“I Don’t Know How To Revise!”

“I Don’t Know How to Revise!”

With GCSE’s looming (19 lessons left before paper one!) Easter is the perfect time for students to get some serious revision done. Regularly I hear students comment “I don’t know how to revise” or worse “I don’t revise!” and simply suggesting and showing them some ideas and giving them freedom often results in no revision being done whatsoever. When you are asking a student to “go and revise” it is a massively daunting task and often students don’t know where to start!

So this Easter (as well as three papers!) I’ve handed out a revision checklist. It’s very simple to create and they are not exactly ground breaking, but the impact of using them should never be underestimated.

I selected topics I knew my students needed to work on and inserted them in the first column of an excel spreadsheet. This in itself is powerful, cutting down the mass of topics to a smaller, more manageable and focused chunk. You can even make personal lists for individual students or for groups of students with different targets.

Then along the rows I suggested different tasks they could do to revise each topic, for example our school subscribes to several online resources so each resource had tasks within it on their own row.

The students can then check off topics they have looked at by completing the different tasks. As there are several suggestions of tasks for each topic they can even interleave their revision and make sure they come back to topics again using a different resource.

It is one of the simplest and quickest resources I have created as a teacher, yet it powerfully enables students to focus their precious time on to the type of revision you want them to be doing. As they tick off various tasks it will help them feel productive and build positive and productive revision habits.

I have even given my year 9s the list in a hope that they have more time to improve their revision habits so when they reach year 11 it won’t feel like such a daunting task!

Let me know if you have any tips for Maths revision strategies for students!