Earlier this week, Equip Schools director Eddie Gandevia spoke with Channel 10′s Ellie Southwood with some last-minute HSC preparation advice.
Click here to find out more about the programs offered by Equip Schools for students across all of high school.
With every passing year the question returns to the fore, and parents and students are equally guilty of dappling in these dangerous areas: is it worth memorising an essay word-for-word, ready to be perfectly regurgitated in an exam? The answer: No.
It is like saying, is it worth borrowing more than I can afford to repay? If the GFC has taught us anything, it is that high risk portfolios don’t necessarily lead to immediate demise – but one day, it will.
However, I must admit, I made prolific use of the ‘regurgitation’ technique in my final year at school – and in fact, to great success. One particular essay I wrote exactly the same 3 times throughout the year and received full marks each time. But on the fateful day of my HSC English exam, the strategy unravelled. Utterly.
The question was directed from such an angle that my pre-digested 1040 words was rendered largely useless. I was forced, all of a sudden to actually participate in what the exam was designed to test – my ability to construct a well argued, sophisticated analysis of a text. All I was able to do was jumble together random components of my rote-learnt answer – the strategy failed me. Dramatically.
Let me contribute to answering this question by first praising the premise behind the dilemma. There are smart ways to play the game called school. I had a friend who studied for 8 hours a day for 3 weeks and performed worse than they did when all they did was play soccer. The key to performing well in an exam is not the amount of work you do, it is how well you are prepared to perform the task on the day, in the way it is asked. That is why memorising an essay is so appealing – if you get the question you are hoping for, it is a failsafe way to maximise your marks, simply because most people don’t write better under exam conditions than when they have crafted their wording and flow for months (and often with help from others).
So first things first – there is nothing wrong with seeking successful strategies; clever strategies that will maximise performance. The problem with this particular strategy is that it simply exposes you to too much risk. You cannot predict every essay question you will be asked and prepare a memorised response to each – you must have the capacity to adapt.
Therefore, let me suggest an alternate strategy – one I believe accesses all the same benefits as memorising a whole essay, but with almost none of the risk.
Instead of memorising an entire essay, memorise “cards”, and take more ‘cards’ than you need into every essay-based exam. What’s a ‘card’? A card is the structure (and even the full-text) of a body paragraph. By memorising your body paragraphs you allow your introduction and your conclusion to be framed by the question. Then, depending on the question, you decide to play your best ‘hand’ of cards. That allows you to order and relate your key arguments in a way that responds to the question, however, preserving your well-crafted phrasing. It similarly exposes you to far less risk since your introduction is the critical section of your essay that determines the entire framing and course for your argument. In essence, you get the best of both worlds: adaptability with prepared quality. Good luck!
#1: Choose Your Position
The way parents understand their role will dramatically affect the ways you respond to your student’s behaviour, performance and attitude. We are all to familiar with the stunt-double parent who finds themselves awake at 3 am completing that assignment on the planets while their child sleeps peacefully; or the robotic general who barks orders from afar only to learn that Gen Y is actually just code for “incapable of obedience”.
Now, I am not a parent (I hope), and therefore I do not pretend to be an expert on what are sound parenting principles or not. However, in my time, I had sat around many, many kitchen tables with sobbing students and parents – both at a loss about what approach to take, and dealing with the consequences of thinking about things the wrong way. So let me humbly suggest that when it comes to your student (as opposed to your child), you adopt the position of “coach”.
Why might that be a helpful metaphor for modern parents? Partly because these days having a Personal Trainer is a lot like a having a Hawaiian shirt in the 70s – you just don’t leave home without one. With life coaches and business coaches and personal trainers our society is thoroughly familiar with the position these people have in their respective contexts. A helpful dictum is “on the sideline, but not in the game”. It articulates the fundamental elements of this position.
You see, the coach lives every high and every low, they often make the hard decisions for their understudies, the help formulate the plans and aid in every way they can – except that they are always just millimetres off the playing green, standing there on the sideline.
Let me encourage all you brave parents who have at once the most rewarding, wonderful yet profoundly difficult job in the world. Might you consider the ways that you can respond to your student’s academic life as a coach – helping them to strategise and plan; making tough decisions for them (such as eliminating their distractions); fighting to stay informed of the state of play – for a good coach knows their players and the challenges they face well; and finally, that you stay on the sideline, granting your student their opportunity to shine.
The age-old dictum: good is the enemy of great has no greater foothold than in our schools – or so it seems. Once I have been forgiven for my gross generalisations, perhaps take a moment to listen to my rant.
The work that I do and the organisation I run, exists because schools are not doing the job they are designed to do. Now, in one sense I am not complaining – I love my work. But on the other hand, we support schools to have an intentional, research-driven and educationally sound methodology and curriculum to grow students in the skills they need to survive and succeed in life – skills like time management, or organisation, or motivation.
For many years, the dominant model has been to hire an external presenter to come and deliver a day of ‘study skills’ seminars, once a year (at best). However, it frustrates me immensely when this model is adopted – and I am partly to blame – we are often the external presenter. The problem is, the very reason we took over 2 years of intensive research and entirely remodelled our business was because this model of growing students in these skill-based areas is almost useless.
The research on this point has been clear for a long time – skill development does not take place via a once off informational download. That would be like reading a book about Lance Armstrong and then being expected to know how to ride a bike – the technique is impotent to deliver the outcome.
Instead, skill-development (which is absolutely what these areas entail) is an ongoing process of ‘new strategies’ being understood, adopted, ill-applied, but then refined over time. It requires ongoing support, ongoing accountability and ongoing access to the tools required to trial and develop these skills.
When we speak with schools and are informed, “Oh, so you run study-skills workshops… oh we do those too. It seems our school already does what you do”, I get hot under the collar and feel like pointing out that their ad hoc, unintentional, “tick-the-box”, information deluge they refer to as a student development program is unlikely to deliver any of the proposed results – in fact, it often means that schools outsource that entire conversation to these one-off sessions.
Indeed, schools often take a lot of persuading that if they truly desire for their students to master key areas like Learning, Planning, Organisation, Goal Setting and Self-Regulation, they need to adopt a more intentional, thoughtful and intensive approach. Because at the end of the day, we do not want to create young people capable of regurgitating the population of our continent (a symptom of our over indulged emphasis on curriculum outcomes), we want them to be confident, independent, and resilient learners equipped with the skills to thrive in life.
So no, for the record, the mere existence of a mediocre “study skills program” is not a sufficient reason for schools to neglect considering how they are actually supporting and investing in their students in these critical areas that will dramatically impact their life opportunities and likelihood of success.
We’ve just returned from sunny Darwin where we were sponsors of one of Australia’s best educational conferences, put on by the Australian Council for Educational Leaders. It was a fantastic chance to connect with switched on educators from all over Australia and beyond.
Our very own Simon Breakspear was also presenting just prior to once again returning to the UK to pursue his PhD at Cambridge on a Gates Scholarship – switched on, indeed!
We look forward to returning to ACEL’s 2010 conference – in Sydney – next year.
Our website is back after a brief hiatus while we prepared to switch on individual accounts in our Equip Online system. The good news is, online setup for individual accounts is just around the corner! Meanwhile, feel free to contact us to request a demo account and we’ll work something out.
