 My name is Stephen Bruce and today I'm going to be talking about exam preparation classes and I should begin by, first of all, thanking Hugh Deller. Hugh did a talk a while ago called 20 Things in 20 Years and it's on YouTube, it's really, really good and I've blatantly ripped off the structure for my talk today. Can you get to show your 10 years younger than me? I'll introduce you and you'll see that's not actually true. But I've just posted on Twitter as well so you should check it out, it's really good and it's at least twice as good as this presentation is going to be, just numerically speaking. So my backstory isn't terribly interesting, about 2001 I started teaching English and then in 2004 I started to really focus on exam preparation classes and at that time it was mostly Cambridge and I used to think exams were fantastic, you know, oh they're wonderful, they give an external motivation and they can help students move up from that plateau they sometimes get stuck on. But then as the years went on the stakes got much, much higher for students and I started to see exams more as obstacles, things that were in the way of what the students really wanted to do whether that was get a new job, get a promotion or go to university which is kind of the big one at the moment. So for about ten years I just got obsessed with exams and I kind of lived in a bubble where my goal was just to get students through these exams as quickly, as painlessly and hopefully as enjoyably as possible. So I should say really that today I'm not really qualified to talk about, you know, the intrinsic values of exams or whether we should test or not in the first place which I think is a very interesting discussion which we kind of looked at yesterday with Sue's talk but really for my students they have these exams, they have to do them and I think my job is to help them get them and move on to the next thing that's in their life. So today I just want to summarize some of the principles that I kind of came up with, that's a bit of a fancy word, but some of the principles I came up with and maybe just suggest some practical ways to apply those in the class. So these are some of the kind of difficulties that students would have, some of the things that they would say about exams and the problems that they would face, you know, obviously the key one is how can I get a high grade and sometimes, you know, why are these topics so boring and then some of the things I'm thinking about while I'm teaching are over on this side so, you know, how can I get students to reflect a little bit more or how can I make this a bit more interesting for students and sometimes they don't match because, for example, if I'm thinking how can I get students to reflect a little bit more and they have an exam in two weeks or three weeks, they don't want to reflect, they want to do tons and tons and tons of practice exams constantly. So sometimes it's a bit of a challenge to try to match what you think is best for the students and what they think is best for themselves and I think you have to respect those two things. So the first thing was how can I get students to reflect a little bit more. I tried to cover some of these points but maybe not all of them and really with this I think there's kind of two things that I'm looking to do with. The first is I want to try to demystify the exam as much as possible for students to kind of take away this horrible monolith that's in front of them that they don't know anything about and seems arbitrary and horrible and terrible and I want to try to demystify that a little bit. And second I have a practical concern. Actually just yesterday I was talking and we talked about how students don't write that much and I think part of the reason why students don't write that much is because we can't correct that much and so some of these solutions today are kind of practical in the sense of getting students to do more writing and getting me to do less correcting. But anyway, there's three kind of principles here and they're a little bit misleading in a sense because I say help students become teachers. Really what I mean there is help them to think a little bit more like teachers, help them to think a little bit more like exam makers, help them to think a little bit more like examiners. So like for example with the first one I tend to find myself saying things constantly you know, oh you need to do more topic sentences, oh you need to do more linking words, blah blah blah. So one of the things we used to do was group writing projects. So for example over the course of a week on a Monday we'd break up into groups. It's quite scary. We'd break up into groups and then on the Monday say that group would work on for 20 minutes just maybe decoding the question. The Tuesday they'd work on planning it. On the Wednesday they'd work on an introduction and just so on like that. And then at the end of the week they've kind of discussed things amongst themselves, taken a little bit more ownership of the process. Instead of just this power dynamic where it's me telling them all the time, it's them discussing it. And then at the end instead of having to correct 15, I only have to correct maybe six or five. So there's kind of a practical bonus there for me. I'm going to try very quickly and use a little bit of technology. So it's probably going to go disastrously wrong, but if you have smartphones and you could indulge me for a second, I'm sure some of you have come across the webpage Mentimeter. And if you haven't, if you wouldn't mind terribly, if you have a smartphone and if you wouldn't mind going to this webpage, govote.at and you can pop in that code 369398. And I've decided to do some really hard hitting research this morning and really get to the bottom of this issue of desserts among ELT professionals. And I came across this webpage just through kind of blogging and talking to different people. And it's kind of fun. It's basically like the who wants to be a millionaire, ask the audience option. And all that happens is you pose a question, you give a few options, and then people can hopefully as they get through the process of blogging on. Oh, fantastic, thank you. They can start to kind of vote and they can start to kind of, you know... Is it meant to meet your voting? Yeah, it's actually, you