How do I revise?

by Mr C Malone

Assistant Principal - Equality of Learning 

“Your mock exam is coming up and you must revise these topics,” said the teacher.

“How?” said the class.

Often in schools, the biggest frustration for staff and students is based on revision. Staff want students to revise and will often set this as a task or a homework; a timely reminder for an assessment on the horizon. Students know they need to learn a topic, but are sometimes lacking the basic skill base to do so.

As Head of House some months ago, I felt it would be a good idea to use form time to begin building up to a set of mock exams for our Year 11 and Year 10’s. We decided to create a 'back to basics' approach to revision.

A four week plan was put in place after dialogue with staff about “what worked for them as students?” This got us all thinking about the skills we had to learn as students and how to teach these skills to our students in form time.

Week 1 – Revision Time Tables and Revision Cards

Week 1 covered revision timetables and being organised, as well as then setting students the task of creating their own timetables. After this, we covered the rules of revision and revision cards. Revision cards and notes were categorically the most valued revision technique by staff, so was introduced straight away!

Week 2 – Spider Diagrams and Flow Charts

Students were taught the process of organising their thoughts and allowing these thoughts to grow during revision. In particular, focus was given to the ideas that we can split into areas and allowing that to form a revision structure. Students were asked to create a revision flowchart for an English topic they had to revise. On the last day of the week, they had to discuss what they thought of the process.

Week 3 – Idea sharing

With two weeks to go, we were hoping that students had utilised our techniques enough that their revision was improving. In any case, we suggested that we also share some techniques in class and came up with this list. Students tried many of them out at home to see which, if any, worked for them!

• Mnemonics
• Games
• Lists
• Highlighter Challenge
• Post It Notes
• Read Out Loud
• Sing
• Teach your friend

Week 4 – Conclusion and Findings

Finally in Week 4, each form and Progress Tutor set their sights on Examination Success and began utilising all their new revision skills in practice!

It was a very useful situation for staff and students and set our Year 10’s in particular up for some excellent mock results!