Exam Top Tips

The pressure of the exam can cause so much distress that learners automatically forget how brilliant they are. I am a huge fan of doing everything possible to settle and calm nerves before exams. I remember in the opening year of a small school I was in buying pan au chocolat, cereal bars and hot chocolate for the 12 year 11 learners on the day of their exams. It is always something I have done, maybe it is the areas I work in but breakfast seems to be a meal we, as education providers, often supply. No more so on exam day. 

I began thinking about ways to embed the exam throughout the year in an effort to reduce some of the stress of the actual event. Every lesson includes and exam question, printed from the exam so it looks and feels like the real thing. After a couple of years of this I asked one of my repeat repeaters what was happening when he got into the exam and he said there’s just so much stuff to remember he kept making mistakes on the easy parts.

I then began building a bank of hints and tips that I could embed into my lessons that I called save the space. The idea is to give learners more space to remember the stuff that they find hard. Here are a few examples:

Number line

I am a big fan of a -10 to +10 number line somewhere on the exam booklet. Once it’s down it can be referred to and the learner can jump from one to another hopefully doing addition and subtraction of negative numbers a little easier. Even if the numbers are more sophisticated the number line may remind them of the concept of whether a number gets larger or smaller.

Get out of jail 2,3,5,7,11

I teach prime factor decomposition with the first 5 primes written all over the place. I call them the get out of jail free numbers and say one branch on the decomposition must be one of the top 5 primes! I then use the first 5 primes again in simplifying fractions. It is essentially divisibility checks but in my experience if you mention the word division panic sets in for many learners so giving them the divisibility checks as a helpful hint overcomes that panic. 

360o protractors.

Every year around February I will ask the head of department I am in what equipment they have for the exam. I understand in the outside world if you turn up to your job without the correct equipment it is your responsibility and no one will help you out. Maybe it is the area I work in or my empathy for the learners going through the exam again not for the first time. Whatever the reason I always provide equipment. I always encourage the department to buy 360o protractors. Again it just helps ease learners stress in the exam when working with bearings

Faces Edges and Vertices

There is so much for students to remember in exams. In my private tutoring work I always say my job is to get you ready for your exam, your teacher is teaching you. When I am the teacher in front of a group of resitters it is both my job to get them ready for the exam and teach them! So a little thing I like to do is to teach faces, edges and vertices using your hand, forearm and elbow. Put your hand in front of your face, this is a face! Your forearm is the edge and your elbow is the vertex. The hope is that students will re-enact this in the exam on the low grade 3D shape property questions and save some valuable brain space for the more challenging topics. Plus it provides the invigilator some entertainment in the exam!

British Values in maths

I must admit, when British Values came on the scene, I let out a little sigh! Purely for the fact that I saw it as something else I had to do. I held onto this mindset for some time. I attended training on it, held in-house in my FE College, and my opinion changed. Once it was clarified that it was essentially a code of conduct for lessons I was off and running. I began using a stock template, here is a bit of an example.

Tolerance and mutual respect when discussing ideas. Promoting inclusion through targeted questioning.

I thought I had it cracked! My observers thought I was hitting it and I was never really asked to look at it again. Reflecting after, a half term, I let out a little sigh again. This time I was sighing at the fact I was including the same thing on my next set of planning. It was boring. But my mind got distracted and I never re-did it. Fast forward to the next half term and I was joined by a new PGCE student. Instantly I knew she would be brilliant, I wasn’t wrong! She blew me away in many areas but especially in British Values. She looked for democracy examples in Parliament that would bring her lessons to life, like when she taught fractions the number of elected MP’s vs non-elected Lords and their positions in the law-making process. It was a pleasure to mentor her. Unsurprisingly we employed her once she qualified and together we co-planned the following year. It was a joy! My British Values were on point and I enjoyed the challenge of planning for them. It gave my planning purpose rather than being an added extra.

Let me give you an example of how planning would work. Take compound area and perimeter. Queue screams of excitement at a lesson on compound area! Remember my students are re-sitters and have probably been taught how to calculate compound area and perimeter, they need it bringing to life! 

I assemble a series of T and L shapes of desks. Room size dependant!

We then, as a class, put chairs around the shapes, counting how many places are around the outside of the shape.

Then we imagine (or actually do if it is appropriate) putting the chairs on top of the desks and seeing how many chairs could fit inside the shapes.

Then we have a discussion about what we have done, hopefully concluding a difference between area and perimeter. (I always sing “round the outside round the outside” to remind them!)

Then I ask them to tell me if they think the area is large enough for a bedroom and how would they position the furniture if it were their bedroom.

Generally the students struggle to fit everything they want in their bedroom in, so I ask them to make a larger area using the desks so that they can accommodate their design.

I then bring up the “technical housing standards” from the government, 2015. Then we look at the government bedroom standards from the 2018 tenancies document. The minimum size is 6.51 m2. One of the L shapes I set up before class generates an area of 6.5m2.

I then ask the learners to imagine two 15 year old girls sharing the 6.5m2 room. 

