Year after year, awarding bodies comment in their GCSE examination reports that students tend to write better about unseen poetry than about the anthology poetry they’ve already studied. There might be several reasons as to why this is the case, but one possibility is that the anthology poems are being over-revised. By this, I mean that students are going into exams armed with so much pre-prepared material about their anthology poems that room to demonstrate their own thinking is crowded out. They might have revised relying entirely on the thinking of others, drawing on annotations given to them and adding in ideas sourced from the internet. Presenting other people’s thoughts can be difficult and much can get lost in translation along the way. By the time they reach the exam hall, the ideas can be tired and might no longer hold any meaningful connection to the poem – as well as often being the same ideas as those held by thousands of other students. When responding to unseen poetry, on the other hand, students have to rely exclusively on self-generated ideas, which might well mean that they write with the clarity and authenticity so important to good textual responses.
This is in no way a criticism of teachers or students. Anxiety around GCSEs means that motivated students are very likely to revise everything and anything that they can get their hands on, while teachers are keen to make sure that less motivated ones at least have some ideas to hand.
One way round the problem might be to design revision materials that require students to generate their own ideas, adding these to any ideas they have learned directly in class or come across elsewhere. It’s a great way to help them develop the informed, personal response required by the assessment objectives. This was our aim when we published our ‘Revision-in-Action’ booklets for the AQA and Edexcel poetry anthologies several years ago. With stocks of these booklets now quite low and many schools switching to newer anthologies that contain a much more inclusive set of poets and poems, we’ve decided to make them freely available to download. We’d love you to download them and take a look. Even if you don’t use them with your students, they might give you some ideas about how to direct revision activities so that students add their own new knowledge to the knowledge they’ve already come across from other sources.
AQA Power + Conflict free download
AQA Love + Relationships free download
Edexcel Conflict free download
Edexcel Time + Place free download
Edexcel Relationships free download
Revision-in-Action hard copies
You can still buy hard copies while stocks last for as little as £1 per student.
Edexcel Conflict - no longer in stock
Revision Bundles
We’ve other free downloadable revision resources available too, this time for all of the awarding bodies, for both English Language and for students studying A Christmas Carol or The Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde. The same principles apply: these are resources that provide students with valuable information about their study, but also ways of thinking in order to generate new ideas of their own. They've been gathered together in bundles for each awarding body.
EMC Full Text Study Editions
If you’re taken with this approach and want to give your students a revision boost of the highest quality, then you might like to buy each of them their own copy of an award-winning EMC set text study edition. These contain the text in full, but more importantly, dozens of activities to supplement and develop their knowledge and understanding. If students haven’t used these during their GCSE years, then they’re a brilliant way to get them looking at their set text in fresh, interesting ways.
