Teach Secondary Issue 14.7

N 2 sleep is the longest, and most important stage of the sleep cycle. It’s when your body temperature drops, your heart rate slows and your brain starts to create K-complexes, which are critical for consolidating memories. Speaking as someone who once spent epic hours (unproductively) revising the night before exams back inmy uni days, trust me – sleep is important, and a state in which we obviously aren’t... O nline. Several decades on from that initial explosion of digital tools, teachers are still striving to find that necessary balance between analogue and digital learning aids. And that’s before you even broach the issue of smartphones, and how clearly they highlight the ways in which technology can make students more… P assive – or at least insufficiently challenged. In a world awash with entertainments vying for eyeballs and attention, the difficult process of teaching complex concepts should be considered a... Q uite considerable priority and given the space to succeed. Returning us to... ‘Routine’ to‘Zone of silence’ R outine. As the esteemed record producer Rick Rubin once remarked, “ Good habits create good work. The way we do anything is the way we do everything. ” Note – this doesn’t mean that in the run-up to their exams students should forego... S ocialising. We could have gone with ‘Success’ or ‘Strategies’ here, but making time for socialising during revision periods is hugely important.Wellness doesn’t occur in isolation, and isn’t sustainable as an individual pursuit. Those learners who manage to balance a healthy social life with consistent study habits will see better results across both. Moreover, it’s perfectly okay to acknowledge that virtually every other Y11 student in the country will be going through the same intensely stressful… T imes themselves. We should remember that for students, schools are sites of both anxiety and wonder, staffed by people encouraging them to keep going, because they’re part of a much larger learning community. Within reason, we should try to impress upon students a sense of... U rgency, which they sometimes won’t develop in themselves unless we issue regular reminders, assign revision homework via Google Classroom, set revision deadlines, distribute tailored revision techniques and materials, and attempt 50 different ways of capturing their attention in an effort to make them realise that all this, right here, right now matters ... V ery much indeed. I’d personally like to oversee a classroomwhere autonomy is the norm, so that we can strengthen our students’… W ellbeing, rather than diminish it. We want our students to succeed in their exams, but we should also want them to eventually become better people, capable of understanding that the hardships they’ve faced in school are nothing compared to the hardships they’ll face in later life (sorry). The sooner we show students how to reflect on their daily lives, the healthier they’ll be. So let’s plot ‘year group’ along our… X -axis, progress on our Y-axis and get that line going up as early as we can. Some of those students at the very start of their secondary school journey may well protest that they still have... Y ears to go yet, but it bears repeating: revision should be embedded not at the end of Y10, but from the start of KS3 . To learn how to look forward, students must first learn how to look back and self-reflect. One idea recently adopted at my current school was to create a… Z one of Silence in the sixth form, so that students could use the common room for productive study and revision. At present, most of us are making students learn how to pass subjects while assuming that they’ll implicitly learn the skills needed to do so as they go. In practice, however, most of us will only encounter productive struggle when given access to guided spaces that are free of distractions and which let us explore. It might not be the most fun way for students to spend their time – but it could be the most meaningful... ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jose Sala Diaz is head of media at The Priory School, Hitchin 35 teachwire.net/secondary R E V I S I O N TEACH SECONDARY SPECIAL REVISION