Opening students’ eyes to a whole new world…
This year one of the core themes of the staff training sessions on Monday afternoons has been how to improve students’ independent learning skills. It’s a well-known fact that the most successful students develop great study habits and, after a while, need very little encouragement to do some work. They are organised and well prepared, complete their homework on time and have all the equipment needed for lessons. As a school we have designed systems around these things that try to steer as many students as possible down the right path. The majority of our students get this right very and work well in class and at home, although as we know perhaps too large a proportion are happy to do ‘just enough’. This can be an unwanted side effect of all the support that the school offers – perhaps by providing a clear structure for homework, for example, we give the impression that that is all a student needs to do to succeed.
What sets the really successful students apart from the rest is their attitude to what we would call ‘proactive study’. This is the work that students do in their own time, in school or out of it, that they set themselves. Not homework, not revision for a test…but stuff they do because they want to learn and want to succeed. The majority of GCSE candidates get to the point where they start setting themselves some work as the exams approach, but I’d argue that relying on this is much too late. Really successful learners set themselves work from the very start of a course, for example the student who in my current history class decided to turn all her classwork into a set of revision materials as she went along from the very start of Year 10. That’s work she set herself and it’s very effective. Not everyone does this of course. In another school I can well remember speaking to A-Level students who, when I suggested they do some proactive study, looked at me like I had two heads.
Perhaps the problem has been that up to now we’ve never really made it clear that successful students see work in three ways, shown by the diagram below. So, what we plan to do from now on is to be much more explicit with students that classwork and homework are only 2/3rds of the job, and that real success requires students to set themselves some work too.
MrBarkerMHS 