Conceptualised revision for GCSE English Lit

 How modelling, metacognition and deliberate practice transformed my set 4's Language revision and results

Since the EEF's 'Metacognition and Self-regulated learning' Guidance report, published in 2018, I have been obsessed with embedding some of its recommendations into my English classroom. I felt like I did many of the things they recommended naturally while teaching Lit and wrote about how I had trialed some of them with a top set I had, who achieved 12 Grade 9 in TES. My Language results had always been decent but not amazing, so in September 2020, I decided I wanted to spend the year really focusing on metacognition and how I could use the guidance to improve the way I prepared my students and in turn, improve results. 

I had the perfect class to try it out with as well. My set 4 were a traditional 3/4 borderline class with a couple of students who could pull it out of the bag and get a Grade 6 or even 7 on the day. Personality wise, they are a real mixed bag; a few work incredibly hard but find English to be really tough while quite a large contingent are incredibly apathetic and want to "scrape a 4" to get on to their college courses. I don't believe in 'dumbing down' for lower sets anyway and have always tried to teach the top and scaffold down - Tom Sherrington's blog posts really shaped my way of thinking about this a few years ago. However, while I found that they could write with sophistication about contextual matters in texts and have a good go at an essay, they really struggled with being 'clear' and 'thoughtful' on the Language papers. 

In October, they completed a Language Paper 1 in class, in exam conditions and the results were okay - they could definitely have been better. After a bit of student voice in a feedback lesson, I realised that they were having issues with cognitive load. They knew what they were being assessed for on each of the Language paper questions and we had gone over approaches etc a million times. But once they got into the hall and had to balance all of that prior learning with an unseen text, under timed constraints, it all just went to pieces. Some of them sat for ten minutes or so after they had completed the first four mark question, trying to remember how to start. It was even worse with Paper 2 where they had to grapple with two unseen texts and comparing, which they really struggled with. I could see their working memories were in overdrive and had a think about how I could help. 

Chris Curtis had been writing a bit on his blog about Literature revision and had written about metacognition and how he had created a resource to do with poetry revision which he entitled 'Show me your Revision' which was all about modelling and structuring steps of how to revise. I had been thinking about how I could do this with Language for a while, so I came up with two double sided A3 revision sheets - one for each Language paper, which I hoped would help pupils revise independently in a more structured way, using the recommendations from the EFF guidance. 

On one side, they had a paper and questions created by the most awesome Matthew Lynch and the other side was split into four sections:

1. The question stem for each question

2. Space to write in the steps they need to take to complete the question, eg. box off the lines, re-read that section, highlight relevant quotes, circle words you will zoom into etc. This was the most important thing for me to include I felt, as a lot of the research I had been doing had talked about how metacognitive activities, including planning how to approach a learning task, could really improve students' learning (Nietfeld & Shraw, 2002; Thiede, Anderson and Therriault, 2003). Moreover, individuals who demonstrate a wide variety of metacognitive skills perform better on exams and complete work more efficiently—they use the right tool for the job, and they modify learning strategies as needed, identifying blocks to learning and changing tools or strategies to ensure goal attainment. I felt that if students go into the exam almost having a formulaic understanding of the steps they need to take on each question, it takes away some of that extraneous cognitive load they may experience due to the wording of the question, or the way it is set out. 

3. A QR code which takes students to a model paragraph answer for the paper and question on the back of the sheet. These are stored on my One Drive and I just created a link to them through a QR Code generator. Credit to Andy for this idea! Students found it really useful to see what excellent answers looked like so that they could try to structure them in the same way. Each of the model answers is also colour coded and annotated with ingredients, which brings me to the next part...

4. I left space next to the QR code for students to bullet point the key ingredients they needed to include in their answers. 

5. Now, equipped with all of this information, they could now have a go at writing the next paragraph themselves in timed conditions, in the space I gave them, or on paper should they choose to. I needed this space for students to complete deliberate practice so that they could prove to themselves that they could do it independently. Deliberate practice can be related to positively to performance. In the real world generally, professionals, craftsmen, and employees are expected to achieve the best possible result given their attained current level of skill during their work hours, public performances, and competitions. This is the same with students. They have to perform to their best abilities for a small chunk of time in an exam, so like professionals in the real world, they can only improve their craft through deliberate independent practice (Charness et al., 2006).

Students completed one of these every fortnight for Paper 1 and 2 and when they sat their mock exams in December, I could not believe the progress they had made. Some students who had been working on a Grade 2 had gone up to a 4 but the biggest success was a very apathetic student who struggled with revision going from a Grade 2 to almost a 6! I just hope it all pays off for them in their final assessments next week. If you want to use the sheets, you can find them here.

References:
Charness, N, Feltovich, P.J., Hoffman, R.R., Ericsson, K. A (Eds.) (2006) The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Nietfeld, J. L., and Shraw, G. (2002) 'The effect of knowledge and strategy explanation on monitoring accuracy.' Journal of Educational Research, 95, pp. 131-142.

Thiede, K. W., Anderson, M. C., and Therriault, D. (2003) 'Accuracy of metacognitive monitoring affects learning of texts.' Journal of Educational Psychology, 95, pp. 66-73.