Sixth Form

Mrs Grant, Assistant Head (Pupil Progress), offers some top tips for revision based on her own experiences. Two years ago I sat an English A-level – my first exams in sixteen years! It was time to put into practice all the advice I confidently give out to pupils every year. So how did I approach the revision? I certainly embarked on ‘proper revision’ too late. I’d been enjoying my lessons happily and writing interesting essays (even this essay technique I began too late really), but had not attempted to commit anything to memory as I went along. English is very different to Physics, which I teach, but the bottom line is that some stuff needs memorising in any subject. So far so not good in heeding my own advice. Once I engaged in the process properly, though, I’d say I did manage to make up for lost time a little! I started by deciding which quotations were worth learning from the texts and from critics etc. I tried to choose a sensible number I thought it would be achievable to learn, and which spoke to the key themes of the texts. If I had started earlier, I would have been able to be more ambitious in the breadth of what I learnt. I then grouped them by text and by theme on index cards and set about reciting them out loud repetitively every day. I would read it out loud, cover it up and try to read it without looking etc. This didn’t take too long so it meant I could try to do this every day in the couple of months leading up to the exam. Slowly I knew just from the heading of an index card that I could recite the whole thing without looking. At that point I put these cards in a different pile – not to be neglected, but ones I knew I had cracked and just needed to keep rehearsing. I was left, in the week before the first exam, with three or four stubborn cards which I was struggling to memorise, but this now felt more do-able. I would walk around countryside paths near where I live reciting them and this helped – walking at the same time seemed to stop me feeling fidgety at my desk and I felt less stressed too. Interspersed with the memorising, Mr Murray (my very patient teacher) also encouraged me to keep planning essays and writing bits of them too. The difference now was that I could try to do it timed, without looking anything up. I think a big danger in English was that, having learnt key quotations, I was sub-consciously very keen to use them and show off these interesting things I had learnt by shoe-horning them into potentially totally irrelevant contexts. This continued exam practice and Mr Murray’s patient feedback helped me to have an internal voice reminding me how counter-productive that would be. I needed to plan a good essay that was relevant to the question and only then reach for things I had memorised to support my plan All of this helped me to feel like the real exam was just this same process again that I was well rehearsed in doing. I had a good sense of how much time to spend planning an essay and knew this would make the writing time more efficient and effective. When using quotations in the real exams I could often picture the bit of my walk I was on when learning it which helped me remember it and helped me to feel calm. In summary then: - Consolidate as you go along. - Be in a room with no tech – a phone that is off but in the same room is still taking up ‘cognitive load’ research has shown. - Have a timetable that spaces different subjects and topics out instead of having whole days or just one subject or topic. - Don’t completely neglect past questions/essay planning when memorising material – interleave these activities. - Schedule breaks and get fresh air and exercise - If you listen to music it should be lyric-free.

Top Tips is a new series from Mr Pearce, Deputy Head of UCAS, Politics Teacher and our Apply Plus programme lead, featuring helpful tips and hints ahead of the upcoming exam season. You might have read our recent post on managing your revision time during exam season, which focused largely on two questions about how to use your time effectively to achieve excellent work output. Yet as exams approach, let’s remember that managing your wellbeing becomes just as crucial as managing your work: rest and work are two sides of the same coin. The busier you get and the higher the stakes, the more important it becomes to look after yourself. So, let’s apply the same two questions to the question of stress management during Trinity Term. What are your personal stress and wellbeing hurdles? As a seasoned exam veteran, you know the kinds of wellbeing hurdles that caused you to stagger in previous years. Perhaps you get tempted to cut down on sleep, drop social contact, or neglect health and exercise habits when revision piles up. Perhaps you end up leaning on unhealthy strategies – caffeine, forgetting to eat properly, working without breaks, or engaging in “restless rest” as you binge-watch or doom-scroll to avoid revision. You know yourself well enough to recognize these potential hurdles in advance, and that empowers you to take preventive action. Remember, knowledge plus action = power, and most of these hurdles are more like old acquaintances than ambushes: you know them of old. What stress management habits have worked for you before? We know that our “stress buckets” can quickly overflow during revision season, and we also know that some actions are much better than others at helping to drain the stress bucket before spills happen. You’ll already know your own “happy place habits" – the wellbeing practices that keep you buoyant and help you cope with challenges. These might reflect the NHS five ways to wellbeing: 1) Connect with others, 2) Be active, 3) Keep learning something new, 4) Give to others, and 5) Be mindful. Which of these do you already know you need to hang on to hardest as you go through the gears on revision? Be disciplined about these, just as you are with your revision. These kinds of habits can transform exam season. Learning something new for fun, like juggling or origami, can be a great stress-reliever. Giving to others – sending an encouraging message to a friend or making them a good luck card – offers a surprising amount of good vibes for you as well. For me, getting outside for some exercise every day was transformative during revision season. I went for a run four or five times a week – not particularly long, or certainly not very fast – but it transformed the way I felt, boosting my sleep, my revision, my focus, and my exam performance. Likewise, during my A Levels, I always stopped work at least an hour before I went to bed, and spent some time with some easy-read novels to wind down. I returned to favorite stories from my early Senior School days – familiar and easy enough not to keep me up late reading, but comforting and transporting enough to whisk me away from revision stress. So guess what? I revived that habit during my university finals too – I went back to what worked. What’s worked best for you in the past? Know this: your experience through school means you are already a successful exam hero. Your experience equips you to identify your personal stress hurdles, and you can revive the "happy place habits" that have served you best in the past. Getting the proportions right is key: revision season really does require long periods of serious, committed hard work – but you mustn’t feel guilty about an equally disciplined approach to your wellbeing. It’s easy to feel like taking time away from the books to look after ourselves is somehow a “tax” on our success, but the reality is quite different: balancing hard work with deliberate and effective stress management will not only improve your experience of exam term – it’s very likely to bring you higher grades too. Yes: hours spent learning are essential for learning; but our brains need recovery time just like athletes need rest days and cakes take time to bake. To put it another way: resting is investing .