Top tips for revision

With exams not far around the corner, James Ralphs, Head of Sixth Form, has provided some top tips to help guide you and your child through their revision. However, it is important to encourage their independence, so please remember that, while you naturally want your child to succeed, they are the one doing the revision, not you!

Plan ahead

By now your child should know the exact date for each of their summer exams. Referring to the subject syllabus, they may wish to start by identifying all of the different topics that they need to know. Before each exam, they will need to have written their own revision notes, learned them and tested themselves using questions from past exam papers. Each stage will take longer than they might think, so it’s vital that they plan ahead to leave themselves enough time for all stages.  

Be concise, not expansive

When revising it can be tempting for your child to just copy out the class notes they have in their folders. Pupils do this as it requires less effort and concentration. While there are merits in repetition (as shown by Atkinson and Shiffrin’s Multi Store Model of Memory), learning a large amount of information is very difficult. Therefore, to ensure your child can anchor the content in their long-term memory, they need to condense their notes into manageable chunks. These chunks should also contain trigger words that will help them remember the whole topic area. 

Flash cards or mind maps?

There are many different ways for your child to condense their classroom notes. It is important that they find the method that suits them best. Flash cards can be useful for listing trigger words or phrases that link to an overarching topic. Triggers can be equations or other key terms too, any of which can be very useful as a quickfire way of testing their memory. Mind maps allow your child to draw links between concepts and examples that create visual ways for remembering essay plans.

Tutorials would be the perfect opportunity for your child to discuss methods of revision with their tutor and decide upon the one that works best for them.

Have a regular routine

When freed from the daily routine of school life it can be difficult for your child to be strict and get down to revision – especially during the Easter holidays. Building on the ‘Plan aheadI’ section, suggest, when you are consulted, that they make a revision timetable that clearly identifies which topics and subjects they are going to be revising – and when. Ensure that they think about scheduling in regular breaks throughout the day and mix up the subjects that they are covering, so that they don’t get bored.

Find a productive working environment

It can be tempting to revise with friends, but we all know this will eventually lead to distraction. Your role is to encourage your child to find a place where they will be able to work uninterrupted for the period of time that aligns with their revision timetable.

When revising at school, you might like to advise them to mix up where they work and put themselves in a location, such as a subject room, where they can get help from their teachers.

Make time for testing

This doesn’t have to mean writing out an essay or completing a whole past paper. It can take the form of verbally recalling a set of flash cards that they have just learned or writing out a detailed plan for an essay. As the start date for their exams gets nearer, it is important that they practise completing past papers in exam conditions too. They should practise writing their answers to a constricted timeframe or without their notes, then go through them with a mark scheme and revisit any revision notes that they were unable to recall. Exemplar past papers can be found on each exam board’s website.

And finally ... PUT THE PHONE AWAY!

Sharing another Snapchat or checking whether friends have updated their Instagram story can be a tempting way to procrastinate. Suggest that they turn off the Wifi on their laptop and put their phone on the other side of the room – in flight mode. This will help them to work distraction-free. There is a lot of work to be done, and this simple action will allow your child to concentrate undisturbed – and help them to be more successful in their exams. Plus it may have benefits for the rest of the family too!

The Selfie Generation

During a time when social media is talked about daily in the news, Edrys Barkham, experienced tutor and former hsm, discusses the impact of these digital channels on children and offers some guidance on how to manage your child's screen time...

Our children are living in a time of radical social and technological change, and perhaps one of the most iconic symbols of this is the ‘selfie’. This is the image of ourselves that we present to the world using social media through our smart phones. Social media was designed to broaden and deepen connections between people, and make loneliness a thing of the past, but increasingly research is showing that it does the opposite and can actually make us feel more isolated and depressed the more time we spend using it.

Social media is having a major impact on how our children see themselves and live their lives and, as our adolescents are growing up better connected, there is a greater potential for them to be more depressed than previous generations.

