Episode 126: The Number ONE Shortcut to Exam Success

TRANSCRIPT:

You’re listening to The Parents of Hardworking Teens Podcast, episode 126 -  How direct instruction and explicit teaching can provide a shorter, straighter route to developing sustainable, successful exam performance.

If you’re tired of your teen having to guess at exactly how marks are allocated, what sustained or discerning actually looks like on the success criteria and what ‘discuss’ really means in an essay question, then listen in to discover The Number ONE Shortcut to Exam Success for your teen.  Because students shouldn’t have to just somehow figure out and magically up-level these skills each year in order to be able to show their true ability, get the results they deserve and have a more sustainable study-life balance along the way.

Hey VIPs. I hope you and your teens are doing great and I really hope that the term is going well. I am better than great. I am really pumped for this episode. Because, this week we’re going to get into Direct Instruction and Explicit Teaching, Versus Inquiry learning or discovery learning, which is usually referenced in the world of education  in relation to teaching subject content, but I want to talk about it in terms of the skills of applying that subject content knowledge - How students can show they know that subject content when it comes to exams, essays, and assignments.

Now, this has been on my mind for quite a while and I’ve actually ended up spending a lot more time and doing a lot more research on it than I usual because the more I’ve delved into this, the stronger the message and evidence has become and the stronger I’ve felt about sharing it all. So much so, that I’ve created a one-page resource for you that you can download for free - along with the full transcript in case you prefer to read rather than listen, and you can get both of these at www.rocksolidstudy.com/126. 

Now, the terms direct instruction and explicit teaching are pretty interchangeable. In teaching, this is where subject content is clearly, directly, explicitly taught, shown and explained. It means explicitly stating the facts, directly explaining concepts and how things work.

So, if we translated that to my focus of training students in the skills of applying that subject knowledge, it would mean that specific concepts, facts, tools or strategies related to applying that subject content in the way the task or question requires and mark scheme demands are directly explained and taught to students.  Facts like how exams work, how marks are allocated, how discerning is different to appropriate in descriptors for specific different tasks. Strategies for dissecting the specific explanations of what certain wording in the question or in the success criteria actually mean and tools and techniques to produce what they demand, at the level they demand it AND have the insight and information to also know and be able to leave out what they don’t need.

Now, in my quest to explore all this a bit more, I ended up coming across a book called ‘The Power of Explicit Teaching and Direct Instruction’ by Greg Ashman -and one of the things that really resonated with me was when Greg wrote that ‘There is the general idea in education today that figuring something out for yourself is superior to having it explained to you.’
 

I totally agree with that - in terms of the fact that the idea is prevalent. Not necessarily agreeing with the idea itself, but definitely it’s really drummed into you as a teacher - at least in my experience of teacher training back in the UK, and in my years of teaching since.

And I get it. 
 

We know that rote learning is not the most effective way to learn, and the old way of chalk and talk is not the most effective way to teach.

Although it turns out, that’s not entirely the case - you’ll see this clearly on the chart from international research on the resource I’ve created for this episode that shows the actual measured effectiveness and I’ll get onto that more in a moment.

So, the other way of teaching, the more modern and encouraged way of teaching, is to create experiences, inquiries and a pathway of discoveries for students, so they create their own learning, by working things out for themselves.

And I would argue, and this is my key point here - that this is the ONLY way of learning provided to most students when it comes to learning exam technique, revision strategies and other skills related to assessment.
Students certainly are not or are very rarely being taught any of these explicitly or directly in school. And so by default they’re having to inquire, discover or let’s just say it - guess or trial and error their way there.  Although these days we don’t officially call it trial and error.  It’s now called guess and check or trial and improvement. You take a guess and try it out and then keep going til you get closer to the answer.

But I don’t think there’s actually much learning happening whether it’s trial and error or trial and improvement. 
 

A perfect example of this was when one of my 10WGT students Alex said on our consult - “whenever I’d  get a good result, it would just feel like a fluke. I didn’t really know why I’d got it. So I couldn’t necessarily do it again on a future test or assignment.” 
 

He’d be pleased with the result, but because he wasn’t totally sure how he’d done it, because it was by guessing and hoping rather than with intentional strategy or confident steps, even when he was successful, it wasn’t building his skills or confidence. It was just a happy result where the guesswork paid off. 

