SHOW NOTES

I’ve reverse-engineered almost everything I share and teach so that instead of ‘guessing forwards’...
- I’ve taken what I KNOW is what’s required, 
- worked back to figure out what students need to do 
and then 
- figured out some great ways to have them learn how to do it for themselves.
 
In this episode, I’m sharing what I do to reverse-engineer tasks and skills, how I do it and why, so that you know where my info is coming from, and maybe have your teen reverse-engineering their next assessment.

FEATURED ON THE SHOW:

• Get the Free Parent Guide: 3 Huge Mistakes (Even Smart!) Students Make in Exams and Assignments - and how to fix them immediately so your teen confidently achieves their best ever grades.
   
• Follow Rock Solid Study on Facebook
   
• Follow Rock Solid Study on Instagram
   
• Have your teen trained by me in the 10WGT: 10 Week Grade Transformation Program

TRANSCRIPT:
 

You’re listening to The Parents of Hardworking Teens Podcast, episode number 77 - how I’ve reverse engineered almost everything I share and teach so that instead of ‘guessing forwards’ I’ve taken what I know is required and worked back to figure out what students need to do and then figured out some great ways to have them learn how to do it for themselves. So I’m sharing what I do, how I do it and why, so that you know where my info is coming from, and maybe your teen might like to give it a go too.
 

Hey VIPs! How’s things? Things over here are GREAT. I’m almost at the end of external exam marking, having seen and marked hundreds of answers, and as you can imagine have been sharing plenty of take-aways, tips - how to’s and how not to do’s with our members on our coaching calls. AND I’ve also been recording an exam marker video diary that I’ll publish for you soon. 

I did want to share a related aspect with you and that is my reverse-engineered approach to everything I do. Almost everything I share, train and teach in terms of strategic study, exam technique and essentially study success - how to get more marks with more confidence - is how I have worked backwards from things like years and years of external examiner training and tens of thousands of scripts marked. Of exam board writing panel and scrutiny panel meetings, of formal coursework moderation. 

Rather than looking at what I think is creating good results, I look at what is required and what gets those top results and reverse-engineer what your teen can do to therefore create those results for themselves in a clear and structured way. 

I’ve come to almost every concept and system I share, by reverse-engineering everything I’ve seen, learnt and been trained in, when it comes to assessments and exams and all the things behind the scenes of exam boards. And I’m sharing this here on the podcast because what I see others in this field often doing, is that they look at successful students, or they are a successful student themselves and they try to distil what it is that they’re doing that’s creating that success. 

Now, I’m not putting down any tutors or any study companies - we all have different expertise and experience and different takes on things and styles of teaching or training or tutoring can benefit different students more than others or in different ways. And even just the act of trying to do this can be useful in itself. Scrutinising different study habits or whatever it might be. It can all be valuable to students - there’s more than one way to do things - but one issue I do often think of with that approach is that we can create success because of or in spite of something.

A student who gets straight A’s might spend the hour before they go to sleep watching funny cat videos on their phone. It is something they do, but it isn’t necessarily what’s creating their success. And in fact it may even be reducing the quality of their sleep and therefore their focus the next day. Another student who is getting disappointing grades whatever that grade might be for them or for someone observing them or questioning them, - that student might be spending 3 hours every night studying and keeping their phone out of reach and going to sleep at a good time. 

Would we determine that 3 hours must therefore not be enough? Or maybe it’s too much and they’re burnt out? Or is it what’s happening in those three hours? Maybe they could be doing study actions or activities that are more effective. Maybe they’re putting all their effort into knowledge and don’t have the skills of application - a common reality actually. Now, does that mean that studying for 3 hours each evening is bad? No!
It’s just that these things are relative and an action or activity does not necessarily CAUSE an outcome even though they are both happening. 

What I prefer to do is reverse engineer from the outcome backwards. And honestly this has just been something I’ve done naturally. Something that I was just doing instinctively. I think it’s because I’ve always liked concrete, black and white answers and systems. So I like to have something specific to work back from, rather than guess forwards.

When it comes to getting more marks in exams, essays and assignments, I’ve been able to do that because I’ve marked thousands of external assessments, exam papers and coursework. I’ve taught and trained thousands of students over more than 17 years now and have been able to figure out some of the most effective ways to share information and insights and have them build and hone these skills for themselves. 

If we’re talking about your teen’s study success in terms of results - which I would argue goes hand in hand with confidence and enjoyment, because the more skilled and more informed they are in how this all works, the more confident they are, AND the more marks they get and the more enjoyable the whole experience of education and academics is.

If we’re talking about results, then with every external exam paper I mark each year, (sometimes multiple papers per year when I’ve also been full time teaching and marking mocks, trials and other internal assessments) I get into a system, a rhythm of knowing what I’m looking for in answers to those questions on that paper. I know what triggers me into ticking a criteria or moving the candidate up the rubric. As markers, we have specific things that we need to see in order to award a mark, or certain things that count as evidence of a descriptor being met. And once you’ve seen pretty much every possible way that these things can be shown or written (and all the ways that just slightly miss the mark - literally - or massively miss it, get nowhere near it)  then you get really good at distilling what’s needed, what isn’t and the most efficient or effective ways to do it. 