Children who are ‘digital natives’ have always lived with social media, smart phones and electronic tablets. They have been called the ‘iGen’ by American psychologist, Jean Twenge, who considers them to be more compliant and less prepared for adulthood than any other generation. It was thought that access to social media and the world of information would make children grow up more quickly, but paradoxically it seems to be having the opposite effect and teenagers are in fact taking longer to grow up than ever before. This may be because they do not spend as much time with friends face-to-face as teens did 10 or 20 years ago. They are less likely to leave their home without their parents, meet up with friends or go to the shops or parties. They are less likely to do the things that adults do and children don’t: they are less likely to get their driving licence at 17 or 18 years, to drink alcohol, to have a paid job, or to have sex - childhood seems to have extended into adolescence.

There are benefits to growing up slowly and it has been a long-term trend in the Western world since the Victorian era. In evolutionary terms, a slow-life strategy for having fewer children means it is more likely that offspring survive because they can be nurtured more carefully, with a longer period for education. This means that children take longer to grow up because they are being more carefully protected for a longer and longer period of time.

How does social media affect sense of self?

Possibly the biggest negative effect of social media is that adolescents can spend even more time comparing themselves to increasing numbers of their peers. It is not surprising that our teenagers ‘see’ that their friends are leading more glamorous lives, having more fun and are better looking than they are. What they don’t seem to realise is that each photo displayed on their phones is carefully selected or even staged to present the perfect image. Their friends may have had a terrible day, but posted a picture of the one good thing that happened where they looked good and everyone around them looked happy. Social media is heavily curated so it doesn’t give anything like a real picture of other people’s lives, just the highlights of the good things. When adolescents believe that these images reflect real life then depression can develop as they aren’t able to reproduce this type of ‘reality’ in their own lives.

Despite there being a better understanding of how the brain works and greater insight into psychology than ever before, iGeners appear to be mentally fragile teenagers. They are the most physically safe and carefully protected generation, and they are exposed to fewer difficulties and they take fewer risks. And yet they report greater levels of anxiety, are more likely to self-harm and levels of depression are on the rise. Is there a connection, I wonder?

Increasingly schools are developing their social media policies to help their pupils understand how they negotiate the minefield of postings through their adolescence. Bryanston ensures that younger pupils have more controlled access to social media by limiting the times when they are allowed to use their electronic devices. Charging lockers ensure their phone and tablet are secure but inaccessible for most of the day and overnight. After classes, a wide range of activities mean that pupils have to talk to and work with each other face-to-face to solve problems and engage in the real world rather than virtual reality. As pupils get older they are given more access to their phones, but they also follow a programme of education about the benefits and dangers of social media. Social clubs, the café and house common rooms all give pupils the space to be with each other, to talk and to realise that no one really lives an ideal life. 

The weekly opportunity to speak openly and on a one-to-one basis with their tutor is strongly valued by pupils, and in the annual Pupil Voice feedback they always tell us how much they appreciate the advice and direction they receive from their tutor. Mobiles are not acceptable in the classroom and staff are themselves encouraged to model responsible behaviour with their own mobile devices and talk to the pupils about sensible use of social media.

However, children often see their parents posting on Instagram and Facebook, modelling in effect the behaviour they want their children to avoid. Allowing children to binge watch YouTube or Netflix is a temptation for parents as it enables them to “get things done”. Children often have unfettered use of mobile phones in the car for a peaceful journey, or to keep them amused, so that parents can talk to their friends at social events.

There is no doubt that parents and schools have a role to play in teaching children how to use social media, but the aim must be for adolescents to learn to use it responsibly and to be more astute about what they see posted.

Here are some simple rules to introduce when you give your child their first mobile phone:

• Establish when the child will have access to the phone and when they don’t
• Don’t allow the phone in the bedroom overnight
• There should be no use of the phone by any member of the family during meal times
• Talk to your child about the best way to communicate with their friends – you set the expectations rather than have your child learn from experience
• Model the behaviour you expect from your child through your own use of your phone.