Memory – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Vocabulary acquisition

An essential challenge faced by students and teachers alike is the acquisition of vocabulary. I have written before on the best methods that students can employ when tackling vocabulary learning, so I do not plan to reiterate those here. What follows are rather some observations and musings about what we’re getting wrong in the Latin classroom when it comes to vocabulary acquisition, especially when compared to our counterparts in modern languages.

In my experience to date, supporting students in the accretion of vocabulary is a responsibility undertaken more effectively and proactively by modern language teachers than by those of us who specialise in Latin. It is possible that Latinists are under more time pressure in the curriculum and thus have no choice but to place the responsibility for vocabulary learning onto our students, but I think it more likely that we are simply less well trained in how to go about it than our colleagues in MFL. Classicists suffer from the fact that our training is somewhat broad – a qualified Classics teacher will necessarily have spread their training time across Ancient History and Classical Civilisation subjects, dramatically reducing the time that they spend focused purely on the teaching of the Latin language. I have little to no recollection of being given any significant guidance on how to help my students to develop their knowledge of vocabulary, so all my knowledge in this area has come later – through experience and through reading.

One of the many differences between the manner in which ancient languages are taught compared to modern ones is in the presentation of vocabulary to students. While modern linguists favour grouping words into themes or topics (e.g. “going to the shops” or “hobbies”), Latin teachers tend to present vocabulary in the following ways:

By chapters in a text book (e.g. Cambridge Latin Course, Suburani, De Romanis or Taylor & Cullen). Sometimes these may have a loose theme, but it’s generally pretty tenuous.
As one long alphabetical list (e.g. OCR GCSE or Eduqas GCSE).
In parts of speech. Some teachers invite students to learn the GCSE list in types of words, e.g. 1^st declension nouns, 2^nd declension nouns etc.

Each of these approaches has its drawbacks, so let’s consider those one by one. First of all, let us consider the approach of learning vocabulary by text book chapter. If one were to use Taylor & Cullen for this purpose, one would at least be learning the set vocabulary for OCR and thus there is some longterm justification for the approach. The vocabulary also reflects what is being introduced in each chapter and therefore there is some pedagogical justification for students learning it as they go. All of that said, you wouldn’t believe how few schools are actually doing this and to date I’m not sure I have met a single student that is working systematically through the chapters of Taylor & Cullen and learning the vocabulary as they go: some students are being tested on the chapters retrospectively, but I have not worked with any who are using the text book as it was designed. This is most likely because Taylor & Cullen is an ab initio course and thus the early chapters are not suitable for use with Year 10s who have studied Latin in Years 7-9. Why don’t schools use it during those years? Well, I’m assuming that its somewhat sombre presentation and lack of colour pictures puts teachers off the idea of using it a basis for KS3, when (to be frank) they are under pressure to recruit bums onto seats for KS4 or else find themselves out of a job. This means that there is no text book explicitly aimed at preparing students for a specific GCSE exam board being made wide use of in schools.

None of the text books commonly used in schools at KS3 build vocabulary that is explicitly and exclusively aimed at a particular GCSE course. While Suburani is supposedly linked to the Eduqas course, it diverts from using the vocabulary that is relevant to this in favour of what suits its own narrative. For example, students of Suburani will be deeply familiar with the word popina as meaning “bar” (not on the GCSE list for either OCR or Eduqas but used widely throughout the first few chapters), yet they are not introduced to the word taberna meaning “tavern” or “shop” (on the GCSE list for both boards) until chapter 12. Similar problems occur in terms of the thematic focus of Suburani: because it focuses on the life of the poor in Rome, students are taught that insula means “block of flats”. While it does mean this, I have never seen it used in this way on a GCSE paper – the word is used exclusively by both boards in a context in which the only sensible translation is “island”. I shall say more about the problem of words with multiple meanings later on.

Presenting words in an alphabetical list seems to be the practice used by most schools when students reach Years 10 and 11 and are embarking on their GCSE studies. Most students that I have worked with are told to learn a certain number of words from the alphabetical list and are thus tested on multiple words that have nothing in common, either in terms of their meaning or their grammatical form. One advantage of this is that students are forced to look at words with similar appearance but different meaning. However, multiple and in my opinion worse problems arise from this method. Students learning the vocabulary in alphabetical order give little thought to what type of word they are looking at (e.g. whether it is a noun or a verb) or to its morphology. This means that students do not learn the principal parts of their verbs, nor do they learn the stem changes of nouns and adjectives. This can cause considerable frustration and demotivation when students struggle to recognise the words that they have supposedly learnt when those words appear in different forms. Teachers could mitigate against this by testing students on those forms, but most seem reluctant to do so. Do they think it’s too hard?

