Episode 138: "Miss...This is GOLD" 

TRANSCRIPT:

You’re listening to The Parents of Hardworking Teens Podcast, episode 138 - the moment I realised students really do want these insights, this training in exam technique, mark schemes and rubric criteria, they just don’t ask for it, because they don’t realise they’re missing it.

Hey VIP’s.
I hope you’re good! Enjoying the holiday! Enjoying this amazing spring weather. It’s certainly amazing here. I’d say early spring is the absolute best time here on the Sunshine coast. We put the gazebo up over the weekend as we had friends over and don’t yet have a covered outside space, (reno still in progress) and that felt very summery. We hoped to leave it up for the week, but then it got really windy 2 days later so we took it back down again and quickly got reminded of how much of a pain that is. I cannot wait to have the renovation done - which includes adding a covered patio. 

So, today I’m going to share with you the second thing that has happened in my time teaching that led me to…  create the study success formula: Knowledge plus application equals success, to realise that it’s not just about how much subject content you know and have stored in your brain when it comes to getting great results in exams and assessments, and ultimately to set up Rock Solid Study, create the 10 Week Grade Transformation Program, Next Level Coaching, and this podcast.

Now to recap, I said this is the second thing. Last episode I covered the first thing that led me to doing what I do, sharing what I do with you, and training and coaching students in the way that I do. That first thing was my first ever external exam marker training - back in the UK, for GCSE Geography in 2010. 

That was the moment I realised the difference one word can make to the marks an answer gets. Literally. One word. It was the first time I went behind the curtain of how exams actually worked. And it was the first time I saw how the wording of a question is SO important as to what that question demands and how to answer it. It not only answered some of my curiosity about how exams worked, but it absolutely ignited this fire to get into all of this big time, it changed how I taught and help prepare students for exams and it started me off on this journey of share it all with any student who would listen to me.  At that point, just those I was teaching in the classroom and who were coming to my breakfast revision sessions.

You can listen to all of the details on that in episode 137. I’ll put a link in show notes and with the resources for this episode on the web page. So what about the second major moment on this journey? Well, the second thing was something that happened in a class of Y11 Society and Culture students I was teaching in Sydney. And I’m going to get into what happened in that class on this episode, why it was significant and share some key take aways that I hope will be helpful for you and your teen.

And as a teaser for next week, the third thing that made a huge difference  to me - in particular to how I saw the skill or artform of writing, and how I considered open choice tasks was when I did NAPLAN Writing Test marking - as a teacher who was not an English teacher - and from being a student who really didn’t enjoy English, and as someone who does not consider themself a natural writer, or creative mind. 

So if that sounds anything like your teen - then definitely tune in for that next week.  A lot of insights and also some more practical, tangible strategies to come there. And also - if they love English and are a wonderful writer, then there will definitely be some of the more nuts and bolts side of things that will help them up-level when it comes to what markers are looking for in their writing. To help them make the most of and optimise those talents.

So - moment number 2. Sydney 2011. In my first year of teaching in Australia, and of course - I was in Sydney, because just like everyone heads straight to London when they go to the UK, my not-then husband and I started life in Australia in Sydney. 

And this experience is where I always say that if this were a movie, it would be the poignant aha moment, where the lightbulb goes off, and it cuts to the up all night ‘I’ve seen the light and here I go on this journey’ scene. Like the Rocky training scenes montage - but in teacher/laptop form.  The ‘have to get this out of my brain into the world’ montage - where it’s like a time lapse of ideas, typing, thinking, creating this masterpiece ’ kinda like in Jerry Maguire where he writes his mission statement through the night’, - and then everything unfolds from there.

Now that didn’t happen. At all. There was no big aha in that moment. No “this gives me an amazing idea” and that night I came up with the idea for the 10 Week Grade Transformation Program or what have you. BUT there was a moment. And it did feel significant at the time, and ever more so on reflection now.

So picture this.
I have this lovely class of Y11 Society and Culture students. We’re in the classroom in a lesson. They had completed a practice exam essay question the previous lesson and I’d marked it and I had this lesson all planned out to review it and go through it and really have them learn from it.
Cause remember, I was in the zone of exam technique by now. This was maybe a bout a year after doing the external exam marking in the UK. 

