Let’s take a step back for a minute. You have designed the perfect course with a Big Question and exciting enquiries. You have introduced the unit visually and created some fantastic lessons that are engaging and use stories, as well as get students to investigate issues for themselves. You have reviewed the learning at regular intervals and built in quality assessment through ‘hinge’ questions in plenaries and by targeting core skills through mock exam questions. How could this fail to get your students the top grades?

 

Actually, there are still two important elements that we need to go through with our students to get them through exams. These are revision and exam skills. These are problematic for many reasons; let’s discuss them one at a time.

 

Revision is the perennial problem. We know that students need to do it and they need to start early. Also, we know that most students are bad at it. The problem is compounded by study leave, when you have no control over what students do. There are some really good revision sites out there, the BBC’s Bitesize being the most comprehensive, but they only cover part of what needs to be learned – they deal only with the content. This book has consistently pushed the message that content alone is not enough to engage or get students through the exam process. So, that means it is down to the class teacher to ensure that all the areas are covered – skills and content. Also, you might be covering material that students last encountered nearly two years before. They say a week is a long time in politics, two years in the life of a teenager is an epoch. Revision is hard. It is hard for the students and it is hard for the teacher to make exciting. How do you make something exciting when you have already done it once? How do you offer something new and exciting, but at the same time reinforces the key content and the core skills? Hopefully, this chapter will have some of the answers.

 

Exam skills are also difficult to cater for. As subject leaders, we have seen a rise in the number of students who are opting out of papers when they hit a barrier. This is a serious problem. You can equip students with lots of skills and knowledge to tackle different styles of question, but if they won’t even read it, then what can you do? Luckily, most students will try their best to answer the questions in front of them, but how do you ensure that they make the most of their time and don’t forget everything they have learned? How can you help them to prepare and keep calm under the pressure of a lengthy exam? There are answers to these points and we will explore them later.