The method I used was to present the GCSE list in parts of speech and invite students to learn different types of words in groups: all the 1^st declension nouns, all the 2^nd declension nouns etc. The advantage of this method is that it allows for the opportunity to link the vocabulary to the grammar. For example, the first vocabulary learning task I used to set my Year 10s in September was to learn/revise all the 1^st declension nouns (in theory they knew most of them already from KS3) and to revise the endings of the 1^st declension. In the test, they were expected to be able to give the meaning of the nouns I selected for testing and they were expected to be able to write out their endings also. I felt (and still feel, on the whole) that this was the best approach, but that does not mean that it does not have its own disadvantages. Firstly, it made some learning tasks excessively onerous and others too easy: for example, that task of learning the 1^st declension nouns was very easy (because most of the words were already familiar and the forms of the nouns are very simple) but the task of learning 3^rd conjugation verbs was much harder (fewer of them were previously known and their principal parts are a nightmare). This meant that students were often hit with homework that turned out to be extremely difficult at what might not have been the ideal time for them. A second disadvantage was that it was impossible to give students a translation test, because one could not create sentences out of a set of words which all belong to one category. Thirdly, and related to that point, testing according to parts of speech made it very difficult to link vocabulary learning to classroom teaching in any meaningful way: in class, we might be studying the uses of the subjunctive, and that could not necessarily be linked to the homework task that was next on the list. This is something that I have been thinking about more and more in recent years as a massive problem in Latin teaching – a disconnect between what students are learning in the classroom and the vocabulary they are invited to learn for homework. The more I think about it, the more I believe this is a fundamental problem which requires a complete curriculum re-think.

The difficulty of linking vocabulary learning to explicit classroom teaching is something that modern language teachers would probably be very puzzled by. Modern linguists are way ahead when it comes to tying vocabulary learning to what’s happening in their classroom and to the relevant grammar. Given this, imagine my excitement when one of my tutees shared with me that she has been presented with the OCR vocabulary list in themes! I was full of anticipation as to how her school was planning to test their students on those themes. For example, one theme might be “fighting and military language”, within which students learn nouns such as “battle” and “war” alongside verbs such as “fight” and attack”. Call me daft, but I hoped and expected that she would be tested using some simple sentences, which would afford teachers the opportunity to observe students’ (hopefully) increasing understanding of grammar and morphology alongside the acquisition of the relevant vocabulary. Surely no teacher would have gone to the trouble of dividing up 450 words into a set of themes unless they were going to make use of some innovative testing methodologies? No? Well … actually, no. The school are testing the students on a list of words, with no link made between the meanings of those words and the learning that is going on in classroom. I have absolutely no idea what the point of this is. Maybe somebody in the department has read somewhere that “themes” is a good way to classify vocabulary and I am sure it is – but I’d place a hefty bet that there is no tangible pedagogical gain unless that learning is linked to the use of those words in sentence-structures, the kind of approach favoured by Gianfranco Conti.

I said that I would come back to the issue of words with multiple meanings, and that is something I have noted with interest from my tutee’s themed list. Words with multiple meanings appear more than once on the different lists, with their meanings edited to suit the theme of that list. This is an interesting idea and I am still pondering whether or not I think it is a good one. Multiple meanings are a real menace, particularly when the most obvious meaning (i.e. the one which is a derivative) is the least essential. For example, on the GCSE list for both boards is the word imperium, which can mean “empire” and all students immediately plump for that meaning as it is an obvious derivative. However, the word is more commonly used on language papers to mean “command” or “power” – it is therefore those meanings that must be prioritised when a student is learning the word. Similarly, all students need to be drilled on the fact that while imperator does come to mean “emperor” in time, it originally meant “general” and is usually used in that way on exam papers. Even worse is a nightmare word such as peto, which is listed on both boards as meaning anything from “make for”, “head for”, “seek” and “attack”. Students really struggle with learning all of its multiple possible meanings and it is important to show them multiple sentences with the verb being used in lots of different contexts so that they can grasp all of the possibilities.

As so often, I reach the end of my musings having criticised much and resolved little. I am thankful to be working in a one-to-one setting, in which I can support students with vocabulary learning in a proactive and detailed way, one which goes way beyond what is possible in the mainstream classroom and supports their learning in a way that simply cannot be expected of a classroom teacher. I shall continue to ponder what I would do were I in a position to re-shape the curriculum all over again, but I fear that this would entail writing an entire text book from scratch. Many have tried to do this, and even those who have made it to publication remain flawed: I have no conviction that I could do any better.

Reading their minds?

Classroom teachers are expected to be psychics. According to the Teachers’ Standards, which are many and complex, every classroom teacher must not only understand how children think and learn but must know when and how to differentiate appropriately, using approaches which enable pupils to be taught effectively; they must have a secure understanding of how a range of factors can inhibit pupils’ ability to learn and how best to overcome these; they must have a clear understanding of the needs of all pupils, including those with special educational needs, those of high ability, those with English as an additional language and those with disabilities; they must be able to use and evaluate distinctive teaching approaches to engage and support all of these different young people … and all of this must happen while there are 30 of these diverse learners in the same room.

