Highlights from The Exam Man podcast Season 1, Episode 7
Back in early May 2024, Sander de Groot of MADE Training joined us on The Exam Man to discuss the work they do to support learners. He is an experienced teacher, trainer, lecturer and facilitator and MADE Training are the leading experts in thinking, studying, and revision skills. At the time thousands of young people were in the thick of exam preparation and revision, so the episode was timely. We asked Sander for any helpful tips that he had for students and families to navigate this period, and his tips were brilliant for anyone coping with stressful periods too.
So what would be really great is to if you could tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into the world of revision and training?
So growing up in a Dutch family here in the UK as a boy, I wouldn't say that I was the best reviser. But I had many friends who, to varying degrees, were pretty good at it. I think from Year 11, I really became the magpie, looking at how other people did it, and testing those ideas out for myself, and some of them worked really well.
As the years have gone on, I've learned more and more ways to focus, how to get the best out of myself when I'm working, studying and all the strategies that we share with students I apply myself.
I became really good at drawing, so I became a cartoonist and a fashion illustrator and designer. After a PGCE to become an art teacher, I became really interested in in pedagogy- the art and science of teaching and delivering really good classes. I taught for a while, lectured for a while, and then I had the opportunity of working for a training company. I had the opportunity of working with a couple of organizations, going back into schools delivering thinking skills, and then sweet spot came together, working with students, but not within a specific subject- helping them to think and really think for themselves.
I've become really passionate and interested in helping students to do this. So now we work with students, but also with teachers, with parents, and we also work with a handful of sports people and businesspeople. We help them reflect on the way that they're thinking and help to develop their thinking skills. We can also call them processes, strategies, to use to attack problems, to attack situations that we get stuck in perhaps. And it has gone from strength to strength.
I think that the thinking skills that we share are applicable to everybody, it's basically about how we pitch it. For those students who are already really focused, then we talk about extending their learning, and validating e strategies that they already use, and giving them hints and tips on how to make them even more effective. For those who haven't even started revision, they need to have a bit of a breakthrough moment. The first five to ten minutes of our workshops therefore need to be a moment where the student goes "Okay, I'm not just understanding what you're saying. But oh, my gosh, this stuff actually works. Yeah, I can see it in this session. And I can notice it in my head, that this isn't just information, but this is I'm experiencing it”
So is that something that you do at the beginning of the session?
Yeah, totally. It's almost like a proof of concept to the student. And that's whether it's in a personal development workshop, or in a workshop based on independent or autonomous learning. I think people, students, and everybody needs to have that moment. That penny drop moment of, okay, I can see this actually works.
We have what we call a MADE model, which is like a flow model that goes through each workshop, where we explain the strategy. We give them the psychology and the history behind it, where it's come from.
We demonstrate it, then the students practice it and see really, okay, I can see this working. And then they discuss in groups of how are they going to apply it? In which kind of subjects might they think it's useful? And how can they tailor it to their own methodology?
Could you give us an example of some of those strategies?
One of the classic ones, and I think a slightly misunderstood one is what's known as the memory palace or the method of loci. This is the oldest memory technique in the book, put forward effectively 2500 years ago. The idea is that they hook pieces of information or powerful memory triggers around the room.
I have two daughters. One is 18 and about to take her A Levels. One is 16 and about to take her GCSEs. I explained this idea to my 18-year-old as she was approaching mock exams for GCSEs. She said “Yeah, okay, Dad, see what you mean”.
But then a week later, I noticed there were these post-it notes throughout the house. There are a few words on the front and a few words on the back. And she said to me “I took the idea that you explained to me Dad. But I've tweaked it to work for me”. So, she wanted to memorize all the quotes from Macbeth. She wrote half a quote on the front, half a quote on the back. And she placed them on a journey through the house. Above a light switch in a room on the back of the bedroom door, in the hallway, back at the bathroom door above the mirror. And she said that every day she would walk past these things, read the first half of the quote and see if she could remember the half on the back. Then she said that in the mock exam, she realised that she only needed to remember one thing. And that was the place we lived.
She knows that like the back of her hand. She said she could go through the house, and they all came back to her. And I thought, Well, fantastic. Now I explain the strategy to students in two or three different ways now. So you could use it like this, or this is how my daughter has applied it. I see the students go, okay, okay. Now, if your daughter's used it, and she's changed it, then that means I can change things.
What do you guys do in terms of helping students to be prepared mentally to take on exams?
I think a big part of resilience is having the confidence to be able to get it wrong, identify what went wrong, what the gaps in the knowledge and know that we can make progress. I'm going to give you an example from my other daughter. My 16-year-old is very different from her older sister, perhaps because my eldest daughter was quite studious.
