Every student completes their exams alone. But with support and tuition, in the heat and pressure of an examination hall, they’ll have a set of tools and insights to help them unpack even the fiercest questions.
Knowing that a significant part of a student’s future could hinge on the result can make question intimidating and scary. But if a student has been shown how not to freeze at the big questions, and explored techniques to unpack them, scary moments don’t need to stop excellent exam performance.
One technique that sets students up well for both exams and for life is looking at the questions underneath the question, i.e., what smaller questions do we have to answer in order to deal with the big question that is being explicitly asked?
I’ll use an example from life.
For a student approaching the end of formal education, there can be lots of big and scary questions. The biggest and scariest one is one that we all face at different points.
What am I going to do with my life?
It’s scary because there is no single answer, and asking it explicitly opens up a world of yawning possibility. But in life, as in education, we can make questions less intimidating by working out what we need to know to approach a satisfactory answer.
So, to help answer the question “What am I going to do with my life?” we could ask a student to talk through their answers to these questions first:
– What do I enjoy doing?
– What am I curious about?
– What are the areas of life I know about, and what are the areas that I could explore further?
– What is meaningful to me?
– What would I like my life to look like in 10 years’ time?
Each of these questions is smaller, more specific, and easier to answer than the first, big question. Talking through these answers will give a rich tapestry of information that be used to inform or guide specific choices.
The discursive skills we learn in the classroom stay with us for life. The types of analysis we perform in History, English, and many other subjects are methods that help us understand ourselves and the world – exploring the big questions, not running scared.
by Tom I – Tutor at The TutorBank