For the start of the new school year, I am writing a blog series on all of the systems I have in place in my A-Level Economics classroom. They definitely aren’t perfect, but when I started teaching A-Level in a brand new Sixth Form, I scoured the web for articles on how to manage the practicalities of an A-Level class. I really benefitted from the wisdom of Matt Smith, Adam Boxer, and Ruth Walker, and over the last few years I have tweaked and built on these ideas to create systems from which I think (hope?!) I think my students benefit from.
I want to start with homework. As well as the standard MCQs and exam questions that I set here and there, I have several standing homework tasks that I set every week. I tend to set these on the same day each week, often scheduled in Microsoft Teams, and have them due on the same day too. These are:
· Quizlet – Each week I give students a Quizlet set with recall facts on what they have leanred that week, which is then tested the week after. Year 13 students also receive a revision set from Year 12
· Indy Hour – an hour of independent, free choice work. I give suggestions as to how students could be using this time each week, with recommendations for articles, podcasts and videos that relate to what we have learned that week.
· Class Read (Y12) – These are activities based on our whole class reading book, ‘Can’t We Just Print More Money?’
· Exam Practice (Y13) – On top of any work set based on current essay topics, I also do weekly timed exam practice, some of which students need to prepare for.
This first post will focus on Quizlet. I'm going to go into a painful amount of detail because for me, it has been the details which can make or break a system!
A weekly recall test is probably a hill that I would be prepared to die on. Not only do I value it hugely, but somewhat surprisingly, students will often tell me that weekly tests are one of the things they find the most useful in their Economics studies.
Each Monday, I distribute a Quizlet set of material we covered the previous week (ish). We don’t normally cover a topic neatly in a week, but often I have a set that works, albeit sometimes it includes stuff they learned 10-12 days ago rather than a week. Occasionally, I take a bigger set and split it in two, but I only had to do that once or twice last year. You are welcome to take a look at my flashcards here, but please check them as there are a bunch of mistakes from when I have imported or copy-pasted a set. My whole account is a bit of a hot mess, but cleaning it up isn't really a priority at the mo!
I pay for Quizlet Plus, so at the start of the year students join my ‘class’ and then they get the full set of features. That said, while some of them will start tricky sets on Learn mode, generally I advise them to use Flashcard mode which is free anyway. I go through a sample set (based on general knowledge and school trivia) and show them how to adjust the settings to turn sorting on and answer with definition. We then go through exactly how we revise using flashcards, talking about how this would translate to physical flashcards.
My Year 13 students get two sets assigned: one on their work from the previous week and one on stuff from last year to keep it ticking over. These sets are a little larger, with about 30 cards, but in theory students should just be refreshing their knowledge at this stage. You can find those sets here.
We have 3 doubles and a single each week, after some trial and error over the years, we’re now in a good routine of doing our test in the single lesson. At some point in the week, I select 10 questions from the set to test and put them in the Teacher Only section of OneNote. It would probably be easy at this point to pick and copy 10 questions into a OneNote page, but I irrationally hate doing this, so I export them into a spreadsheet and use a randomiser, which probably takes longer. For year 13, I display both tests on the same OneNote page
I photocopy a ton of these very exciting test templates at the start of term. I (or the very lovely INA supporting one of my students) cut some in half for my Year 12s, but they are left with two on a page for Year 13. I very much recommend bulk photocopying (because you only want to have to think about it once). If you’re photocopy budget doesn’t stretch that far, lined paper is fine, but I found that the identical layout makes it much much much easier to mark, and now I’ve made the move, I won’t go back. If photocopies were out of the question, perhaps it would be worth coaching students to split the page up into two columns of 5 rows (or even a 3 x 3 grid?) to mimic the style.
I usually save the test until towards the end of the lesson. If students are super quick, they can leave early (it’s only a few minutes, please don’t tell my boss), and students who need longer can run into break. It also makes it easy to keep back those students who need to resit from the previous week.
This clearly costs me lesson time and precious marking time, and I tried hard initially to eliminate both. The first year, I set the test on Microsoft Forms as homework. The second year, they did the test on devices and I sat at the back of the room supervising. The temptation to cheat was too much for some students, so I switched to paper. I am now pretty confident that I could better instil the culture needed for students to be honest, but even so, I wouldn’t make the switch back now for two reasons. Firstly, I find it is actually quicker to speedmark paper copies and I’m much better at just getting it done quickly, probably because I want to avoid carrying the paper around and know I can get it done within a few minutes. Secondly, students respond much better: there is something more formal and permanent about paper, and leaving a question blank on paper glares back at you more than it does on a form.
I award two marks per question, with 2 marks for a bulletproof answer and 1 for an answer that would gain credit in an exam. Any student failing to get 12 (60%) has to resit. On the first occasion, they stay back and I run through the revision process again briefly. On the second occasion, we make an agreement that I will monitor their Quizlet activity. On the third occasion, if their Quizlet activity isn’t up to scratch, they get a detention. If there are signs of Quizlet activity, I conclude they are either revising incorrectly, not revising enough or manufacturing Quizlet activity for show. Either way, revision with me for a few sessions in a week tends to sort them out.
Marking the papers is very quick, thanks to the standard layout. I usually start with one or two students who I can be pretty sure are going to get high marks marks so I can use their work as a mark scheme. I make 3 piles with marked papers – those with full marks go in one pile so I can quickly dish out merits, any failing papers go on another pile for follow up, and everything else goes on a third pile. I timed a class set of 17 papers and the process of marking took under 4 minutes, with a further 2 minutes for logging the scores in Teams and giving merits on our school system (I didn’t have any failing papers to act on).
However, I’m sticking with Quizlet for now for a few reasons. Most importantly for me, it’s one that students can use themselves, both for their other subjects and into Uni, setting up their study skills well. It’s also one that it used by other subjects. In recent years, it has really improved and the spaced repetition and learning personalisation are excellent and now rival Anki. I still have students who prefer to use Anki, so I have shown them how to export the sets from Quizlet and upload them into Anki. I still prefer Quizlet over Anki because the interface is clearer and because Quizlet is pumping out new features fairly rapidly. While I prefer my sets to the AI generated ones (not least because I prefer a question-answer style to term-definition style), they are still much more effective than what many students could create themselves, especially if they are generated using trusted, high quality study materials.
Hopefully next up I'll post about Indy Hour. Maybe.