I then explain the bedroom tax and that any room 6.51m2 is classed as a bedroom and children of the same sex inder 16 are to share. I give a scenario of a double bedroom, and two single bedrooms of 6.51m2. A family of 2 parents and 2 daughters aged 15 live in the house. They receive housing benefit and have had a 14% reduction in their benefit as the girls are expected to share and therefore they have a spare room. We then explore the rule of law, democracy and mutual respect and tolerance. 

My re-sitters sometimes share their own personal experience with this scenario and it requires delicate handling. I have felt uncomfortable in these conversations but I am comfortable with the experience I am giving the learners. British values and understanding the world we live in are of equal importance to me. Anything I can do to prepare my learners for the world outside the classroom holds as much value as course content as it develops them as young people and hopefully I encourage them to become active members of society.

This is just one example of where I integrate British values into my lesson, I have more but the joy of finding the opportunities yourself is really powerful and I encourage you to look again at your planning.

Algebra - a long read!

Collecting like terms, simplifying expressions, introduction to algebra, whatever you call it, it’s one of the most important but underestimated lessons in my opinion. It’s an opportunity to introduce the key concept of letters for numbers and the unknown. The old avoid x and y playing in my mind, integrating equality and diversity as well as employability and enhancing digital IT skills ringing in my mind ...my lesson needed a revamp, or so I thought! My original lesson began with describing the shopping in the basket.

I always say to the learners, you wouldn’t say that you had 9applebananas so why would you write it in algebra? The point being that each term is a different unknown. 5a + 4b. Did this need a revamp? Maybe? So it became a bingo game! Each image had a mixture on the page and learners had to form an expression to represent it! I had great fun!

On the bingo card was 6n+6t in one of the squares!

You get the idea, it just freshened up the apple and banana image. We then did some work based ones, for catering students we had this one for 7c+5w:

 The idea was to engage the learners. By changing the image and creating a game rather than chalk and talk and questioning through we had a much nicer time! I felt that the concept was more secured than my usual discussion. I was impressed with the power of changing the images and activity, not everything needs to be all singing all dancing! 

We got to forming equations and then solving equations much quicker as well. I was rapidly searching my Google Drive for anything that I could go with mid lesson as we were about to finish the forming expressions tasks. I came across this

I wouldn’t like to guess how old this resource is, I have certainly had it for 10 years or so! The learners quickly formed equations for the image and got straight on with solving the equations. That weekend we went for a family nightmare, sorry I mean meal, at a chain restaurant, and on the kids pack was a similar one of peppers and cucumbers. Even my 4 year old worked out that a pepper was worth 2 and they started to look at the value of the cucumber.

Reflecting on my lesson where I had gone to the NCETM resource off the hoof and the ease my 4 year was engaged and able to solve I thought there must be something in this approach. Why do I teach solving equations with unknowns represented as letters and not as images? Because that’s how it is in the final exam? Is there a way I can start with images then move onto letters? Fast forward to my night class of adult resitters. Algebra was not their thing, the very word made them panic. In my way of no lesson being a surprise some of them had started to panic about the lesson coming up in 3 weeks time called solving equations, such are the barriers to learning when we are resitting and have had a previous negative experience with algebra. Realising the anxiety of the learners I carefully planned a sequence that skipped through algebra only using images. 

I'd like you to picture a learner who is in her 40s who is working full-time as well as running her house, caring for her children and her grandchild. She's coming to a night class once a week, she needs to pass her maths otherwise she cannot receive a pay rise at work. Her homework is always completed on time but it takes 5 to 10 attempts to get it correct. The pride she takes in her work is out of this world and I stand at the front and say we're going to do algebra. Instantly her face changes, her brain shuts down and she does not want to be there. But in sharing algebra in pictures it transformed her face, and her learning experience. She managed to move onto solving unknowns on both sides using images and taught her peers this the following week! 

We were able as a group to really power through solving equations. After we had finished with solving with images, we moved onto traditional 2 or 3 step solving equations. The balance method is something my learners can often recall as a name but not recall as a process. I have never got to the bottom of why the concept alludes so many of them. Like I always say, if you have a method that works for you and you can apply it consistently then use that method. If you don’t you may want to consider my alternative. Solving equations is no different. You may know this as the function machine method, or the flow chart method and I find it a very powerful tool. I also enjoy the story telling I put into it as well!

The story goes like this, g gets on the bus, 5 people get off at the next stop. 4 of his family get on at the stop after and they get off at bus stop number 24 in town. They go shopping, have a vegan sausage roll and to get home, what bus stop do they need to get the bus from? 24, then who will get off the bus first? The 4 family. Then 5 get back on and g gets off at home and they live at house number 11. 

The learners don’t draw in the buses etc, they use the arrows but I find the storytelling helps secure the knowledge. My 40 year old who ended up teaching her peers really took to this method, as do all my learners. If I am mentoring teachers and they observe me teaching solving equations like this, it soon becomes their norm of teaching solving equations too. I have been challenged as to what level of understanding the method gives learners in terms of algebra. I argue, they are comfortable calculating with unknowns which is a great place to be at is it not?