Sometimes it’s trial and success, sometimes trial and error. 
But for him, it wasn’t trial and improvement, because he wasn’t able to actually take any learning forwards. He couldn’t then apply any of the success to a different task. And this is my issue with one of the arguments for discovery learning: that we learn from our mistakes, that we fail forward, that students will have productive failures. And maybe sometimes in a carefully, intentionally crafted lesson to provide the avenue to build subject knowledge, they do.
But, in my experience, when it comes to knowledge application skills like exam technique and essay strategy, the opposite happens.

There may be learning about the subject content, in other words, that was the wrong information or wrong answer. There seems to be very little learning in terms of the skill and technique aspect from a failure to get a certain grade or pick up particular marks for a specific marking descriptor that can actually be taken forwards, in a way that can be applied to future exams or assessments.

In an essay, they might’ve been told - you need to add more detail. 
Add more detail, HOW?  Where exactly? By extending which exact point? And why does that need more detail, but another one doesn’t?
 

Now again, my personal experience of this was affirmed in the ‘Power of Explicit Teaching’ book where the author wrote: 
 

“Students are assigned essays to write, don’t do a great job, and then teachers are staying up to the small hours explaining in each essay a small sample of the things that are wrong with it.” 
 

Yep, been there, done that. This was my favourite line: “It should occur to us that it may be better to teach students how to do it right in the first place.”

And I would suggest that where it says essay, we could substitute in there, any type of assessment. Students are assigned exams and don’t do a great job.
Or research assignments. Or extended responses. Or even - revision. By don’t do a great job. That could be not a great job in relation to their result, but I’m also referring to the process. 

Your teen might end up with a great mark in their research assignment, but has it taken them twice as long as it could or should have to actually complete it?
Having to cut after going way over the word count, doing 3 or 4 drafts and having to change their point or examples or even whole focus of their writing?

Because research shows - “that direct instruction and explicit teaching of these can offer a shorter, straighter route to developing effective learning in the classroom.” 
And I would suggest that the exact same thing applies to developing effective study technique, exam technique and performance is the same.

Ultimately, your teen’s subject knowledge is assessed using exams, essays and coursework assignments. And so they could really benefit from, or I would go so far as they deserve to be, SHOULD be,  taught how to actually tackle and perform efficiently and confidently in them. I.e. not just be taught the subject knowledge they’re expected to show, but also taught directly, explicitly, the skills in HOW to show that knowledge, in the way the task or exam question  demands and in the way the mark scheme requires or at the level of the top descriptors on the success criteria - certainly at the level their knowledge and ability is actually capable of.

Now, none of this is to say that we should go back to the days of chalk and talk (I literally remember my Biology teacher sitting at the front of the classroom dictating notes that we wrote frantically into our exercise books) and my English teacher writing so much for us to copy on one of those roller boards that they’d go the full way around and have to rub off their own writing from the same lesson to keep writing out more. 

It’s right that students shouldn’t be spoon-fed everything. 
But… honestly, I think - and there is research to show that - some things should be. 
 

They should be handed it on a plate.

Now, the good news is that we don’t have to guess at what should and shouldn’t be spoon-fed. The research I’ve been reading shows that the key factor in what type of teaching and learning is most effective - direct instruction or inquiry learning - is whether the student is a novice or expert. 
 

If they’re a novice, then explicit teaching is most effective. Which makes sense, as it’s definitely tougher to make discoveries that make sense if you don’t even know what what you’re really looking at. 
And inquiry-based teaching can be more effective for experts; to add depth of understanding or building on examples or additional related concepts.

And I would argue that most students are NOT experts at exam technique, writing sophisticated discursive essays or completing assessments smoothly, efficiently and effectively. That’s not to say that your teen isn’t getting good results in these, but that they aren’t tackling them expertly. With confidence, in the most effective and productive ways.

