Revision (re-see learning).

The word revision is made up of two root words re, as in "repeat" or "redo," and vision, to “see”. With the disruptions to 2020, there has never been a more important time to ensure revision strategies are apart of your teaching toolkit. This is so that students can revisit topics covered as part of a remote learning sequence to ensure continuity from 2020 to 2021 and consolidate new knowledge and understandings. Furthermore, it is never too early for our senior students to build in revision time to support their exams preparation. So what are some strategies that we can use to get our students to re-see key concepts? Below we share some of our favourite revision strategies that you can use throughout the year to consolidate learning.

Recall Grid

The recall grid can be used in various ways; it is essentially a grid where students are required to think about the topic and provide short snippets of facts, information and knowledge per blank box. At its most simplistic level, it can be used for one-word answers as a fast revision activity to complete at the end of each lesson or the end of a topic; see the sample we have provided for you to use here. However, it can also be used to recall larger slabs of information. To use this in your class, all you need to do is create a blank grid with as many boxes as you desire. The grid may be larger if you are revising a whole unit or smaller if it is revision for an individual topic or lesson. Then, down the left-hand column, provide topics for students to “revise”. You can shade out some of the blank response boxes if students are not expected to remember as many details for a set concept; it is that easy! To add in a competitive layer, you can time students and award prizes to whoever completes their grid the fastest.

What’s in the box?

Prepare several exam-style questions (or cut them from previous exams and practice exams available here for Victorian VCE teachers) relevant to the topics you will be covering and number them. Have a box at the front of the class that contains a ‘lucky dip’ of numbers that each correspond to an exam style question. As students learn new content, add the exam question number to the box.

Ask a student to draw a number from the box as they enter the class, and then project the question corresponding to the number on the board. Set a timer and ask students to write a response or generate a discussion about how the question could be answered.

Put the number back in the box as it doesn’t matter if the question is called on again in future classes. In fact, this would be great - if this happens, you could change how students respond. For example, if the question was discussed, get students to write a response the second time it is drawn out. If drawn out a third time, get students to go over prior responses and add or change anything.

Each time you cover more content, add numbers to the box that correspond to the exam questions that you have prepared to address this skill or knowledge area.

You can also reverse this strategy by projecting an exam style question of knowledge and skills that you have not yet learnt as a class. Ask students what they think they will need to know and be able to do in order to answer the question, and then put the number in the box that relates to that question, so students get a chance to answer it in the future once that area has been taught.

The Missing Link

Provide students with a diagram at the start of the lesson, which contains three to five boxes on the left. Ask them to fill in boxes with information, ideas, and knowledge obtained from previous lessons. Begin teaching the new lesson, and at the halfway point, ask students to fill in the three to five boxes on the right with the new knowledge or skills they have obtained so far. In the space between the boxes, ask them to find connections between their prior knowledge and this new information. The more links and connections they can find, the better! If you don’t have time to complete the connections during the lesson, it is a great way to start the next lesson - ask students to pull out the diagram and find the connections before the new lesson commences. This can be added throughout a learning sequence - ask students to draw their own table in landscape and make sure there is room for them to keep adding boxes to the right. You can download this free resource as a pdf or word file.

Rewind, repeat.

At the beginning of your lesson, spend the first 2-5 minutes refreshing content and skills from previous lessons. Rather than providing a quick summary of what happened in the last class, encourage active recall of prior knowledge of any relevant content to the day’s lesson. Some ideas to do this include:

• Using random questioning (see our blog post here) to ask students a series of open and closed-end questions about prior content. Always remember to ask the question first before calling on the student to answer, as this encourages the whole class to think of the answer. As often as you can, ask students if they know how the prior knowledge or skill links to the topic for today’s lesson.

• Provide a sticky note to each student. Get them to write down something they learned from the previous lesson on one side and then a question they still have on the other side. Ask students to share their questions, and call on student’s to respond to them if they know the answer.

Notetaking

As teachers, we too often see that student’s don’t know how to take notes or summarise, revise and review prior learning. For this reason, it is important to provide a consistent framework for notetaking and build time into our lessons to teach these essential skills. We have written a blog post about notetaking that you can view here. If students are effectively taking notes each lesson, we can build time into our lessons to reflect, annotate, and revise.