It's exam time and your students are preparing. You're going around the class, observing how students are studying and, shock horror, they are re-reading and re-writing their notes. The notes are literally going from one notebook to another notebook without going through their brains in-between. As a teacher this is one of the most frustrating things for me to see, and recently I've been on a bit of a war path to try to stop it.
This is a short post to celebrate some of my students doing deliberate practice. This year I've been stressing the importance of students re-doing questions (as opposed to just re-reading them).
Pictured right is how Ericsson describes deliberate practice (pg. 367)
They way that I've advocated for this is to ask students to 1. Identify questions that they got incorrect in our weekly tests, 2. Get a book or another sheet of paper and cover the answer, 3. Re-do the question, 4. Slide the book/piece of paper down and check, 5. Re-do again if they got it wrong, 6. Re-do again a few hours/days later to consolidate.
I've felt like a bit of a broken record but then, today, I had my day made when walking around the class I saw these two students!
To attend to the motivational segment of the task, I knocked up this sheet that I gave to students at the start of today's revision session.
Deliberate practice for the win. Just wanted to celebrate. Hopefully it pays off in their exam.