Much of what is demanded of the average classroom teacher is impossible. I say this not to be a doom-monger or to preach the acceptance of mediocrity – far from it. Throughout my career I strived to be the best teacher I could possibly be. Yet in reality, we cannot be all things to all men and we cannot possibly fathom the inner workings of every single one of the minds that are sat in front of us.

I have written numerous times on the differences between classroom teaching and tutoring but this week something hit me that had not occurred to me before. While I have always been aware that one-to-one sessions give me an insight into the misconceptions each child may have and thus the ability to address those, it has not previously dawned on me that tutoring a large number of students in the way that I do has given me a broader insight into how children think and learn in a way that I could not have experienced as a classroom teacher. Working one-to-one means that I get to listen to how my students think and reason in real time.

It is often said by modern cognitive scientists that education has placed too much focus on the diversity of learners in the past. While every parent likes to think that their child has a unique set of needs that can only be met in a unique way, the reality is that there is far more that unites young learners than divides them. We now know a great deal about how memory works and how best to support students with the learning process: this is not to say that some will not find it harder than others and require more time and effort than others, but broadly speaking the approaches that work for those with special educational needs in fact work well for the mainstream classroom as a whole. If you tailor your classroom towards providing the best learning support for your neediest learners, everyone benefits as a whole.

Working one-to-one with the huge number of students that I do has furnished me with a real insight into how students tackle the process of translating and what the common pitfalls are when they are doing so. It has also provided some perhaps surprising insights into which constructions that children tend to be able to translate on instinct, without a full grasp of understanding. This information is actually gold dust and links to what I blogged about last week – the necessity of designing a curriculum around the learners sat in front of you and in relation to the time you have available as well as the end goal when it comes to examinations. I have realised in the last year or two that there are some complex constructions which many classroom teachers tend to focus too much time on, to the detriment of the basics, when in fact many students could translate those constructions without difficulty so long as they had a grasp of their verb and noun forms and their vocabulary.

Working one-to-one has given me more of an insight into what doesn’t need to be taught as well as what does. While most of my students have gaping holes in their basic knowledge, many of them have spent an unnecessary amount of time being taught things that they do not need to understand in detail. Sometimes, a construction has been so over-taught that a child has been left in complete confusion; their natural grasp of it, one which they would in all likelihood have stumbled upon if given the right basic tools and a decent dose of confidence, has been lost forever.

I am still pondering what to do with these insights as it occurs to me that they could quite honestly be of enormous use to any classroom teacher who is willing to listen. For now, my understanding of how children go about acquiring the skills that they need to do well in Latin is ever-increasing and remains endlessly fascinating to me.

The best use of curriculum time

“Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.”

Theophrastus.

On Wednesday, I had my regular fortnightly meeting with the new teacher who has taken over the teaching of Latin in the school where I used to work. This teacher is an ECT (in her first year of teaching) and while she will of course have a professional, in-house mentor to oversee her development within the school, the Head was conscious of and rightly concerned about the fact that she will have no subject expert in the building to offer her support. That’s where I come in. This week, I found my young protégé in a bit of a flap about one particular part of the language curriculum and since reflecting on our time together I realise that I was less helpful than I could have been. Rather than letting our conversation continue when it comes to the grammar at a granular level, what I needed to do was to get her to reflect on which aspects of the curriculum actually require the most time spent on them. Next time I see her, I shall do so.

One of the most frustrating things about leaving teaching is at last having the time to see and understand how one could completely re-write the curriculum to reflect more accurately the way that the exam papers are written. What those outside the profession will find difficult to understand is that it is left in the hands of often new and experienced teachers to design an entire curriculum to prepare for an exam they did not write. No real guidance is shared by the exam boards (and on the odd occasion when some guidance is offered, it is usually either unrealistic or unworkable in some or most settings). What we really need is for exam-setters to work alongside schools to build an appropriate curriculum, but that’s never going to happen.

As we talked, my instincts were telling me that this teacher was becoming unnecessarily bogged down by her worries about a particular construction and was planning to spend a huge amount of time on it. I need to make sure that she does not do this. The reason? Well, I have just reviewed the 8 separate past and specimen papers that we have from the exam she is entering her students for, and this particular construction appears either once or twice in each language paper. Around half of the time, its appearance is supported by comprehension questions, which guide the candidate towards the correct interpretation. The rest of the time, the examples used are almost exclusively ones which most students would be able to translate on instinct, even if they had never been taught the existence of this particular construction. Compare that to another kind of construction, which most teachers skim over very briefly, but which in fact appears multiple times in every single exam paper. Which would you focus on? Sounds obvious now, doesn’t it? But you wouldn’t believe how few teachers go through this thought-process when designing their curriculum and planning their lesson time.

