revision materials across all subjects can live together in harmony.

Flexible learning

Whether it’s because a student didn’t get a concept, was absent or simply needs reminding of a key point, the ability to call up lessons going over certain areas that pupils can relearn takes away some of the pressures associated with exam season.

Various studies have shown that teenagers function better with later starts, and while the structure of the typical school day has yet to reflect this, we can at least now offer students the flexibility of being able to access learning when it works for them, rather than at prescribed times – something which may well result in better engagement with the content needing to be learnt.

Where we’re going

So with all that in mind, what can you do to take your GCSE support provision to the next level?

Lights, camera, action

If you haven’t already, start recording your lessons and revision sessions – and if you’re delivering key skills, use a visualiser. Most visualisers come supplied with software that allows you to capture processes as you’re performing them for later recall.

Create a folder on your desktop called ‘Teaching Moments’ and begin building up a bank of knowledge. You could even task students with explaining concepts using your visualiser and capture the resulting footage, so that they can refer back to explanatory videos narrated by themselves and their peers.

Digital resources

The available options when it comes to acquiring digital textbooks are expanding all the time, with websites such classoos.com making it easy to access (for a fee) whichever books you might need.

Let’s not forget the trusty scanner, or free mobile apps that let you take pictures of printed matter and convert them to PDFs – with annotations, if needed – though be mindful of copyright permissions when doing either at scale.

Monitoring

Most online classroom platforms will give you the option to see who is accessing the work you’ve set and when. You can download reports detailing who has watched your lesson and who has yet to complete their tasks, thus enabling you to check whether students have properly understood a concept or might need further support.

Those that aren’t engaging can potentially work alongside your department head or head of year, if needed – either way, you’ll know in real time who is along with you for the ride and who isn’t, and be able to address any issues before it’s too late.

Free teaching resources

There are numerous online revision tools out there, covering a huge range of subjects – Gojimo, Quizlet, BBC Bitesize, MindMeister, Brainscape and XMind, to name but a few – so use them. Some may offer pre-made subject information, quizzes, tasks and exam-style questions, or else they may let you to create your own revision aids, such as mind maps and revision cards.

YouTube and social media platforms such as TikTok can also be a great source of material that students will find helpful, be it general exam tips or advice relating to certain subjects.

Distance learning has opened up a whole new world of learning accessibility, flexibility, creativity and support that’s just begging to be used in the service of securing the best possible outcomes for students. I, for one, am excited about the environments I’ll be able to create and develop year on year for their benefit.

Nikki Cunningham-Smith is an assistant headteacher based in Gloucestershire

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