Issue 14

This issue‌

Issue 14.

April 2018

The REVISION issue

Strategies, inspiration and practical ideas to help us support students revision and retention.

Knowledge organisers Building a full understanding of a unit and subject.

Starting early Maximising study periods and signposting effective revision strategies.

Pedagogy exchange - steeped in practice

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it is important that we continue to teach and model effective revision strategies.

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Emma Stebbings

6th Form revision focus

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n response to a request from 6th formers for more revision strategies, we prepared mini revision sessions that could be delivered in form reading time.

Each week, students are taught a revision technique, then put it into practice with one of their subjects. We also shared an article with them ‘What every teacher should know about memory’, which discussed recent academic research on the best and worst revision practices. .

students can maximise the ‘‘potential of their study periods..

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I

n brief, regular practice testing, distributed across time and ‘interleaving’ subjects had the best outcome for long term retention of information. On the other hand, the research showed that highlighting and re-reading had the least impact on remembering information.

Ironically, this is what students tend to do the most of, and it is important that we continue to teach and model effective revision strategies so that students can maximise the potential of their study periods.

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them engaging ‘‘ it's greatin totheirseerevision! ’’ Natalie Rainsford

The challenge of recall

I n Science

we've been trying to implement revision techniques into lessons that help pupils recall facts.

Mrs Leathley introduced me to the following strategy. The teacher provides students with a list of facts. Students are then asked to draw pictures to represent the information in a given time. Students are encouraged to be as inventive as they can. The facts are then hidden and students try to remember the information from their pictures.

This is a technique that allows students to be creative and it's great to see them engaging in their revision! The attached examples show how successful this was for sixth form Chemistry students.

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‘‘ Knowledge is power. ’’ Gemma Roberts

E.D. Hirsch (Professor of Education at the University of Virginia) discovered that “knowledge builds on knowledge: the more you know, the more you are able to learn.” This very simple idea has profound implications. Hirsch’s ideas can be distilled as follows: a broad and deep foundation of knowledge is fundamental to future achievement, because a memory replete with facts learns better than one without.

Expert Inspiration

This insight

is at least four centuries old and is attributed to the philosopher Frances Bacon during the Enlightenment. His statement has lost nothing in terms of relevance and significance. Knowledge is power and education is the fundamental precondition for social mobility, democracy and social justice.

Since 2010 there has been a transformation of England’s education system. The accountability system has been overhauled and the focus for schools has returned to ensuring that children are taught a broad and balanced curriculum. This is Gove’s legacy and we are now all facing the delivery of a content heavy, knowledge rich curriculum. We need the skills and resources to help us to deal with this.

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Teaching knowledge and emphasising the learning of key factual knowledge can help to close the gap between more and less disadvantaged students.

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We know that lower participation from disadvantaged pupils in core academic subjects can negatively affect social mobility and it should be our moral purpose to try to close the gap between these groups of learners. Teaching knowledge and emphasising the learning of key factual knowledge can help to close the gap between more and less disadvantaged students.

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‘‘ S

o how can we help our students to build a memory replete with facts?

One such ‘tool’ is the use of a knowledge organiser. These resources should organise the most vital, useful and powerful knowledge on one single page. Knowledge Organisers can clarify for everyone exactly what is being taught. You may have to limit the knowledge to the most valuable content that we want students to remember for years to come.

Knowledge organisers should be given to students at the start of each unit to help them remember what they’re learning. No longer out of sight, teachers can recap quickly and easily in lessons. Students can continually revisit and retrieve prior learning from their memories.

Students can continually revisit and retrieve prior learning from their memories.

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Knowledge organisers can be used quickly and effectively for self-quizzing and teacher led quizzing. Students can be asked to produce the knowledge organiser themselves and this is powerful in KS5. They are also brilliant for revision!

But to help to quash some of the disparaging comments that have been made about a knowledge rich curriculum in general terms and the use of knowledge organisers…

It is not merely the drilling of unconnected facts. A knowledge organiser and the use of knowledge organisers is not the curriculum in its entirety. The knowledge organiser needs to be built from a full understanding of the subject and the subject curriculum and therefore requires far more thinking than is first apparent. It is also only the start of what we should be offering our students.

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‘‘ A

simple search on the Internet will return thousands of examples of knowledge organiser. They are becoming increasingly popular across a myriad of schools up and down the country. Some schools make their knowledge organisers available on their secure website and some are even ring binding and handing out a year’s worth of knowledge organisers, subject specific to all students at the beginning of the academic year. They are being used during reading time and students are being encouraged to self-quiz regularly.

They are being used during reading time and students are being encouraged to self-quiz regularly.

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Top tweets from the world of Teaching & Learning

The Science department have found the production of knowledge organisers for KS3 very useful and their production has led to many a discussion within the department but we are encouraged by their receipt and hope to embed this practice at KS4.

So, if you haven’t researched, discussed or tried knowledge organisers why not give them a go!

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Learning Spy A snapshot of knowledge organisers from across the web

Knowledge organisers

Examples of how knowledge organisers can be adapted to suit a range of units, styles and subjects.

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way of assessing ‘‘ An effective students revision ’’ Charlotte Joyce

Revision strategies in History

T

he image below is an example of a new initiative I've introduced for students in KS4 and KS5. It is a grid of all the potential questions on the exam and students are given 2 minutes per question to write a plan before we go through the answers together. This has been a really effective way of assessing students revision, and if timed well with up and coming assessments, students have time to go home and make sure they work on the questions that they were weakest at and resolve gaps in knowledge. The sixth form really liked it and I've so far set it as a revision task for Y10's for the mocks and Y11 revision sessions we have weekly.

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