Use of It in Teaching – Excel in Key Subjects

The Productivity Revolution: How to Study Smart for GCSE and A-level

Idris Musty — Thu, 23 Nov 2023 09:14:12 +0000

How to Study Smart for GCSE and A-level:

Having two teenagers who are both in the final year of GCSE and A-level respectively, means the notion of “hard work vs smart work” is a constant topic of conversation in my household… If you ask anyone which is better: smart work or hard work, the answer is a no-brainer, as the Americans say!

My son and I have completely different points of view about the importance of hard work. When he got the result of his GCSEs last year, as expected and unlike in all the other subjects, he did not get the top grade in English Literature. He missed it by two grade points. His position had always been that he was not prepared to put in that extra work that would allow him to secure Grade 9. When his cousin’s results came out this summer and she got 12 Grade 9s, including all the subjects that are perceived as difficult, I tried to highlight her achievement to my son. The fact that his cousin did so well and was in the top 20 or so students in the whole country. Despite having to travel for about four hours (in total) to and from school every day, she was still able to put in the hard work. Of course, that reignited the debate between my son and I again, I’m sure you can guess where our argument/conversation on this often leads to, but I will try and avoid getting into the hot potato debate of nature vs nurture here. I’ll come back to this point again towards the end, with a light-hearted story.

We all know that, if you are in the military, you can find yourself in a position of having to decide or act on matters of life and death. This could be for yourself, or worse, for your men, women or colleagues. I concur that education – including learning, training and getting qualifications and all that, is not a matter of life and death. However, getting it right can be the difference between a miserable life and a more enjoyable one. Nevertheless, permit me to use a couple of quotes from the military.

Here are two quotes from Google about the military.

Discipline is the soul of an army. There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.
The best Generals, the Germans found, came from the clever and lazy; the best staff officers emerged from the clever and hard-working; the stupid and lazy could be made useful as regimental officers; but the stupid and hard-working were a menace, to be disposed of as soon as possible. They are dangerous! – my own edit.

Getting the balance between nurture and nature is a delicate one and, as I’m not an expert, I do not know the answer. What I do know in my over 30 years of being in the secondary education system is that you do not have to be a genus to achieve A* in any subject. Whilst I would be indulging in falsehood to claim that everyone is capable of obtaining the top grades in every subject, I’ve witnessed young people of about average ability doing very well at GCSE and even A-level. Sadly, I’ve also seen very bright young people ending up with mediocre exam grades – or perhaps failing exams all together.

Teaching in schools, on the whole, is so much better these days, partly because teachers are under greater level of scrutiny. We hear about constantly improving GCSE and A-level exam results. However, despite the huge volume of resources available, the education divide remains still too wide. The education attainment divide is still largely along demographic lines, but if you care to dig deeper into it psychographics play a bigger role. I am not going to go into detail here but what I will say is that is not just about parental income or being middle class and all that. Brampton Manor School (the so-called Eton of East London) is a testament to that. Another example is – Mayflower School in the East End of London. This school, which has so many of the typical challenges that are faced by inner city schools, outperformed almost all top private prep schools where parents are now paying about £15,000 a year.

It's always the parent’s fault – isn’t it!

Here is the light-hearted story that I promised you earlier.

A boy came home with his school report in which he has done very badly in all his subjects He then said: “father, can I ask you a question?” The father responded “yes, of course, go ahead”. The question was: “what is the reason behind my bad exam performance, is it nature or nurture?”

Never mind the cheekiness of this question. The thing is that we parents are just a catalyst in the chemical reaction that results in exam grades as the product. This chemical reaction takes many years to occur, and, according to my simplified Chemistry definition, a catalyst. has to be present for a chemical reaction to take place successfully, but the catalyst does not get used up in the process. The difference is that we as parent often get used up. Never mind the financial cost, which can be a lot; the physical and, more importantly, emotional energy we expend can be even more costly.

As I’m not an expert, I do not have a solution on how to motivate a teenager and get them away from gaming and social media. What I’d say is that it is a constant battle, and we have to remain engaged with the teenager. There is not one specific way to solve the problem, but it is important to be aware of it and to keep at it; constantly having the conversation and adopting different strategies.

The fact of the matter is that so many teenagers do not have the discipline to study, or, when studying, to work and focus in a productive way so that they get more out of the time they put in.

Help is at hand!

One thing that we did at Excel this summer was to organise some sort of study sessions during the last couple of weeks of the summer holiday. In those sessions, the idea was to use scholars from Imperial College to supervise learning sessions at the British Library in St Pancras. It turned out in the end to be teaching sessions for those scholars, as they actually taught the students. What the parents liked about those sessions was that it did not cost any money to them but it cost the children their time, as they had to get their act together, get off their devices and go and do some learning!

We are hoping to repeat the same thing during the coming school holidays, so watch this space!

Clarification: Our modus operandi at Excel involves using professional teachers for our courses, and not university undergraduates to do the teaching. We usually use scholars for a different purpose (scholars are graduate and undergraduate students – usually from Imperial College or UCL). Scholars are used to supervise sessions like enhancement and homework assignments. It must be said that, despite the fact that these are usually not sessions that parents pay for, the scholars are paid.

However, we have on occasions used some highly qualified people, but without a PGCE or even QTS, as teachers. They have been some of the very best teachers one can find anywhere. You may say this is imitating the very best of private school, where they are not so bothered about a teacher having PGCE when they are recruiting. I have got a PGCE myself, and I advocate having one, as it is safer that way. However, there are people without PGCE, BEd or any form of QTS who are outstanding teachers.

