TRANSCRIPT:
 

You’re listening to The Parents of Hardworking Teens Podcast, episode 121 - What REALLY up-levels with each new year group in high school - in particular three unseen, hidden challenges that I see catch out so many students. Don’t let it happen to you and your teen!

Hey VIP’s! Happy New Year! 

I hope you’ve had a wonderful break over the holidays and if you’re listening in the southern hemisphere then I hope that you are continuing to enjoy the remainder of the summer holidays.

I’ve had a really wonderful last few weeks. A lovely break, we’ve had my dad out to stay which is not SO much of a break when you’re hosting, but on the other hand it does also force me to not work so much. Plus, I took my dad on a trip to Tasmania - it was basically his 70th birthday present, but if I’m being totally honest, it was basically also a present to me because I’d never been and really wanted to see Tassie. So I have indeed had a proper break and now I’m back. Fired up and so ready to deliver great things in 2025. 

And to start, that is going to be a special live event: Have Your Teen Nail Their in brackets - NEW - year group. The new in brackets because if you’re in Australia or New Zealand, your teen will be just about to start a new year group, but if you’re in the UK or US or anywhere in the northern hemisphere, they’ll be pretty much slap bang in the middle of their year. But don’t let that stop you attending if that’s you. 

This is not about anything that happens in specifically the first weeks. This isn’t going to be about getting first day back ready, or meeting new teachers, sorting out your school bag or books or whatever. In fact, the issues and strategies that I’m going to be spotlighting and sharing are actually more likely to be happening mid-year when they’re really in the midst of their learning, assignments, maybe even mocks or term exams. So - great to know at the start of the year, and critical to know if you’re in the middle.

Now, have your teen NAIL their new year group is going to be a FREE live online webinar on Wednesday 29th Jan - and you can register at www.gradetransformation.com/new

And come ready to really get into things rather than just you know, watch along. Because it’s got some interactive elements so that you and your teen - your teen is absolutely welcome to join you - can really see what’s happening that you probably don’t realise, and how best to tackle the new expectations and subtle but important changes in demands on them - that will come up, they just aren’t always obvious.

And that’s the problem - the things that are holding many students back from being more confident, feeling more in control, and actually achieving the results they are wanting and so often very capable of achieving - are the things that aren’t explicitly told to students. They’re just kinda woven in and it’s expected that students just somehow gather the skills and awareness to deal with them effectively. The trouble is, if your teen is anything like I was as a student, they don’t just happen to figure these things out, they’re not obvious. But - thankfully, they’re not hard to do - once you’ve had them spotlighted and explained and been given proven strategies to rise to those challenges or adapt to the up-levels that are quietly happening.

And that’s exactly what I’m going to give you a taster of on this podcast episode. I’m going to just highlight 3 ways your teen can rise to the challenges of their next - or current - year group - and then I’ll actually show you and your teen what to do and how to do all this proactively and super efficiently - with real life questions, examples and demonstrations on the webinar. Plus, I’ll have a bonus strategy that I’ve also just added in.

So, here is a recap of 3 ways the demands will or if they’re already into the year - have already - up-levelled for your teen in their new year group - AND what to do about them. 

Now, if you’ve been with me a while, you’ve likely heard me talk about the Study Success Formula: Knowledge plus application equals success.  And if you want to hear me explain that formula in detail, then go back and listen to episode 1 of the podcast. Because that formula was devised by me over the course of probably 10 or 11 years of teaching, tutoring, study coaching, exam marking, coursework moderation and from thousands of conversations with parents, students, teachers and examiners.

It came from realising there was a whole missing piece of the study puzzle - and realising it too late for my own study I will say. And that piece is the skill of APPLICATION - your teen being able to APPLY the knowledge they’ve been taught and studied to learn in class, in homework; apply it in the exact way an exam question asks about it, apply it in an assignment, in an essay, in coursework, through an oral presentation or multi-modal, or even just in classwork and homework. And apply it in the way that meets the mark scheme criteria. So that they actually ‘answer the question’, don’t end up waffling in an essay, and also don’t do more than they need to. 

Because I’ll talk about this more in a moment, but in the lower year groups, in primary school and in Year 7 and even in Year 8 really too, going over and above, putting in as much information as possible, that gets good marks. But as your teen moves up through the year levels, it’s much more about being able to respond to the question in the right way, than about impressing with quantity. In fact, especially in the senior year levels, going off topic, even if the information is actually correct, can actually bring down marks, because it may be considered to lack structure, or focus or represent a lack of understanding of the key focus of whatever’s being asked for. 