Plus, on top of this, PISA research - PISA being an international research program for high school student assessment, that’s been running for over 15 years, across 72 countries in the more developed world -in other words it’s a big, well-respected study - has shown that  a blend of teacher instruction and inquiry based learning is the best combo overall for learning subject content. 
They showed a nice really visually clear summary of this in a chart, it’s almost more like an infographic, (Like I said, I’ve included on the resource I’ve created for this episode which you can get for free at www.rocksolidstudy.com/126) 

But what stands out on this chart, is not just that the biggest gains in learning are understandably where there is that combo of teaching styles, but also the fact that wherever there is direct instruction, there is always a positive impact on learning.  A positive blue figure on the chart.  Whereas inquiry methods can actually detrimental to learning ( shown by negative red figures on the chart) if they’re not done alongside or preceded by direct instruction. In other words - trying to do it too early, before students have become experts. And remember, most students are not experts in exam technique or assessment performance. 

And - also remember, it’s not that schools are trying to teach these skills of knowledge application, of exam technique through discovery learning. In most cases, they’re not really being taught at all. 
 

The poor kids are just ‘discovering’ their way along because it’s the only way. There is no inquiry task or discover lesson structure that guides them through the development of these skills, techniques and strategies.

Now, if your teen is in the lower years of exams and assessment, like Y9 or Y10, then that means they’re going to face a lot of non-directed discovery learning.
They’re going to have to guess a a lot of times. So, the sooner they have these skills, the less guessing and the more success and more confidence and more efficient study they’re going to experience. And if your teen is approaching their finals, that means that getting these skills on board is also kinda urgent. There is ot an unlimited amount of time to figure all this out.
We can’t just wait and hope they discover their way to consistently getting the results they’re capable of.

Whether or not you or your teen feel that the results, numbers and grades matter, (Though I know for a fair few students they do actually need certain results to follow the next steps in the path they want to pursue. (And yes, there are many paths, but why take the longer one if you can take the shorter one?))
I would argue this matters for pretty much every student, if you’d love for them to have a less stressful, more confident and more enjoyable experience at school and college. 

Knowing what you’re doing, how to do it and then executing well boosts self belief and pride. Guesswork and poor results dent confidence and over time can reduce motivation and self belief.

If you’d like direct instruction and explicit teaching of exam technique, assignment strategies, understanding and predicting mark schemes, essay structuring steps, how to actually analyse instead of just explaining and how to know how much detail is required and how to give it, then definitely go look at the list of contents on the 10 Week Grade Transformation Program summary page. It’s about half way down the page at www.gradetransformation.com/join to help decide if this will help your teen. I’d love to have them join us. 
And if you’re listening to this as this episode drops, then I’m going to be opening a very special ‘limited edition’ if you like, version of the 10WGT. 
Where students can get the direct instruction and explicit training in the program, AND also accompany it with my expert, personal feedback and direct personal instruction to them with personal 1-1 coaching and support until their end of year exams, so this is especially for those students in their final exam year.
Where this is not just important but also perhaps a bit urgent and some focused personal training would really help. 
I’ll be sending out more information about this ONLY to my email list, so if you’re not on there and would like to be, please email support@rocksolidstudy.com and ask to be added. 
And I’ll also be emailing out some bonus video info about these issues, so which will also be helpful, no matter what year group of high school your teen’s in.
 

So to sum up, there are explicit teaching, direct instruction ways to teach subject content and inquiry based ways to teach content.
I believe this also goes for the skills students need in order to effectively apply this subject knowledge - in the way the question demands and mark scheme requires. 

However, I very rarely see the behind the scenes of how exams actually work - how they’re written and marked, HOW to actually analyse in an essay - and WHEN to, knowing HOW to hit the top criteria, in the most succinct and effective way, HOW to actually dissect and then respond to the exact wording of any exam question, HOW to achieve more of the success descriptors - I very rarely see any of this being explicitly or directly taught and trained.  And so students are left to discovery learn it all for themselves. 
 

They’re guessing, trial and error-ing their way there. Which, far from building confidence or resilience, for many is denting and depleting it.
And so - I believe that if we’re assessing students using these methods, then we should be directly teaching them in the skills, strategies and concepts to tackle them effectively and perform in them successfully. 

Grab the one-page resource I’ve created on this, plus you can get the transcript of this episode as well at www.rocksolidstudy.com/126
And if you’re listening to this in March 2025 then look out for more help and support in your emails from me on this too.

Okay, have a great rest of your day, and I’ll meet you back here next week. See you then! Bye