And I could tell that there was not a lot of awareness about exam technique in students here in Australia either. I’ve got to say, I’ve yet to see it anywhere - hence why I do this work now. And I ALSO knew that almost all students hate going back through a paper they’ve completed. Totally get it. You’ve done the horrible thing - which is completing a practice exam. No-one loves doing those in the first place. And all you want is your mark back, ideally get some useful and tangible feedback on it - and move on.

It’s like, don’t make this any more painful than it needs to be. Don’t keep re-sticking and removing that plaster please. I’ve done it, you’ve marked it. Let’s move on and just hope that the real thing - the actual exam is as painless as possible, and ideally do some other more fun things in the mean time. Thing is though, I knew that one of the things that would make the real thing as painless, and as smooth and successful as possible, was learning from the successes and mistakes made in this practice. Because this really is a gold mine of opportunity to learn and build these extended response skills of how much detail to include - where this is enough detail - and what makes it enough, where there isn’t, and how students need to and can figure that out for themselves and do it - in exam conditions. How to effectively integrate quotes, how to analyse evidence or sources, how to actually… answer the question.

Now, when it comes to reviewing responses or learning from responses, I see it happen a lot that students get given exemplar responses. Or sample responses. 
They get shown an A grade essay and read thorough it and maybe pick out what’s good about it.

And maybe they also get to view or read a B or a C grade example as well. Less common - but so important. Because that’s how you start to really discern and distinguish between the marking criteria. And what those descriptors really look like and mean and how they are met.

But what they often don’t do is figure out WHY. 
Why is that considered detailed, or discerning or sophisticated? 
How does it compare to the B grade sentence or paragraph and what sets it apart and what does that match up with specifically on the mark scheme criteria?

So, with all this in mind while I was doing the marking, I was pulling out sections and samples of what these students did and wrote, and photocopied and anonymised them with a view to doing all of those WHY’s, in an engaged, clear and tangible way, and in a way that actually makes sense, is applicable to each student and that they can actually take forwards for themselves. 

Now I will say, this was a bit of a mission. It’s a lot of work to work out which bits will best exemplify different criteria, in what way, at which levels, to then number and letter them up, make sure they’re anonymous, there was colour coding of the photocopy paper and what have you to keep everything clear and easy to use and reference. And this is the thing. You can’t just hand over exemplars or samples to the students and ask them to peer assess them or discuss them. It needs to be a structured, scaffolded exercise. They need to be guided in what to look for, how to connect this with the mark scheme, and how to scrutinise the specific elements in a systematic and purposeful way. Not just reading though and seeing what you see.

Remember, most students don’t really know how marking criteria are written and structured. They don’t know exactly what sophisticated counts as. Many teachers don’t to be honest. I say that because I didn’t really, and I still don’t always until I’ve gotten training on how it applies to the specific question, asked a few clarifying questions, gone through control scripts. (Control scripts are responses that the exam board has pulled out to demonstrate exactly what a particular level would look like. Like this is a B grade level analysis, or this is an example of a sophisticated and complex analysis - and will have annotations or explanations of why they are considered to be at those levels.) Without this kind of training and detail, you can of course make an informed guess or make your own cut offs, but training and applying this level of training and detail and practice and control markers - over many many years, in different exams, types of questions is what really helps.

So, I ran this lesson giving each student a pack each of these anonymised samples. And I guided them through each part of the mark scheme and specific examples of the real responses with a little kind of detective activity for each part or each skill. 

Like referring to evidence was an aspect we looked at. 
Analysis - the right level of detail of analysis, where it was stuck at explain rather than analysis - and what the difference is and how to spot it.

All this stuff that I find SO amazing, SO useful, SO impactful. 
But I’m not naive enough to think students will find it interesting, amazing.  I just wanted to make them do it because I know how much it would help them.
And this sort of stuff can be a bit of a hard slog to be honest. 
To run as a teacher and to actually do and follow and mark up as a student. 
It’s not interactive quizzes and discovery learning and model making and lollies.
But like I said, they were a good class. So they were doing it, and it was going well. 