So whilst yes, the level of subject content does increase in terms of complexity and the amount of KNOWLEDGE required, that is only half of the success formula and from my experience, what I also see is that the skills, strategies and techniques in APPLYING that knowledge also increase. Especially from Y9 onwards. Because up til then, I would say that the formula is more heavily weighted towards the knowledge side of things. Students can get great results by just learning and presenting their subject knowledge, they get marks by giving lots of stats and facts and showing their comprehension of a topic or a book or an event, and get extra ticks, and bonus points by going over and above when it comes to pretty presentation or giving more than was asked for.

However, this changes in Y9 and beyond as the balance swings more and more towards those skills of application. But there’s no big announcement, no alert that this is happening as we move up through the year groups, it just happens in a really subtle way.

So, to help you see this, I’ll share some really specific ways this shows up, and then if you want more help, more explanation and see me dissect real life examples, at the end of this podcast I’ll share the details of a webinar I’m running live to kick of the new school year and that you can join me on for free.

So, one way that you and your teen will be able to see the application side of things up-level is in word counts.  The word counts increase on assignments, essays and reports, going from maybe 800 to a thousand and maybe up to 2000 words by Y12. BUT this doesn’t mean that just more and more information is required. The mistake I see so many students make is that they think they just need to include more stats and facts. And if your teen has ever struggled to fill a word count, then this is likely the reason. 

They’ve given all the information there is to give, have filled about two thirds of the word count and don’t know what else their teacher or the marker wants. Or, they may do the opposite and go totally overboard with their research and writing up TONS of information - everything and anything related to the topic. In fact I had a Y9 student recently join the 10WGT who’s mum sent me her research assignment for feedback on a coaching call and it was jam-packed with data and online research she’d spent hours and hours on. Now, she did get a good result for the task, but she’d spent a crazy amount of time and effort on the task, and she could’ve gotten the same result with not even half, more like a quarter of the information and time she’d put in. The trouble was, she didn’t have the skills (yet) to distinguish that for herself.

So what do those bigger word counts require?

How’s your teen supposed to fill that word count?

They need to do the opposite of putting in more and more descriptive information. They need to go narrow and deep. They need to take one aspect and analyse it in detail, they may even need to evaluate it. They need to go further than just describing or explaining and respond to what the task or the question is relly asking of them which might be to analyse the information, evaluate the sources of that information, consider different perspectives, compare and contrast different elements. This relates to one my favourite skills, the ability to identify and understand and respond to command words. And so if your teen isn’t super-clear and confident in all of the different levels of cognitions - Describe, Explain, Apply, Analyse, Evaluate, Create - and if they’re not super-confident in all of the different command words at each of those levels of cognition, then this is where they need to work on their skills of application. And just that will make a huge difference to how they fill a word count.

This also shows up in terms of the TYPES of tasks they get set. Instead of being asked to do a ‘presentation about their favourite sport’ or write a ‘project about Christianity’ for example, where they simply have to compile lots of facts and information about the topic, you’ll see these instead become tasks like a research investigation or an analytical essay. 

Unlike those projects in the lower year levels, these don’t just want lots of info. They require higher level commands like comparing or evaluating, and that means that presenting lots of researched information that would’ve gotten them good marks back in Y7 or 8, will now perhaps scrape them a C grade if they’re lucky. At the higher year levels, the tasks are much more about what they DO with information than just finding or knowing the information.

Likewise this is the case in tests or exams. If you ever get to see one, because I know a lot ot times they don’t get to bring them home, but you can always just go check out a past paper on an exam board website, but if you scan through, you’ll notice that there will be fewer short response questions and more extended response questions. Fewer 1 or 2 or 3 mark questions and more 6, 7, 10 and even 20 mark questions. And just like the word count of essays and reports, this does not mean they just need more info. An eight mark question does not require eight facts. 

The wording of these questions will also change accordingly. The command, won’t be state or define, it will be discuss or justify. And so your teen’s skills of application will need to match this, so they apply their subject knowledge to respond to the question and the way it is worded. They’ll want to (a) become a master at dissecting the wording of the question so they know exactly what it’s asking… and (b) be able to respond in the way the mark scheme that matches that wording demands. 

