Giving KS5 History Students Ownership over their Revision: Some Thoughts and Strategies

Last week, I put forward some thoughts on approaching revision at KS5 (that post can be found here). This week, I’d like to share some DIY revision techniques that students can use to develop their own meaningful History revision materials in the run-up to their own exams.

 

The Rationale

One of the main ideas I was pushing at in my previous post was that getting students to think hard about the same information in different ways can help them remember and make sense of it. Here, I’m raising a closely linked contention: in order for students to think hard, and in different ways, about their revision content, they really need to be activated as the creators and gatekeepers of their own revision resources.

This picks up on a point made recently by Alex Quigley: “The emphasis is too often on what the teacher can do, not what responsibility the pupil has to show. So, how do we get pupils to take over responsibility for their learning in the final mile?”

Giving students responsibility for their own revision is doubly important – it can help their memory and understanding of revision content; it also protects teachers from excessive workload at a serious pinch-point in the year.

 

Reframing Revision as Meaningful Independent Work

How can we approach giving students responsibility for developing their own revision materials? This year, I’ve moved through revision with Year 13 in several consecutive steps.

1. Throughout Year 12 and Year 13, I asked students to continually make their own revision notes, summarising lesson in whatever way they see fit to get them used to reframing, repackaging, and reprocessing course content.
2. Having finished Year 13 content, I gave students revision booklets and one-page narratives for the courses, recapping in a straightforward way the key information (they were instructed to refer back to their own revision notes to help them complete these).
3.  Alongside revision booklets, I explicitly modelled a range of subject-specific History revision techniques and resources which students could use to create their own resources at home.
4. Finally, earlier this week, I asked my Year 13s to bring in their own revision resources to share at a Revision Fair.

When modelling revision techniques and resources for students to develop, I worked backwards, starting first with thinking about the different ways they would need to process and reprocess information, from simple knowledge recall to sequencing and chronology, examining change and continuity to conceptually categorising.

Students brought in a range of activities for the Revision Fair, which I they had developed and adapted to suit their own needs. (Thank you to them, first of all, for sharing these in a very engaging 55-minute lesson and allowing me to share these on here!)

There are some really easy wins here, I hope, for anyone trying to encourage students to take responsibility for their own History revision at A-Level.

 

Brain Dumps

A good starting point for students to work out what they know (and don’t). Brain dumps are particularly useful - a helpful introduction can be found here. Take a blank piece of paper, write down (“dump”) everything they remember about a topic, compare to their revision notes, repeat. One student referred to these as “temporary fact lists” and showed us how she wrote out lists of information at the start of revising a topic multiple times, repeating until she was fluent in what she wanted to know.

 

Topic Summaries

To think in larger conceptual terms about a topic or enquiry, students mind map or draw diagrams answering very broadly key questions on the scale of “What drove changes in power and authority before 1917?” These are best linked back to big themes, such as society, politics, economy, and culture, or to chunky substantive concepts like “individuals”, “reform”, “reaction”, “revolution”, and “war”. Some students chose to write these out as bullet-point or narrative summaries, telling the story of the course in their own words.

Speed Tests

Pure knowledge recall, nothing fancy. Students formulate series of questions relating to aspects of course content and write their answers on a piece of paper divided into two columns. Questions in one column, answers in the other, students can then fold the paper down the middle and test themselves continuously. Think 25 flash-cards on a piece of paper.

We put great effort into developing these for our topics at KS3 and KS4, for students to learn. The evidence of knowledge "sticking" after students made them for themselves at KS5, however, suggests that the power is not just in use, but also creation. 

Teacher-made (KS4)

Student-made (KS5)

Essay Plans and Questions

As important as answering essays is planning them. Students can use packs of past questions to practice planning essays to time, a skill that is central to a successful exam. After giving students packs of every exam question for our specification, plus additional ones I'd created, I asked them to identify the ones they felt were hardest and focus on planning these. Planning practice essay questions, as the necessary first step to completing an essay, is every bit as valuable as writing them (although can't, obviously, replace the latter altogether!).

Timeline Cards

Some students were concerned when we started revision that their chronological knowledge was weak. Using flashcards, they can write down the key events for the course (there are of course many of these) and practice sorting them out into sequences. This not only helps with chronology, but also with categorisation – if students are focusing on “power and authority”, they can sort out the cards relating to this theme before sequencing; likewise with "economy" or "culture". Regular repetition here is the key: the first time sequencing and categorising is hard, the second time less so, the tenth - much easier.

Living Graphs

A staple of the old History teacher handbook, these are effectively x-axis timelines with a y-axis running up the side to indicate a particular quality - a useful introduction can be found here. They can be used to measure any aspect of change over a period of time – improvements in the lives of workers, the strength of liberalism, successes and failures in wars, and so on. As a revision tool, a key part of the process is students thinking carefully about what important trends and processes they want to trace and in what timeframe. One student showed us living graphs that ran to different timeframes – for example, measuring the strength of liberalism in Russia would only go up to 1917, as liberalism effectively vanished as a political force in the USSR. An excellent piece of critical thinking!

Themes Tables

Students were given at the start of revision A3 tables which split the content of the course chronologically and into themes. They have been filling these in step-by-step as we have completed revision booklets. This is designed to give them a broad cheat-sheet to answering any exam question by providing them with key information within the parameters of the themes asked by the exam board.

These were given out as mandatory pieces of revision to be completed at home, but I was pleased to see the level of detail that had gone in to them. For the sake of a few minutes drawing a grid on Word or PowerPoint and printing off, large summary tables like these are a highly efficient way to engage students in meaningful reprocessing of revision content.