After the MOCK exams: THE LEARNING SCHEDULE STRATEGY

Like most teachers in the country, we have just finished our Mock Exams. For our school, this is the second set of trial exams carried out by our Year 11 classes.  The data that comes from these exams is invaluable in deciding a course of action for the next few weeks, leading to the actual exams in May and June. 

To help students analyse the data, we use the following KS4 Self-Reflection Exam analysis form, which breaks up students' performance by skill and helps them see how many marks away they are from the next grade.

There are several elements to consider, when we analyse the data of our Y11 classes:

• Which skill was the worst performed by our students?
• Within that skill, which question or section was the most challenging?
• Which skill was the best performed? Why? 
• How many marks are students away from the next grade?

Exactly a year ago, I wrote a blog post "SOS: After the mock exams, what?" describing a strategy to follow in order to maximise, listening, reading, writing and speaking skills in the last few weeks of the course. Although this was meant for the old languages GCSE qualification, the strategies and techniques are the same. You can access the blogpost here.

In this short post, I want to focus on creating a learning schedule for the students.

I see, year after year, that students perform in lessons and generally can do the work well but once they are at home, a part from specific homework tasks, they do not know how to revise. 

In the case of the languages exams, this task becomes harder, as students have 4 different papers to prepare for requiring specific skills and within the papers, different exam questions, such as the translation or dictation tasks, all underpinned by a strong vocabulary and grammar command and knowledge. 

Even the best students can become overwhelmed with the languages revision demands and many reduce this revision task to learning some random quizlets, with disjointed vocabulary, with a few carrying out some past papers, in the best of cases, normally, a day or two before the actual GCSE exams. 

To help students with their revision, we have created The Learning Schedules.

We have created two learning schedules: One to be carried out, specifically during the Easter holiday period, focussed, entirely on the Oral exam and a second one, spread over three weeks, to be started mid May, leading to the actual Listening, Reading and Writing exams. 

The schedules tell students what to revise and for how long, on each day, during a given week. Ours is based on 5 days of learning revising 45 minutes on each day.  We have used Padlet to create the schedules so that these are fully accessible and interactive, with direct links to specific, quizlet, Mizou courses, past papers or Exampro tasks.

The Oral exam Learning Schedule

You can access the Oral exam learning schedule here.  The idea is to start the schedule during the Easter Holidays. The main focus of the schedule is to prepare students for the unprepared conversation following the description of the two photos and reading aloud tasks, by chunking the revision of different topics throughout different days, with interleaving practice and using Mizou to practise random, potential questions for the exam.  When following the schedule, students will identify gaps and they are encouraged to be proactive, and go back to their own Sentence Builders Booklet to revise any topic which they may find challenging.

The May-June Learning Schedule 

You can access the May-June Learning Schedule here.  This schedule is meant to start once the oral exams are finished. It practises lots of different skills: 

• Writing, using potential questions from the previous schedule and Mizou, now to be carried out in writing.
• Reading and Listening, using past papers from previous years and Exampro tasks
• Official AQA vocabulary learning, via quizlets featuring all official vocabulary.
• The 5 Magic Powers practice, via a quizlet and a technique to maximise the skill: to write a sentence with each key structure.
• Grammar practice, focussed on verb endings via interactive tasks for Higher Students and interactive practice for Foundation Students on Question 3 of the writing paper.
• Dictation and translation, via interactive Exampro tasks.

The schedule breaks up the revision of these elements, day by day, giving students flexibility to assess and evaluate which skills to focus on, depending on the data provided by our Mock exams. Ultimately, we want students to ask themselves:

Which skill do I struggle the most? 

Which particular question do I struggle the most?

How can I practise my verb endings?

How can I practise the 5 Magic Powers and the Verb Nuggets as an alternative to verb endings, if I need to?

How can I practise my listening and reading skills?

How can I practise the vocabulary?

and find something in the schedule to close the gap so that they become independent learners.