Having made the switch from the classroom to private tutoring, I am in contact with dozens of students from multiple different types of schools. Something I have come to realise is that almost all teachers over-teach the aspects of the curriculum that they believe to be difficult. It is not that their beliefs are incorrect, but what they get wrong is the amount of curriculum time that they dedicate to these concepts as a result of their relative complexity. It’s a common assumption in education that one must spend more time on something because it is difficult. In fact, this must be weighed up against three crucial realities: firstly, the nature, knowledge and curriculum history of the students that we have in front of us; secondly, the amount of time that we actually have with them; thirdly – and perhaps most crucially – the relative weighting that this difficult concept carries when it comes to final outcomes. This requires an understanding of how much, how often and with how much depth that difficult concept is tested, as well as how many marks that testing carries. Once you start trying to balance this equation, it can lead to some surprising conclusions, which might not seem obvious to anyone but the most experienced in curriculum design.

If a concept or construction is so difficult that its full understanding will require multiple hours of curriculum time, yet that very construction is only likely to add up to three marks on one paper, which converts to 1.5% of the student’s overall score … is that concept actually worth teaching at all? It’s something to think about, at least. Perhaps one could teach it in a very condensed form, teach some broad strategies that work in the majority of cases and leave it at that. Certainly, what one should not do, is spend hours and hours of precious curriculum time trying to bring students to the point of full understanding whilst neglecting other concepts which we might consider simpler but appear multiple times on the paper and are thus integral to success. It simply isn’t the sensible approach, given the huge constraints that all schools face when it comes to curriculum time.

The tendency for teachers to labour what’s difficult is something which I share openly with my tutees. I am very careful not to criticise or undermine the school’s curriculum, but I simply explain that it is natural for teachers to spend lots of time on the things that they know are difficult as they are setting the bar high for their students. Children of the age that I work with are perfectly capable of understanding that this might be a noble and understandable approach, but is perhaps not the best strategy to help them if they are struggling with the basics. Even the most able students, who are aiming at the highest grades, can still be reassured by the knowledge that the most challenging aspects of the curriculum are of less importance than perhaps they thought they were; it actually frees them up to grapple with them, once they have been released from the anxiety that their full understanding of this concept is absolutely essential for success. Knowing that you’re working on something that might gain you an extra mark or two is very freeing, and it enables the students who are aiming high to make sensible decisions about how to spend their own time, which is often very stretched.

In Latin, it is not only the language paper that requires this frankness of approach and a realistic analysis of where one’s time should be directed. I have written before about the extent to which teachers over-teach the stylistic analysis of literature texts, when the overwhelming majority of marks are gained in the exam through students simply knowing the text off by heart. I emphasise this over and again to the students I am working with, many of whom come to me because they are scoring very low marks in this aspect of the examination. Students can score at least 80% by simply knowing the text like the back of their hand, so this should be the overwhelming focus of the lesson: despite this, I have so far come across only one school where I would say this is happening – where the focus is on drilling and making it clear to students that they must be learning the text in detail. I shall not name the school, but one thing I will say is that it is a very high-achieving school, where the Latin department produces results of almost exclusively 8s and 9s in the GCSE every single year: this goes to show that the school is not avoiding the trickiest concepts – there is no way a student could score a Grade 9 without getting a decent score in the style questions – but it shows that they understand how to balance their curriculum and focus their efforts on what gains students the biggest advantage. The emphasis must be on knowledge, with the complex skills being supplementary to that. The final clincher, which again I share with my students, is that the high-level questions become infinitely easier and more doable once you know the text. Thus, a student who has already gained a solid knowledge of the text that is in front of them has a much better chance of being able to understand and apply the ideas he/she is being taught to gain those elusive extra marks.

Beginners’ luck

How fortunate today’s new teachers are. This might seem like an extraordinary thing to say, given the recruitment and retention crisis and all that, but I mean every word of it. New teachers entering the profession today have a wealth of materials available to them that should make their transition from novice to expert far smoother than it was back when I trained and few books illustrate this better than a book called What Do New Teachers Need to Know? by Peter Foster.

I purchased this book as a gift for the newly-trained teacher who has taken over my previous job in my local comprehensive. Not only is it superbly informative, it is beautifully written and easy to read. From the very first line, “I didn’t enjoy teaching to start with,” the humility and frankness of the author shine through. He talks of the Monday morning dread, the reality of teaching That Class and how it all “stemmed from this feeling that teaching was something you just had to figure out, a blisteringly frustrating game of Snakes and Ladders where every triumph was followed by a setback.” This was so achingly familiar that what had started out as a cursory glance over my purchase turned into me settling down to give the whole book my full attention.

