The Pedagogy Behind the Exam

Mr Chris Graham (Assistant Principal - Secondary)

Sometimes people like to sound a little too smart by using big words; pedagogy is one such word. Pedagogy means the method of how teachers teach, in theory and in practice.

As our Year 10’s and 11’s will soon be having their Semester One exams and our Dunhelen students will be sitting their first exams at the end of this year. It’s important that as parents you know some of the study techniques we are teaching the students. We’ve been looking at ‘A Learners Toolkit’ (https://alearnerstoolkit.com.au/).

There are 6 basic strategies:

I often hear parents speak of the importance of ‘study’, but often people don’t actually know what that is or how to do it. This framework shows students how to. In our recent assemblies, I was sharing a ‘visualise it’ and ‘connect it’ strategy that I used a long time ago when I was in university. I did a subject called ‘Cadaver Anatomy’. In this subject we had specimens (people who had donated their body to science) that we dissected and we had to learn all the muscles, nerves, bones, muscles origin point, muscles insertion point, ligaments, tendons, blook supply to the muscle and blood supply from the muscle. This was literally thousands of words.

The strategy I personally used was to connect and visualise something from my long-term memory (I chose my house) and link it to the new information that I was trying to learn. Upon entering my house, I visualised x4 muscles, including their bone attachments, innovation/nerve and blood supply. I visualised myself turning left and walking into my lounge room. In the lounge room, there were a number of other muscles in different places, some on seats, some by a lamp and some by the open fire. All with their specific bone attachments, nerve/innovation and blood supply. I then turned right into our family room and this process continued throughout my house until I had a visual connection for all the muscles. While my marks were not amazing, I did pass the subject and exam.

As each student is approaching their own periods of study, we’re encouraging all to be aware of the number of different strategies (in the link above) and to explore using them. By doing this we’re wanting to take some of the fear and unknown out of exams.

Good luck to all as this time approaches.