The Home Stretch
5 top tips for preparing students for their English exams
It’s that time of year again: the countdown to exams has begun. Whilst most of us have hit the start of our Easter holidays (thank god!) and are hopefully planning out how to spend the next two weeks resting and recuperating, for me it’s inevitable that I will spend some of that time thinking about my Year 11s and how to get them through the last few weeks – the home stretch – before their exams begin.
In this post, I will share my five top tips for preparing students for their English exams.
Most of these tips relate to revision strategies that you can employ in the classroom to prepare students for their exams. This is something I think is incredibly important this year, considering the amount of learning this cohort has missed due to Covid and how, in many schools, teachers are reporting a huge issue with revision culture at home. It is incredibly difficult to establish a culture of revision at this point in the year, if there is not one established already. This is a battle that, as individual teachers, is very hard to fight. We cannot force our students to revise the subject outside of lesson time. However, what we can do is make the time students spend with us in lesson as impactful and high-leverage as possible.
1. Confidence is key
At this time of year, it’s more important than ever that we invest in building students’ confidence: tell them how impressed you are by what they know; remind them of how much they’ve learned; reflect with them on how far they have come since they started their GCSE journey. Positivity and encouragement can go a long way. From my experience, student confidence is a large part of the battle when it comes to exam season, so I like to spend the few weeks leading up to the exams constantly reminding my students of how proud I am of them. We also can’t assume that students are getting this encouragement at home, so it might just be that their teachers are a vital source of comfort and confidence during this stressful time. They might squirm or roll their eyes but somewhere deep down it will be gradually boosting their confidence and convincing them that they are ready for exam season, despite what they might think.
2. Practice makes permanent
Linking to this idea of the importance of confidence, it is imperative that we prepare students as much as possible for the exam scenario. We need to regularly expose them to exam-style questions in a way that will build both resilience and exam-smart skills. Something I have found really useful for English Literature is what I call ‘exam-drills’. At the start of the lesson, I will give students an exam-style question, a mini-whiteboard, and a pen, and give them ten minutes to independently practice planning an answer to the exam question in a low-stakes environment. I will then circulate the room, identify misconceptions, and address said misconceptions through either some quick-fire feedback or modelling of how I would have approached the question. Depending on the outcome, I will then take the lesson from there. Sometimes, I’ll go completely off-piste from my original lesson plan and invest more time into correcting the errors I have noticed, perhaps by modelling a full written response to the question I gave them. Other times, I’ll give praise and encouragement and then go back to the rest of the lesson I had planned.
The level of independence I insist on during these exam drills very much depends on the needs of the class and the question I have given them. I recently saw Jennifer Webb (@FunkyPedagogy) use the term ‘health struggle’ which I liked. And I feel what make struggle ‘healthy’ very much depends on the makeup of the class. Sometimes, I insist that students work on their own for the full ten minutes, even if that means having a blank board at the end of the time. This can be useful for students that have decent self-esteem in the subject but are clearly not revising as much as they should, and need a bit of a wake-up call to remind them of the gaps they need to fill. I will say things like ‘Remember this feeling of frustration you have now because you don’t remember everything you need to in order to answer this question. Times that by ten, and that’s the feeling you will have in the exam if you don’t do your revision’. Of course, what can be motivating to one class can be demoralising to another. With those classes that are less confident, I will intervene if I think the struggle is becoming ‘unhealthy’ or unproductive, and do more of a reassuring ‘Okay, we clearly have a gap. But that’s okay! Let’s have a look at this together’. Other times, I give students a heads-up of the exam-drill we will be doing the following lesson. This can encourage students to do some revision overnight. This can be particularly useful for classes that need some motivation to revise. Different classes respond to different approaches, but the important thing is that they are routinely being exposed to that exam-style situation so that they have built resilience for the ‘real thing’.
3. List the moments
This is a tip specifically for preparing students for their English Literature exams. Another revision activity I like to use with students is giving them a character, theme or even an exam-style question and getting them to list all the moments in the text that are relevant to that thing. I like to do this on a whiteboard and remind them that, no matter how insignificant the moment might seem, as long as they can explain its relevance to the prompt, it goes on the board. This can kill a few birds with one stone. It can build confidence by reminding students of everything they know about a particular topic. It can become a preliminary stage in the planning process and thus a useful habit to get into for the exam: listing everything that is relevant to the question before cherry-picking the moments that will best prove your line of argument. It can also be used to strengthen knowledge of the structure of the text when you encourage students to, either during the task or retrospectively, list relevant moments in chronological order. Finally, it can build exam resilience by getting students into the habit of getting started straight away, rather than wasting minutes panicking about what they don’t remember. Something I say to students all the time is: it is a waste of time in the exam panicking about what you don’t know or don’t remember – focus on what you do know. This activity can be great for making this thought process habitual for students, even in high-pressure scenarios.
4. Quotations, quotations, quotations
Another Literature-specific tip. And a fairly contentious one at that. I know quotations aren’t the ‘be all and end all’. And I know you do not need exact quotations to write an excellent Literature essay. References to the text count. I know this – I’m an examiner myself. However, what I also know is that learning a select few rich quotations can unlock some beautiful analysis. It can also focus students’ revision and give them confidence when talking about a particular character or theme. For example, my students feel so pleased with themselves when they can use Sheila’s change from the infantile term of address ‘mummy’ to the more distant and mature ‘mother’ as evidence of her progress throughout the play. This is a great example of selective quotations which unlock both ideas and analysis (AO1 and AO2, if we’re talking AQA Literature). A quotation revision activity I find really useful is one that @__codexterous writes about in his blog post here. As the title of the post suggests, all you need is some flashcards and a visualiser to deliver a great lesson which encourages students to make links across the text and look for patterns in choices by the writer. This is one of my favourite revision lessons to use with pupils, and I always find pupils walk away feeling much more confident in providing thoughtful interpretations surrounding the topic of the lesson.
5. Model it
The importance of high-quality models cannot be understated, especially in the lead-up to exams. Yes, students need to be doing more independent practice themselves, but they also need to be continually seeing expert models that they can reflect on and use to further their learning. Every time I give students a model, I walk them through exactly what makes it a good example and get them to annotate the strategies I want them to employ in their own writing. While it can be tempting to pick out all kinds of things that make a model successful, I usually pick one or two things I want to focus on for that lesson. For example, I might specifically focus on how a model uses signposting to clearly navigate through the line of argument, or how sentence stems such as ‘This is consolidated in’ and ‘This is further developed by’ can be used to add more depth and detail to analysis. Getting closer to exams, I like to ask students what they expect to see from a particular model before I give it to them – I get them to explain what they would expect from a model of a particular level. Then we read and annotate where/how the model has done these things. This, I find, encourages metacognition by getting students to reflect on their writing process – if they know what to expect from a high-quality model, they also know what to include in their own writing to make it high quality.
Summary
In sum, there are two vital threads that must underpin every lesson that we spend with students in the run up to their exams: building confidence and resilience; and rehearsing the practical skills that prepare students for the exam situation. It is these two things which will give them the best chances of success when they are experiencing the ‘real thing’ and, while students are unlikely to thank you at the time for relentless ‘exam-drills’ or the countless hours you have spent writing models, they will (if not outwardly then perhaps somewhere deep, deep down…) thank you on results day when they are opening those all-important envelopes, knowing that you did everything you could to support them.