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Moving Forward, Life After EdexcelMaths

With #EdexcelMaths trending nationally and news stations across the UK interviewing students highlight what students deemed to be a particularly 'nasty' higher paper 1. Colin Hegarty and I have decided to do a joint post on ways to help motivate your students and get them back in the zone.

The worst thing students can possibly do after an exam is go in search of the answers. This can soon cause many to stress and panic if they realise they have done a question wrong. It is not worth taking this risk. However the damage is already done. We need to remember these are 16 year old students under a surreal amount of pressure and as much as the twitter jokes from the likes of Tesco may amuse people it is also compounding an already bad situation for some of our students.

We have both had conversations with students today who were originally happy with the paper that are now worrying they haven’t done well because the rest of the country thought it was hard. Exams are a psychological battle as well as knowing your stuff. We need to get our students back in the zone and off twitter the hashtag.

Colin has created a great video which can be found on his YouTube channel and is embedded here. I feel we should be attempting to tweet out this video on both department and maths accounts. The aim is to remotivate the students and move forward.

Work Hard

It is important we emphasise that they can work hard this weekend, it will make a difference to their grades. (Every mark will count, more so than ever this year in terms of grade boundaries). Just remember never give up.

Grades

Exam boards don’t want students to fail and will mark fairly. Make it clear you can’t predict the grade boundaries however they often reflect when a paper is tricky.

Confidence Build

The morning before the exam and sessions this weekend for the majority, need to have challenge and prepare the students for the exam. However I know myself that first half hour and the last half hour on Saturday I am going to make sure I hit predict topics, which I know the students can get right to help build their confidence and belief in themselves back up again.

A Powerful Pose

At the end of warm up sessions on Monday morning consider getting your students to hold a powerful pose. It’s something I saw at a recent teach meet and is said to have proven impact on exam results. Powerful poses may just make the students laugh, or they may do it properly. However, this takes students out of their very insular, negative and worrisome thought processes and body language before an exam. Allowing students to start the exam feeling positive and hopeful powerful.

Be Amazing

Ultimately remind the students how hard they have worked for this and how ready they truly are. This is their time to show off and be the amazing students, at every level, we know they are. You can’t change the past but you can change the future. If the worst does happen and they don’t get the grade they want, they can always resit.

Miss B's and Hegarty's Weekend Guide to Success

We have combined resources and compiled links to the best guess papers we know of by @CorbettMaths and another by @MathsGenie. Also the amazing @MathedUp has created an interactive predicted topic list to videos, questions and solutions. Remember don't do anything if you aren't going to mark it. Also predictions are exactly that, we don't know what is going to come up on the exam. However, using professional judgement these have been created to try support students.