One of the most radical things about Foster’s book is it values domain-specific knowledge over skills and argues that teachers themselves require an ever-increasing bank of concrete knowledge to draw upon. This does not mean that the book is fanciful or theoretical, rather that it questions the assumption that teaching is dark art, which only the most experienced wizard can practice, rather than a bank of shared knowledge that can be tapped into. Of course, teaching requires practice and nothing can beat a number of hours at the chalkface in the same way that a pilot’s flying hours are relevant to his or her assumed level of skill; but observation, imitation and repetition of good practice allows processes to become automated and innate, freeing up one’s working memory to cope with a greater number of variables. I will never forget having to write down every word I said and every single thing I had to do the first time I stood in front of a class. As time passed, I no longer had to think deeply about certain basic processes because they had become automated. Foster likens the start of a lesson to the opening of a chess game – not because it requires great strategy, but because it is the knowledge of opening gambits that empower the player to make the right moves.

One of the most frustrating things about teaching as a profession is how little focus is given to knowledge at INSET. For a profession focused on imparting knowledge, we do ourselves no justice by neglecting it in ourselves. Foster explores the different areas of knowledge that an effective teacher should be working on at the beginning of and throughout their career, from curriculum through pedagogy and behaviour. His chapter on behaviour focuses on the need for clarity and gives explicit examples of the language that should be used when issuing instructions, expectations, warnings and sanctions. He even gives examples of the questions that a new or inexperienced teacher could ask of their colleagues, something which I have rarely if ever seen suggested: my recollection of training was being told to ask questions, but nobody had any suggestions or examples of what it was I should be asking. For some teachers new to the profession, the whole process can be so overwhelming that they do not know where to begin, so to encounter books such as this which demystify the process is an absolute wonder.

Foster addresses what it means to “know your students” with a level of specificity I have also not encountered before. He explores the limits of our knowledge and looks into how a knowledge of individuals as well as how children learn in general can be of use in the classroom. He counsels against the assumptions we can make that lead to biases in the classroom, something which has always concerned me as a professional. “By paying lip-service to groups of students and gaps between them, teachers and schools can entrench biases rather than topple them,” he warns. It was not so long ago that I was being explicitly told to do things such as mark Pupil Premium students’ books first and indeed to sit them at the front of the classroom. Foster makes the case for equitable treatment and an avoidance of assumption.

Peter Foster has generously shared much of his knowledge for free on his own website, but I would highly recommend any new teacher or indeed any experienced teacher investing in this book. You can buy it here.

Snacking

This week I resolved to do more snacking. Not of the doughnut kind (tempting as that is) but a thing I have read about called exercise snacking. It’s rather fun. Instead of resolving that anything other than a full-scale workout is a waste of time, the philosophy of snacking advises working small bursts of activity into your daily routine, whatever that is. I decided to experiment with it. So far this week I have done some calf exercises on the bottom stair while my coffee was brewing, some balancing exercises in the kitchen while cooking (there are probably some health and safety issues with this but I’m a grown adult and doing it at my own risk), plus some squats while finishing a drama on Netflix (far less risky, although the cat was pretty weirded out). None of this snacking is replacing my twice-weekly visits to the gymnasium from hell, but they form a picnic hamper of exercise snacks that I can work into my day without making any effortful changes to my everyday lifestyle.

This got me thinking about how the principles of snacking can be applied to studying. As clients will know, I work in half-hour slots and spend a great deal of my time persuading students that short bursts of focused work are far superior to longer periods of dwindling focus. So many students remain convinced that they need huge swathes of time in order to be able to study effectively, when in fact the reverse is true. No matter how much we learn from cognitive science about the limited capacity of our working memory and the shortness of our attention span, most students (and often their parents) remain wedded to the idea that they need a lengthy stretch of time for studying to be worthwhile.

Much of this attitude, of course, stems from good old-fashioned work avoidance. We’ve all done it: pretended to ourselves that we simply don’t have time for something when in fact what we’re doing is manufacturing an excuse to procrastinate whatever it is that we don’t want to do until the mythical day when we will have plenty of time to dedicate to it. You wouldn’t believe how much time I can convince myself is required to clean the bathroom. Part of overcoming this tendency is to call it out: point out to students when they are using their lack of time available simply as an excuse. But there is, I think, also a genuine anxiety amongst many students that they need long stretches of time in order to be able to achieve something. It often surprises them greatly when I inform them not only that much can be achieved in 10, 15 or 20 minutes but that in fact this kind of approach is optimal. It is not a necessary compromise in a busy lifestyle to fit your work into short, focused bursts: it is actually the ideal. The same is true for exercise snacks, for which there is a growing body of evidence that suggests the benefits of these short bursts of exercise can actually outweigh those of longer stretches.

