GCSE Revision Lessons

Seeing as the exams are starting pretty soon-ish, at my current placement most of the lessons I have to deliver are revision lessons.

I've been looking into revision clocks, questioning, past exam questions etc.

Does anyone have any ideas for the most effective kinds of revision lessons - especially for learners that are lower ability or disinterested?

I teach Science if that affects any suggestions :smile:

Reply 1

SarcAndSpark

Hey- I'm also a Science PGCE student and we recently ran a revision day in some schools- so here are a few ideas that might help.

I think exam questions are always good- exam technique causes students to lose lots of marks.

Maybe start off with a "fun" activity (card sort/game/quiz etc) to refresh their knowledge and then move on to some exam questions?

You could approach exam questions in lots of different ways e.g.:

-Talking through as a class how you might tackle a question- I like the "box the command words, underline the key words" idea.
-Writing questions in groups, either collaboratively, or one student plans, one student writes, one student tries to add content etc.
-Tackling questions with key terms provided (to help those with low literacy think about how they'd phrase their answer). Or even give them the whole answer jumbled up to sort out.
-Write your own answers and get students to mark them- students seem to respond well to this and it can be good for exam technique.
-Walking talking mock, for short sections of the paper if they won't focus for all of one.
-Mind map the key ideas they might need to include in a particular answer.
-Get them to write their own "exam style question" and mark schemes.

On TES there's a bank of all the 6 mark questions and mark schemes, which is free and might be useful?

You could also try a RAG exercise to think about where to focus revision, or just ask students to vote on topics.

Hopefully by this stage they know how to revise, and if they don't it's a bit late, but you could maybe run a session or half a session on different revision techniques they can use at home?

Hope there's something in here you can use!

ETA: If there are any required practicals the class haven't done recently, you could do something based around those to break up the past paper questions!