Since September, I’ve found myself commenting all the more regularly that lessons and learning appear to just be happening to a number of the students I teach. This cohort aren’t owning their education in the way they need to in order to be successful. I hope I’m not alone in being greeted by a look of total bewilderment on the faces of one or two students arriving for my lesson in which they will be completing an assessment, as they apparently discover for the first time that their geography knowledge and skills are about to be tested. This is despite my delivery of a revision lesson the previous week which itself followed several weekly online and face to face reminders of the upcoming test. Notwithstanding this, once the assessment is over, for some students the moment they stride out of my classroom and into the afternoon lunchbreak this important benchmark in their learning journey has been totally forgotten about before they finish their Wagon Wheel. Of course, this isn’t all of my students, thankfully far from it, but what can I do to improve ALL of the students taught in geography as learners so that they ALL get better at self-regulation?
One tool we have been using and developing this year is a student self-review task which is completed as part of our post-assessment feedback routine. Sir Kevan Collins in writing his foreword to The Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning Guidance Report from the EEF said we should “…get learners to think about their own learning more explicitly, usually by teaching them to set goals, and monitor and evaluate their own academic progress.”
Through the student self-review process we use in geography, I am confident that we are now doing this much more effectively.