don't need to go to Mentimeter, you can just go to govote.at and that brings you straight into it. And it's nice because for a lot of students, they have to write about graphs and they've never like the concept of a graph is a little bit baffling. So I think it's a lot easier to write about graphs if you've produced the graphs. And it's a very easy tool to use, say more easy than SurveyMonkey. You don't have to sign up too much. You can log in with Facebook. So in terms of writing, that's pretty good. So cheesecake is kind of an option. Maybe we'll come back to that. Sorry, five. So I'm not able to cover all those points, but if you see anything there that you think looks interesting or that catches your eye, please, you can ask me about it later. This one here, I'm sure most of you do this as well, you know, using checklists to correct, using checklists to kind of work through writing processes. We used to combine this with a Friday writing competition. So I'd give students a checklist. I'd give them a task on the Friday. We'd put it around the class and then they'd use their checklists to determine who's was the best. They'd vote and the winner would get a coffee. It got very expensive because they started splitting votes. Three people would win. So, you know, whatever way you can get around that. This question seems to come up a lot. What does this have to do with the exam? And I think this question comes from an anxiety that students have where if you do anything that is not really connected to the exam, they get stressed out. Why are we doing this? Why aren't we doing true, false, not given questions? And one thing I try to do is to make links constantly to the exams. And again, like Hugh said yesterday, if, for example, there's a grammar point like the past perfect, you don't need to labour it. You can teach it as a chunk that, you know, if you're writing about a graph, there's the hook by. You can use past perfect. By 1950, it had increased. Perfect. Now you've got a different option than just passive or past simple for writing about graphs. And the other thing is I don't do songs in exam classes. I'm sure people can make them work in an exam class, but I can't. This comes up a lot. Why are topics so boring? And in exams, sometimes topics are really, really boring. And you can sort of say, well, it's an exam. You know, just do it. But one thing I try to do is feel their pain. So, for example, if I give them a writing topic that's a little bit boring, I do it myself. And then as I do that, I'm building up a bank of resources that, you know, I can give the students, share with students. We can look at my sample, pick it apart a little bit, you know, and learn from it. Also, I don't use answer keys when I do say a reading text, something like that, because I figure if I can't answer it, you know, it's a bit like, how can I expect my students to get really into this if I'm just jumping to the back of the book? Say, oh, that's not given. Sorry. So, I tend to avoid them as much as possible and just get stuck into it. And sometimes I get it wrong, and then I go back to the answer, oh, God, that's wrong. But I think I learn a lot from getting it wrong and moving on like that. The other thing is, how can I get students enthused? How can I get students organized? I think to do well in an exam, you have to be organized. You have to be kind of disciplined and working through things as much as you can. And I've heard a lot about flipped learning and it's really, really nice word. And I don't really see the big difference between homework and flipped learning. So, I think one thing that I like to do is just give homework religiously every day I give them homework. And at the start of every class, we correct homework. And I've talked to a lot of people and they say, oh, yeah, but they don't do it. I've had classes of 15 students and the next day, two of them do the homework. And I check the homework for those two students and I just let the other 13 sit there for five or 10 minutes. And eventually the message gets through. This is what we do. This is how the class works. And if you buy into it, hopefully you'll do a bit better. I mentioned as well using social media. This is a little bit controversial. I talked to some people about this recently at an ELT makers night. And I heard some schools don't, you know, do Facebook or something like that. I had a Facebook class from my IELTS students and my original intention was to share links, share articles, it would be nice. And in the end it became something else. It became like a support network where they would post, oh, I did my exam, I did really well. And somebody would say, oh, I have my exam next week. And somebody would say, oh, I was in that class two years ago and it's crap. And finally, this comment seems to come up a lot. And the comment is, I'm not improving. And students comment, they say, I'm not improving. My English is bad. How can I improve my English? And again, this is an anxiety because these exams are high, high stakes, really high stakes. And the pressure is phenomenal on these students. And I understand that. So often what I try to do is big up students, you know, make them feel good about themselves. And a really easy thing to do is if somebody does a writing that I think is particularly good, I say, that was fantastic. Do you mind if I share it with the class? And just something small like that, I think, gives people a little bit of a boost. And it's not phony because there's genuinely something good in there that would benefit other students. And then the final thing is I ask them to be more specific. People say, how can I improve my English? How can I answer that question? So I say, well, let's get a bit deeper. Which part? Reading, listening, writing or speaking? Okay, reading. Okay, so what do you think? Why did you have difficulty with that article? What was it? And really dig into it a little bit and hopefully then pull it out. And again, they're kind of reflecting a little bit more than maybe what they were doing before. So thank you very, very much for listening. I nick the Bob Dylan phone over there. And as I mentioned before, I stole the idea from Hugh Deler. And that's my Twitter handle there. And I also kind of write a little blog every so often. So check it out. Thanks very much.