And then… about two thirds of the way through the lesson, one girl raised her head from reading through whatever section we were looking at, slapped both her hands down on the desk and I just thought oh god, what’s she going to say.
I mean they were a good class, but there were a couple of personalities in there. Personalities I liked but they weren’t like this meek and mild victorian class of quiet submissive non-teenagers. So the thought that flashed through my head in that split second was, oh man, she’s going to kick off. She’s had enough of this boring review stuff. And having slapped her hands down ont he desk. She went “Miss. - This is GOLD.”
And it was like - phew - relief. And then immediately after I was like “ I know right!?!”

As I looked to see the reactions of the other students around the room - the other students agreed.

It was a bit of a magic moment where you’ve got ‘em. And you’re all on the same page. 
(And all of that colour-coded photocopying, whiting out names, ordering and numbering up samples was worth it).

And she then said, ‘no-one has ever shown us anything like this.”
As you can imagine this moment has scorched itself into my brain. So I really do remember the exact words. I can literally remember where she was sat, where I was stood in the classroom where she said it. And she meant as in the mark scheme, how it’s applied, what these descriptors actually look like on paper, what gets considered as detailed, versus complex or sophisticated. And it’s true. 
 

Most students get given the rubric or the ISMG, but they don’t ever get inside of it all. They don’t really know what it exactly means or how it is used. 

Honestly, just the mark scheme by itself isn’t enough for the exam markers. 
We have days of training for one paper, sometimes even for just a couple of questions on the whole paper when it’s corporate marking and you each just mark a section or question on a paper and the paper gets divided up. Partly to increase the reliability of the marking - because you have less people so less likelihood of marker variation, but also because , if it’s taking - I will say often a day and a half of training for two or three questions, we’d have to spend like a week, just on training for the whole paper - which would be totally inefficient.

So, me doing this exercise, this detailed, structured training with them on this skill, was for sure a rarity. But I didn’t quite think it was that big a deal back then. It was just me making a lesson that I thought would be effective, and I just hoped they would go with, because honestly, it kinda was a little dry. 

So to have the class not just tolerate and endure it, but actually have this student declare it as GOLD was a big deal. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been teaching, those moments are so special. 

And I kinda just stored that in my brain. 

I didn’t rush home that evening and stay up all night creating the 10 Week Grade Transformation Program, or figuring out how the hell to set up a website or a business. I didn’t do any of that. I just carried on weaving this stuff into lessons. And would smile to myself whenever I thought of that moment. 

But it definitely was a significant factor.  

Because it gave me the realisation that I was on the right track with this. That this stuff is super important. Students don’t just need it, they want it. But don’t ask for it, because they don’t realise it’s a thing that they are missing.

Plus, it solidified the fact that this stuff has to be explicitly taught. 
These were good students, diligent, wanting to do well, but I can guarantee, if I’d just handed out the exemplars, along with the mark scheme and said, hey look through these, they wouldn’t have gotten even half of what they got out of that training lesson. 

They need an expert to break this down, to pick out the significant examples, explain WHY they are significant and how to apply them to their own work, how they tie or don’t tie to the mark scheme and have them build this skill, intentionally and accurately - AND ACTIONABLY. So that they can DO this stuff for themselves. So they can dissect and interrogate a mark scheme or rubric for themselves , accurately interpret what that means for them and requires in their response and know what that actually looks like and includes - and what it doesn’t.

This is the sort of structure and detail required for your teen to really know how to do this.

And so, the take away for you and your teen is to consider… how well do they truly understand the rubrics, marking criteria, ISMGs, mark schemes they’re being judged against? Could they look at an exemplar or one of their own pieces of work and work out what exactly meant they were given the mark they had been for that element, or ticked a particular criterion?

If I was the marker, what would I point to to justify the level I credited them at?
Also - what is in there that doesn’t need to be? 

Now, I would say, this is a fairly advanced skill. But in the words of that student way back in 2011, when your teen has it, it’s gold. ***

So, I hope that this is helpful AND I hope you’ll join me back here next week, for the third thing that totally changed how I look at study and exams: my experience as a non-English teacher training for and marking the NAPLAN Writing tests. Something VERY much out of my comfort zone. - Why I was even doing that, what I learned and what it means for your teen and their writing- whether it’s in English or any other subject with some sort of open task or choice of topic in an assignment. Yes, it’s a big one.

I’ll meet you back here then, take care and have a great rest of your week.