And one more example I’ll share today of the application element in action is in the marking criteria, the rubrics and assessment success criteria. Now I know that back in our day, we never used to get given any of this when we were students, but these days your teen will often have these attached to assignments, provided with coursework, and for the external exams, most past papers have the mark scheme also published on exam board websites.

If you compare a mark scheme for a Y7 or 8 exam or assessment with one for a Y11 or 12, or even a Y9 or 10 assessment, and you’ll notice that yes, the subject content is at a higher level, but also the ways that the responses are marked is different. 

It’s less about ‘the answer is this’, it’s not just about the content or the information, and it’s much more about the quality of the discussion of that information.

For example, a senior research task will have levels of response. It’ll have descriptors that go from statements like, provides some evidence, through to discerning analysis of evidence.

This is why saving and using scaffolds or outlines of tasks from previous years doesn’t always work. Now, I’ll caveat that for the senior years. Often scaffolds will be given for tasks in Y11 as they are prepping students for a very similar independent task in Y12, so I would definitely save scaffolds for those, but for lower year groups, students need to be careful that they aren’t limiting themselves to lower levels of response that previous scaffolds would have matched but aren’t sufficient for the levels they need to be operating at in their new year group. 

I hope that these examples have perhaps started to spotlight a theme here. That much of this revolves around command words and the hierarchy of them. This is why I always say, if I could only train a student in one thing, it would be command words - getting in depth knowledge and understanding of them, what they mean and how to respond to them all at the right levels. Because this skill infiltrates so many elements of their study, and how the requirements up-level through the year groups, and it’s critical to the APPLICATION element of the study success formula. It’s not the only part of the application element, but it is perhaps one of the most significant parts. 

I hope that this episode will help you spot some of the more subtle and hidden demands of your teens new year level and how they can meet those demands by developing, honing and actioning the skills of application so that they maximise that subject knowledge and have both parts of the study success formula.

The knowledge part is the part that they are guided through and is certainly focused on almost exclusively throughout their schooling. But the application of that knowledge is the part that often goes under the radar and is given little attention aside from the odd study-skills workshop. Yet it is, in my experience, the part that becomes more and more relevant and important as your teen moves up through the year levels. Because no Y12 essay question ever simply asks - tell me everything you know about topic X. Yet that’s how many hard-working students have achieved success through their earlier years of their education - giving as much information as possible and going over and above in their fact-finding. Giving more than has been asked for. But that’s the opposite of what students need to do as they move up through the year levels.

And if you’d like to learn more about this side of things and see me dissect and explain real life examples of these in action at specific different year groups and levels, or if , you’re thinking that yes, your teen could really use these skills of application and you’re interested in seeing how they can get training from me in them through the 10 Week Grade Transformation program and want to make sure that they can up-level this area in line with their subject knowledge this year and every year beyond, then definitely register for the brand new, live parent parent webinar I’m running on Wednesday the 29th January. It’s totally free to register and  if you’re listening to this before the 29th Jan 2025 you can do so right now  at www.gradetransformation.com/new
 

Now, it’s a live webinar starting at 6.30pm AEST, so that’s 7.30pm Eastern daylight time, 4.30pm for those in WA and Singapore, 8,30am UK and everyone else will have to check their own time zone. 

Now, if you can’t make it live, don’t worry - there will be a replay sent out to those who register, - and you really will want to do whatever you can to make it live, because there are going to be a few special bonus inclusions that I’ll be doing live that won’t be in the replay, that you won’t want to miss, like a special secret-segment with a bonus strategy I’ve just recently decided to add in, and a very special competition for live attendees to win a personal coaching session with me for your teen. 

Plus I’m sharing a free resource download with my top 5 Google Tips so that your teen can get the info for that knowledge part as quickly and easily as possible, without spending hours researching or ending up with useless sources, and can instead spend their energy and brain power and time on applying it all at the highest levels.

So, register for the webinar for free at www.gradetransformation.com/new  -  I’ll put that link in the show notes so you can just click directly on it - and you’ll get the exact steps, how-to and examples to have your teen meeting all the demands of their new year group with confidence and a huge amount of success.

Go register for the webinar, share it with any other parents of hardworking teens 

I’m really excited for what 2025 can hold for your teen and I hope that this podcast episode is a really solid, helpful first step in making this an awesome year for their study.