You see patterns and overlaps across subjects and tasks. Links and connections between criteria and mark schemes. You see exactly why this response got full marks and why this missed out by a sliver. AND you then know what that sliver is and how important it is. Just like when I did my first ever external exam marking for the GCSE exams back in England and saw that students had to state exactly what TYPE of pollution, not just pollution, in their response about impacts of a development. Not hard, and an easy fix, but no document ever said that’s what had to happen. It was just part of what made a response detailed for that particular question.

Now, this on it’s own, is of course a tiny thing. But put together many of these and build a picture up over many, many years, with maybe a hundred different papers and formal assessments, and tens of thousands of responses, and you have a pretty big success toolkit that can be applied across different tasks, subjects and levels. But what about the ‘ways of working’ those study habits, - something bigger and more more conceptual rather than specific words for a specific question? An example of this is my reverse-engineered revision planning system. Now, little-known fact -I developed this as a student myself. And let me tell you, I would never be featured as one of those students who had huge success and was asked to share their secrets. I got A’s and B’s in both my GCSEs and my A Levels and was always good, but never a stand out student either in terms of knowledge or super-high achievement, but it turns out, this system was sound and I’ve used it with thousands of students since so that it really is now a proven system.

It all came from the  experience of running out of time to revise everything I needed to. Something I think pretty much every hardworking student has experienced or can relate to. So, instead of working forwards, thinking about what I needed to study from a list of topics, and guessing at how much time to spend on things- or just working til it was covered, I reversed it and planned based on time rather than content, and worked backwards from the exam date. 

I share the details and specific steps of this system along with templates for calendaring and the star system in Catapult 4 of the 10WGT, if you’d like this for your teen, but before you go off and enrol and think this is the magic cure for fitting in everything that needs to be revised, let me also share this:

Did that system mean I was able to fit everything in perfectly? 
Definitely not. And same for all the students who use this system today. They will often find there isn’t actually enough time available. 
And my answer? 
“Great that we know this now - rather than when we’ve still got 5 topics over 3 subjects and only 1 day left to cover them.” Now we can make some strategic decisions. What will we prioritise, what revision strategies will be best? No last minute panic decisions. Which, let’s be honest, aren’t really decisions. They’re stress-based reactions. And that is the point I want to make:

That reverse engineering is about taking the optimal or the desired outcome or result and working backwards strategically.

On coaching calls, we often work from the mark scheme backwards, and discuss and dissect: 

What do these criteria descriptors really mean and require and look like - and then - HOW can we craft a response that meets these top criteria?

What is the best structure for this essay if we know that we need to show X, Y and Z?

How much detail is actually needed in order to show depth of understanding? How can we do that?

What is the best topic to choose for this project if we know we have to do this, that and the other?

Then, once we know THOSE things, we can work back from that. Make smart decisions AND have a clear plan of action laid out.

It’s great doing these things for specific tasks, but like I mentioned earlier, when you’ve done these things enough times, you can start to build systems that work across the board.  Which is how I’ve gone further to create strategies, steps and techniques for these things.  This is how my brain likes to do things. It likes to say, okay, well if I know that this, this and this will mean I do that - then here’s what that looks like as an overall system.

Like the Topic and Focus system for breaking down an essay title and then planning the response. 

Like the 3 steps of analysis - Because I know what’s required in your teen’s response to be considered a solid or detailed or sophisticated analysis, whether it’s analysis data or analysing a Shakespeare quote.

Like the trigger words for answering a compare question. Because I know what will trigger the marker to give it marks. What counts as meeting a comparative criterion.

Like reverse-engineering a choice of topic for an open task, based on the mark scheme and the elements required.

I take what gets marks and work it backwards into a simple yet effective system. 
I LOVE doing this - because it means students are then independent. They have the know-how to be able to do it for themselves. And not in a parrot-fashion kind of way, just copying cluelessly. But in a way that connects the dots for them  - from the outcome required back to the task or question and way it’s worded - so they can see it and do it for themselves no matter what’s thrown at them.

Which is why, as well as better results it also creates so much confidence for students.

That’s my secret. I reverse -engineer everything. 

I don’t look at what’s working and try to figure out how or why it’s working, and then have students try to copy it. I take the perfect or desired outcome and pick it apart, take note of thousands of responses and hundreds of mark schemes, criteria and rubrics and lay the path to that outcome in reverse.

So, if this resonates, let me throw out a couple of invitations. 

The first one is that doing this as a student can be really beneficial. Having your teen reverse-engineer a rubric alongside their next assignment task. That’s definitely something I would encourage.

Second invite is - if you and your teen would just like all this done for them and laid out on a plate, and done with them personally for their own tasks in our live group coaching calls, then I invite you to check out the 10 Week Grade Transformation Program - just go to the rock solid study website and click on Program for more details.

I’d love to train them and give them these systems ready-made and tested so they can do all this for themselves smoothly and accurately and confidently. 

You can see when you go to the summary page some of the students who are doing exactly that, watch their videos and listen to their stories. And right now, with the summer hols coming up, that can be a great time to complete everything, ready to hit the ground running in Term 1 next year.

Have a great rest of your week in the mean time and I’ll see you back here next week!