With a full-time September start for schools looming, and the pressure that students’ futures and school reputations are at stake, intervention is the talk of teaching.
Teachers will no doubt make themselves available at every opportunity; lunchtime, after school, during the holidays. Some will have directed time to reflect this as part of their 1,265 hours, for others this will be an additional expectation.
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Students will attend, some begrudgingly, some with a skip in their step, to have the wisdom of “revision” or “intervention” bestowed upon them.
But what impact will it all have?
Reopening schools: negative interventions
The sad truth is, for all of our best intentions, this intervention circus will leave us with a whole host of unintended consequences.
Teachers will be exhausted. They will have less time and motivation to plan their day-to-day lessons, less time to be responsive to their class’ learning and fewer hours to actually rest and recuperate.
Senior leadership teams will be exhausted. They will be the ones tasked with chasing students who fail to attend interventions, who have to record every action and who have to hope beyond hope that these interventions will have a positive impact on progress measures.
Revision challenges
And our students? For many, those interventions will be a safety blanket; they will become helpless when it comes to independent learning and fail to develop the self-regulation needed for effective study.
They will be present at hour upon hour of sessions and come to believe their success depends upon a series of additional sessions, that they are going to soak up years’ worth of curriculum. But this is just not possible. We cannot cram in all of that learning, as hard as we try.
However targeted, personalised or bespoke an additional session is, it is often cloak and mirrors.
It doesn’t have to be this way. For exam classes, in particular, we can do things differently.
Self-taught interventions
“Miss, people keep telling me revise, but no one has taught me how to.”
This is a quote from a student a few years ago. Up until that point, it had never really occurred to me that students would not know how to revise.
As expert learners, we can often forget the struggle to get the point of having a plethora of study strategies at our disposal.
It’s almost impossible to remember a point in time when we didn’t know how to revise. Were we taught it? Did we learn by fortuitous trial and error?
Should our students have to go through this hit-and-miss approach, which is only likely to be successful if they have the resilience and tenacity to keep going when the going gets tough?
They simply do not have to.
With our developing understanding and increased translation of educational research and cognitive science into the classroom, our students can have their own toolkit to carve out their own revision and catch up sessions.
1. Teach them the efficient and inefficient methods of study
Guiding them through Dunlosky’s Strengthening the Student Toolbox provides them with strategies that mean they do not need to spend hours upon hours poring over beautifully curated notes with a pastel highlighter. Instead, they should devote time to self-quizzing and elaboration to really reap the rewards for their efforts.
2. Model revision strategies in each subject.
A flashcard for geography may look different from a flashcard in English. How do they look for your subject? How does an expert use a mind map in history to recall the events of the Second World War?
3. Remind them
Give them opportunities to practise revision techniques, in the same way you would give them lots of practice in algebraic equations.
4. Give them a sense of responsibility
Ultimately, the scores a student achieves in whatever external assessment they take will be theirs, regardless of the impact the data may have on a school. They need to own it. Give them access to digestible research on spacing, interleaving, retrieval practice, sleep, and distractions. Provide the why to the how of revision.
The intervention circus is unsustainable. Our students deserve great outcomes and an opportunity to learn to self-regulate, being taught to do so by refreshed and well-rested teachers.