One of the most counter-intuitive findings from cognitive science in recent years has been that regularly switching focus from one area of study to another is actually more effective for learning than spending extended periods of time on one thing. At first, I really struggled with this in the classroom, as all my training had taught me to pick one learning objective and hammer this home throughout the lesson. But up-to-date research-informed teaching advocates for mixing it up, especially in a setting like the school I used to work in where lessons were an hour long. A whole hour on one learning focus is not effective; far better to have one main learning focus plus another completely separate one one to reinvigorate the students’ focus and challenge them to recall prior learning on a completely different topic. I frequently do this whenever possible in my half-hour tutoring sessions, which may have one core learning purpose but with a secondary curve-ball which I throw in to challenge students to recall something we covered the previous week or even some time ago. This kind of switching keeps the mind alert and allows for regular retrieval and recall.

Retrieval snacking is also something that friends and family can help with and that students can and should be encouraged to do habitually. If you’re supporting your child with learning their noun endings, why not ask them randomly during the day to reel off the endings of the 1st declension? This kind of random questioning will pay dividends in the long-run, as it forces a child’s brain to recall their learning on a regular basis and out of context. Nothing could be more effective at cementing something into their longterm memory, which is the greatest gift any student can give themselves in order to succeed. My grandfather (a trained teacher himself) used to do this with me when I was small and was struggling to learn my times tables. “What are nine sevens?” he would yell out at random points during the day and I had to answer. It worked.

So, let’s hear it for study snacks. Short, random moments when a student challenges themselves to remember something. Adults can help and support them in this process as well as encourage them to develop it as a habit for themselves. Share with them the fact that this works and will help them with longterm recall. Apart from anything, it sends the message that study – like exercise – should be a part of daily life and woven into the fabric of your routine and habits. You don’t even need a desk to do it.

How did it go?

With the first Latin GCSE done and dusted, “how did it go?” is probably a question that every candidate has been asked and answered multiple times. This week, I have found myself wondering to what extent their self-evaluations are accurate.

Curious to discover an answer, I turned to the internet without much hope of finding one, yet came across a psychology study reported by The Learning Scientists, a group of cognitive scientists who focus on research in education. What’s particularly interesting about the study is that it attempts to evaluate students’ success at making what they call “predictions”, which the psychologists define as a student’s projection of their likely performance prior to a test, as well as their “postdictions”, by which they mean a student’s evaluation of their performance afterwards. The study attempted to make an intervention in that process, in other words they tried to improve students’ ability to make both “predictions” and “postdictions” about their own performance. The results are interesting.

The study was performed with a group of undergraduates, and the psychologists made several interventions in an attempt to improve their students’ ability to self-evaluate. They taught them specific techniques for making the most of feedback and they ensured that they took a practice test one week before each of the three exams that they sat, inviting students to self-score the practice test and reflect on any errors. The undergraduates were then encouraged to examine reasons why their “predictions” and their “postdictions” may have been inaccurate on the first two exams, and make adjustments. All of this was with the aim of improving their ability to self-evaluate.

The study found that while the undergraduates’ “postdictions” (i.e. their report on their own performance after the test) remained slightly more accurate than their own “predictions” (their projection of their likely performance), the above interventions resulted in no improvement in the accuracy of students’ “postdictions” over time. While the accuracy of some students’ “predictions” did improve somewhat, none of the undergraduates showed any significant improvement in their ability to make “postdictions”. The students’ ability to evaluate their own performance after each test remained as varied as they had been prior to the interventions.

As the authors conclude, “this study demonstrates … that improving the accuracy of students’ self-evaluations is very difficult.” This is genuinely interesting and certainly fits with my own anecdotal experience of my own ability to assess how I have performed after an examination, as well as the huge number of students that I have worked with over the years. A student’s own feelings after a test may be affected by a myriad of compounding factors and if I had a £1 for every student who felt that an examination had gone dismally who then turned out a perfectly respectable grade, I’d be a wealthy woman. In my experience, some students may over-estimate their “predictions” but most students underestimate their “postdictions”. It is interesting that those “postdictions” appear to be elusive when it comes to intervention and that the cognitive scientists have not – as yet – found a method of helping students to assess their own performance more accurately. I suspect that is because it is too emotive.

It is not obvious from the study how high-stakes the tests were – the psychologists do not make clear, for example, whether the test results contributed significantly (or indeed at all) to the assessment of the undergraduates’ own degree. This to me is something of an oversight, as an obvious compounding factor in any student’s ability to assess their own performance has to be their emotional response to it. Low-stakes testing as part of an experiment is a very different ball-game to the high-stakes testing of an examination that counts towards a GCSE, an A level or a degree class.

My conclusion for now, especially for my highest-achieving students, is to remain unconvinced that they know how well they have done. I could name countless students who have been deeply distressed after an examination, only to discover that they achieved a mark well above 90%. Even in the most seemingly disastrous of circumstances this can be the case. I know of students who missed out a whole question or indeed even a whole page of questions and still achieved an excellent grade overall, so solid was their performance on the rest of the paper and the other papers which counted towards their grade.