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The Master-User Protocol: How to Focus While Studying with Technology

Idris Musty — Mon, 18 Dec 2017 17:27:37 +0000

How to Focus While Studying with Technology

Whilst I embrace technology and appreciate its importance as a vital learning tool; I also think there are aspects of the traditional learning experience that is irreplaceable. One main one is day to day interaction with printed text – usually books, which I can touch, feel and smell. I’m one of those people who do not throw away books or resell them as I’ll rather keep books on the shelf than get rid of them. I spend an awful lot of time at the British Library in St Pancras and I must confess that although I go there a few times a week, the novelty somehow does not wear off. Whenever I’m in that cathedra of learning, I feel the sense of wealth – a place with immense wealth of knowledge, culture and history. The British Library as the second largest collection of printed books in the world and at the same time it also possesses state of the art learning resources in digital form. An environment in which the two aspects – traditional and modern learning tools complement each other nicely.

Top Tips for making the best use of Technology

In concluding this discussion, which is aimed at provoking thoughts about the pros and cons of technology, I’d like to offer a few suggestions on how people can make the best use of technology and prevent it from controlling their lives.

Think on paper – keep a physical notebook and use it more often.
Experiment with not having your phone on all day. You can start by turning it off, or putting it on aircraft mode for a couple of hours a day. I’m not speaking about whist at work but it could be just to think, to relax and have a breathing space – or perhaps to indulge in some reading of printed book!
Switch off your phone or put it in non-message-receiving mode before you go to bed. Allow yourself to have a brief review of your day in the evening and to decide on the two or three critical things you want to do the next day. Write down one or two bullet points.
Switching on the phone, tablet or computer should not be the first thing you switch on when you wake up in the morning. Make yourself a cup of tea or coffee and look at the little note you made the previous evening. Do this before switching on your devices as you want to identify your own priorities for the day before you let others into your thoughts.
Record your favourite programme or the news and watch it later. That way, you can fast forward the bits you do not like.
Have a facility time when devices are switched off for a few minutes and converse with your family in the absence of electronic technology.
Do not always think about efficiency but appreciate that effectiveness is more important. I’ll rather walk or cycle for 20 minutes than take the bus or train or drive if I can help it. Walking time is thinking time and you begin to enjoy it after some time.
Try and discover the joy or reading – I mean printed book, with little chance of being distracted. It can be very liberating – an escapism that you may begin to enjoy and indulge in more often!
Whatever you do, stay curious and remain inquisitive!

I hope you have found this informative, stay tuned for our next series of blogs on issues relating to the education of young people.

The post The Master-User Protocol: How to Focus While Studying with Technology appeared first on Excel in Key Subjects.

Tool or Trap? Analyzing the Impact of Technology on Student Learning

Idris Musty — Tue, 05 Dec 2017 17:27:02 +0000

Impact of Technology on Student Learning

Like any good thing in life, it is not usually the technology itself but how people choose to use it. I have about 5 smart phone and tablets – iPhones, iPad and Samsung for my personal use and I use about three to four of them every day. Does it mean that I spend a lot of time on my smart phone? Certainly not. The way I manage myself includes having a phone for family emergency, my main iPhone is the one for calls, it is also used as a calendar that beeps about 11 times a day to remind me of when to stop or to start doing certain routines that I do every day. The third phone and the iPad perform similar functions, which is to listen to background music on YouTube as I work at my desk. Chopin, Ludovico Einaudi and Beethoven are my main favourites, but I only recently discovered Yurima – which is rather delightful. I love listening to Marvin Gaye, Mozart and Bob Marley but I get too emotional with those and I usually can’t listen to them when I’m working. Listening to background music really does let me cut off unwanted noise and to focus. I switch on my phone to take incoming calls for a maximum of two hours a day; usually to make calls or to check messages that have been left for me.

What is the purpose of technology?

We must always remind ourselves of the purpose of using a machine or a particular piece of technology. In my opinion, there are only a couple or so reasons to use a piece of technology or a machine: to perform a task more efficiently or speedily, and for entertainment. When it comes to education and exam revision for example, about 10 to 15 years ago, the way teachers, parents and students gained access to study material including past exam questions was to telephone the company that produced them and order them to be delivered in the post or to go directly to them and buy the material. These days, if you have access to a computer and the internet then you can get those same materials in large quantity. This makes lives an awful lot easier! However, too many young people and teachers take that a step too far and the effectiveness diminishes with that little extra step.

How technology is being used in educating students

In giving questions to students to do, the teacher decides to display the questions on the white board for students to read whilst attempting the questions, instead of printing out the questions. For the purpose of revision, the student downloads the questions and looks at them on the computer screen, thinks about the answers and checks the mark scheme to see if the answers he thinks are correct.

In the two examples above, the teacher has denied each student, the opportunity to touch, feel and read the question individually, which is a different learning experience. The student who just looks at the questions on the screen and thinks about the answers for a few seconds can do more questions in a shorter time this way – very efficient but not so effective. This way, the student is missing out on an essential element of the learning process; to touch the paper, read closely, think and communicate his answers in a written format and perhaps submit the work and get at least some of the work marked by the teacher.

The above examples are perhaps a slight exaggeration, as most teachers do print some question for the students to do and most students do some written work as part of their revision. However, I guess there are too many of the scenarios I painted above happening than should be happening. I am all for protecting the environment and I think not enough attention is being paid to the way we use the limited resources we have here on earth. My belief however, is that the use of pen and paper and also printed material, creates to most an enjoyable and more effective learning experience. We could perhaps do more to recycle the papers we use and reuse things a lot more than just throwing them away.

In my next blog I will give my final thoughts on technology and how it can be tactfully used to benefit people’s lives rather than being controlled by it.

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