A few weeks ago, she was studying at the kitchen table rather than in her room because she knows that managing distractions isn't her strong point. She studies at the kitchen table where she's being monitored by myself and my wife. She’s revising some maths, and I asked her, “Hey, how do you know if your revision is going to work?” And she looked at me, she said, “what? I'll find that out in the exam”. I laughed. “That might be a bit late”. She said maybe I'll need to do a past exam paper. And I could tell by her voice that she didn't want to do it. Now, why didn't she want to do it? Because she didn't want to see the mark that she was going to get. So in the end, she did a pass exam paper and got 32%, not where she wanted to be. But in that moment, she realized, okay, now I know the stuff I do know. Now I can figure out the stuff I don't know. And I can focus on the stuff I don't know. And now she's got into a process of doing a past exam paper each week. And she's seeing her grade go up. And that has given her that resilience to start pushing and start progressing. The idea that we’ve got to see the challenges to be able to overcome them. Resilience isn't going to come out of out the sky.
A key one for parents is acknowledging that every child is going to be different. What works for one child, from a parenting perspective is not going to work for another. And each child needs to be parented differently. My eldest one was very happy to sit down and discuss things with me. My youngest one is “Yeah, yeah. What do you know?”. She is picking some bits up- but she won't say that they are from me!
As a parent, is it just a case of trial and error? Is it a case of testing what different strategies might work with your kids?
I think the big one is nudging, nudging young people to try and move from a passive to an active approach, right? Revision isn't going to be something that gets done to you. It’s something that we have to get done. Is there something that we have to get done?? What are you revising at the moment? Oh, so you're revising geography. Tell me a little bit about geography! I guess it's that showing interest interested in the content, you know?
I love it when my when my daughters teach me- to explain what they've learned. They feel proud. And I really show interest in what they're studying. It gets them to see that this stuff they're learning at school is valid and that it's going to be useful.
Many of the schools that I work with are moving to a model of compulsory revision sessions after school. You can make someone go to a session, but can you make them listen and apply themselves? And so they might be, you know, free riding that session and not really taking it in and they might even be distracting some of the others who want to take part. It’s handing over responsibility to the teachers, isn’t it? I’ve done the revision sessions, so how come I haven’t got a good mark? Surely you were doing the revision for me?!
Can you give us a few tips for any students listening to this?
Number One is really basic. It’s to remove distractions. We’re all half human, half phone these days. In those blocks of focus put the phone on silent and put it somewhere you can’t see it, whether that’s behind the screen of the laptop or whether that’s behind you on the bed, somewhere where it’s out of sight. The next one is when reading, read with a pen in your hand. That shifts the focus from “what’s all this?” to “what do I want from this?”. One of the models that we share is do some reading, maybe 15-20 minutes, take a little break. Then, go into the transforming process- either make a flashcard, or summarise, write up a few key points, or maybe structure an essay plan. That’s when we personalise the information, we filter it through our understanding, and we transform it into something new. Then finally, test yourself to try and show did the revision work. Read, transform and then recall it. Whether that’s learning lines in a play, preparing for a presentation- we as professionals, as teachers, as educators, we go through this process ourselves.
Could you talk to us about marginal gains and how you feel about that concept at MADE?
Oh, wonderful! Marginal gains- those of you who have heard about it before, have probably heard about the work of Dave Brailsford and the Olympic cycling team, and how that concept has gone right through the sporting arena into business and into education too. The idea of marginal gains is about small incremental improvements rather than trying to make one big shift in one go, where we set ourselves up for failure. It’s about small changes, small things in time create a behavioural shift, a performance shift. With students, we talk about marginal gains in relation to their routines. It’s simplistic to think that the only thing that affects my grades is how much work I do. It’s about what time we go to bed, having breakfast in the morning, the relationship we have with our teachers, the relationships we have with our parents- it’s all those little things on the periphery that can really make an impact. When we talk about marginal gains, we get them to look at diet, exercise, prioritising their work. Making those small shifts.
Is it hard to convince students of this?
Not in my experience. I think if we use a really powerful analogy or story upfront, of how others have used it, and then get students to go through let’s say the paradigm shift of looking at when they’ve made small changes in the past and the performance increase they had, then most students go ‘I see this!’ They build up and they snowball. Once we’ve done one small thing, we think well this is pretty easy, I can do another one, and another one, and another one. Our confidence builds and our success begins to snowball.
When I talk to students, I talk about slicing these things really fine, where you are guaranteed to succeed- go to bed 10 minutes earlier, do 20 minutes of revision- of course I can do 20! That becomes 40, becomes an hour. Then we see the behavioural change.
John, Sophie, it’s been a delight to be with you today!
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If you’d like to find out more about Sander de Groot and MADE Training, please visit: https://www.made-training.com/
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