Much as it remains an important emotional connection to engage with every student about how they feel their exam went, they’re not a good barometer for what will be on the slip of paper when they open their envelope in August.

Making a habit of it

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”
Will Durrant, American historian, paraphrasing Aristotle

On the internet, where dodgy misattributions abound, this quotation is invariably ascribed to Aristotle himself. In fact, it is taken from historian and prolific author Will Durrant’s early 20th century work, The Story of Philosophy. In chapter 2 he examines Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and summarises his interpretation as above.

Despite undoubtedly being a genius, Aristotle was a master of the practical over and above the theoretical, which is perhaps the reason why his ideas have endured so successfully. He was one of the few thinkers of his time to acknowledge that philosophy is a luxury: that certain physiological and indeed psychological needs must be met before one can dedicate one’s time to it. He argued that there was never a simple way to define anything, that even the most fundamental moral definitions can vary with circumstances. He also argued, as Durrant summarised so pithily, that living well comes to a large extent through the repeated automation of good habits, and that being theoretically good was not much use in isolation without action.

This week, I finished James Clear’s Atomic Habits, a spectacularly popular book I have been in the queue for at my local library for several months. Conscious of the even longer queue that came after me (it is next available in December!) I finished the book within a couple of days. This was not a difficult task. I can see why there has been so much fuss about it and why for some it has been genuinely revelatory. As a reasonably well-organised and self-motivated person, I would not go so far as to say that I found the book life-changing, but I certainly found it helpful and agreed whole-heartedly with his refreshingly pragmatic approach. To take just one example, he makes the point that people who appear to be good at resisting temptation (a characteristic that many of my friends claim I possess) are in fact merely better at avoiding it – ingraining the habit, for example, that you do not buy certain foodstuffs is always more successful than buying them and telling yourself that you will consume them in moderation: the latter is simply too difficult to achieve.

Above all else, Clear’s point is that successful people (and you can define “success” in whatever way you choose) develop good habits while others do not. This might seem obvious, but it is precisely his unerring focus on habits that is so radical. While other self-help manuals exhort people to find their motivation and attempt to inspire us to make dramatic changes in our lives, Clear focuses on advising us to develop better habits incrementally: to take advantage of our brain’s ability to assimilate and automate regular and repeated behaviours. For example, I have said to myself: “I will go to the gym at x time on a Monday and a Thursday every week.” How do I make sure that this happens? Well, Clear advises going when I can, whatever the circumstances. If I miss a session due to illness or emergency, it becomes even more important to ensure that I make it the next time. If I can only go for 10 minutes, I should go for 10 minutes. This is because the habit of going is what’s most important. To quote another oft-used saying, perfectionism is the enemy of progress: if I let my abstract desire to achieve the perfect full work-out every time I go to the gym dominate over the priority of simply going habitually, I put my long-term gains at risk. It is easy to use the fact that on any one particular day I simply don’t have time for the perfect workout as an excuse not to go at all. Instead, I should focus on developing the habit of attending come what may, even if my peformance is sub-optimal: the enduring habit is the path to life-long fitness.

One of the things Clear expresses beautifully is the limited power of motivation, something I have written about less skilfully here. I am a firm believer that motivation is difficult to come by and has limited value when it comes to the reality of the daily grind – for example, the regular gym visits necessary to attain fitness or the repeated vocabulary learning required to sit a Latin exam. Humans need to experience some practical gains before they can achieve any kind of motivation and even then motivation can fail. Clear mentions a discussion he had with a coach who trains successful weight-lifters. The coach attributed the difference between those who make it and those who don’t not to some bottomless pit of inspiration or self-motivation but quite simply to their tolerance for boredom: their capacity to stick with the programme of repeated lifts, day after day, without quitting. Fundamentally, that’s all that makes the difference.

One of my tutees, with less than a fortnight to go before their exam, suddenly interrupted our session to ask me about “the best way to learn vocabulary.” Now, I’m not saying there aren’t ways that are better than others, indeed I have written extensively about it and shared a practical guide to exactly that with him and his family months ago. But I know this particular student very well and he’s the sort that is always looking for a silver bullet. He’s the sort that wants a quick fix. The reality is this: there isn’t one. You. Just. Have. To. Do. It. A few words a day, every day, day in day out, over and again, until you’ve learnt them. This is what he has never been willing to hear and he wasn’t particularly thrilled when I said it again.

On my way to my first ever solo gym visit (yes, I made it!) I was stopped by a guy who was getting out of his car and wanted directions to the station. Rising above the urge to moan about London commuters who use our road as a free car park, I beamed at him and said I was going in that direction and would show him the way. “I’m heading there,” I said, pointing to the glowering gymnasium squatting next to Jewsons. “Although I’m not particularly thrilled about it.” What he said next precisely summed up Clear’s case in Atomic Habits. “I haven’t been to the gym for months,” he admitted. I told him that it was my first time going alone having lost my work-out buddy and that I wasn’t looking forward to it for that reason. “Ah!” he shouted, confidently, as we parted ways. “You just need to find your motivation!”

Coming from a man who had literally just admitted that he had failed to attend his own gym for months, I found this fascinating. He was probably looking at me and thinking that with my attitude I would never keep going. I lacked the motivation to be a proper gym-goer. As for himself, I suspect in his own mind he was just having a blip. Okay, a blip that had lasted for several months, but a blip nonetheless. He was motivated to go, he simply hadn’t had the time, recently. Work had been manic. But do you see the problem? I think I do. In all honesty, I do not feel motivated to go to the gym. I don’t want to go. But I’m going. That’s the point. It’s the same thing that got me through my PhD, which I hated every minute of; while others claimed to love their research and yet gradually fell by the wayside and quit, I dragged myself up every day, wrote a few paragraphs, cried a lot, and eventually finished it. The practical grind beats the theoretical, the habit beats the concept. Sometimes, the hamster on the wheel is the ultimate winner.

Last-minute help?

This is the first of two remarkably busy weeks working with a very large number of Year 11s during their school holidays, preparing for the forthcoming GCSE examinations. Many of these students have approached me in just the last few weeks seeking help, and it is remarkable how much can be achieved in a short time prior to the final exams.

Many clients are surprised by the assurance that help can be worthwhile at this late stage. Many contact me in a state of panic or near despair, convinced that the situation is unsalvageable and unsure why they’re even asking for my advice. Yet within a few weeks it is possible to have an impact on a student’s confidence and their attainment, so long as you know what to focus on.

First and foremost, it is essential to assess the particular areas with which a student is struggling. This in itself can be a challenge, since many students (and certainly their parents) can struggle to identify where the problems lie. Students often present with nothing more than the fact that they need help with “the grammar”, so I rely largely on my own detective work to get to the bottom of what can be done to improve the situation. At a late stage of intervention this may well not mean delving into complex material, nor indeed trying to ask them to learn basic fundamentals. At this stage, it’s about identifying and selecting some concrete things to address that will gain them a win.

One thing that can be tackled head-on is their performance in the grammar questions, which make up 10% of their language mark. The examiner is remarkably repetitive and we are now in possession of enough past papers to prove this concept. Showing students every single past paper in quick succession, focusing entirely on the grammar questions and demystifying what it is that the examiner is looking for in their answer can be a real game-changer. In just one session it is usually possible to help get most students to the point where they can achieve 8 or 9 out of 10 in that section. To achieve full marks, students require a whistlestop tour of the uses of the subjunctive, which is a question the examiner has asked every single year, and that can take up another session or two. The uses of the subjunctive are another relatively easy win because most exam papers contain at least 5-10 sentences containing one of these constructions, so an understanding of how to translate those clauses gains them a significant margin.

There are further gains to be had if we have time to look at several practice papers as they can be coached on the types of phrasing that come up on a regular basis. I have identified a collection of common phrases that appear on exam papers with striking regularity, and a student who is perhaps overwhelmed with vocabulary learning can benefit from focusing their revision on these phrases. In addition, I have a list of high-frequency words that come up time and again on exam papers. Focusing on the high-frequency words will not gain a student a top grade in the exam (you need all the vocabulary for that!) but it can be a real game-changer for students who are struggling at the pass-mark.

Some students come to me for help with the literature and the majority of the time it is because they are completely overwhelmed by how to go about committing the texts to memory. I have written before on the fact that too many teachers tend to assume that students have the knowledge, experience and skills to rote-learn vast quantities of material without support, but in my experience, this really is not the case. My grades went up significantly when I started to assume that students did not have this knowledge and I taught them explicitly how to go about the process. Likewise, my grades went up when I took the risk of allowing them short bursts of class time to make a start on the process – this afforded me the opportunity to model the process and then monitor them using it. Many students are resistant to advice when it comes to study skills, so it’s important to ensure that they do give effective methodologies a chance so that they can be converted to the process. If left to their own devices, many students will ignore the suggestions made by their teachers, attempt to do it their own way and fail.

I am finding the work that I am doing immensely rewarding. Just this week I had a particularly heartening message from a client saying that her son is really seeing a difference. “He’s just said to me “ a few weeks ago I wouldn’t have had a clue and now I am getting them all right”. So grateful.” This particular student has been through exactly the process I have outlined above – I took him on a whistlestop tour of the uses of the subjunctive, we reviewed all the grammar questions on past papers and now we’re onto as many practice papers as we have time for, tackling some further easy wins such as time phrases along the way. Once the student is on board with the notion that it is never too late to turn their performance around, it’s quite remarkable what can be achieved.