Why I nearly quit the violin

Practice v. Performance.

When I was learning to play the piano, I would often just play through the piece again and again, trying to get better at it. I didn’t understand. Conversely, my violin teacher would make me practice the same little section over and over again at different speeds and with different rhythms until I could play it without hindrance. He understood. And because I didn’t, it did my nut in!

As a teacher trying to help students improve their extended writing, I would often encourage students to practice writing out long answers, before giving fairly general and therefore ineffective feedback for them to apply next time they attempted to write at length. I still didn’t understand. Another subject within our faculty had their students repeat the same process of explaining individual points and facts in a range of different contexts before completing full questions. They understood.

It has taken nearly 15 years since my violin teacher was making me question whether I was ever going to play a full piece of music again for me to realise what he was trying to teach me, that the practice looks very different to the final performance.

The idea of practice being different to performance is repeated regularly in recent publications with authors such as Mark Enser, David Didau and others all using very similar examples to those that I experienced to demonstrate that in order to improve the final performance, you need to work at the small things, the little steps that look so different, but when put together, make your final performance that much better.

But what does this actually look like for the geography student? Especially with regard to that issue where I was previously failing to effectively move students forwards, extended writing?

This is where a bit of thought is required in breaking down exactly what it means to be able to write effectively at length at GCSE into constituent parts. Having examined a number of past exam questions, recalled exam scripts and mark schemes, it appears that there are three main areas where the practice should be focused:

1. The identification of the correct geographical knowledge to use
2. The effective explanation of the facts/concepts/arguments stated
3. The detailed evaluation of these developed points

And so I found myself, during year 11 parents’ evening this week, telling parent after parent and student after student that in order to improve their extended writing in geography, they should practice something very different to what they would be expected to do in their final exam. This took the form of the following three suggestions:

1. Highlighting the key geographical terminology/geographical phrase in a practice question and then writing down all of the relevant content that they could think of which relates to that key terminology. This could be done as a list of bullet points, a mind map, or just as a series of notes. The idea being that they then get used to identifying the key area(s) of their schemata that they need to refer to whenever they see certain words or phrases in questions.
2. Creating a grid such as the one below (based upon a very good example in the Hodder AQA 9-1 Geography workbook) in which a series of points are written into the first column and where the next two columns are then used to develop each identified point, helping students to think through what each point means and thus, more effectively explaining it. (Note: This can be used very successfully in conjunction with photos or other sources where students also have to pick out key aspects of the source.)

Point/fact identified	First development	Second development
Houses are built out of scrap materials…	…so the structures are not very secure and parts can easily be damaged or fall down…	…meaning that people are more at risk of living in dangerous conditions
There are no basic amenities supplied to buildings…	…so there is no clean water supply or effective sanitation system…	…meaning that people are more vulnerable to poor health and disease

• Choosing 3 or 4 key facts that could be used in the answer to a specific practice question. For each fact, the student would then need to write an evaluative statement, making some kind of judgement about the fact. For example:

Fact	Evaluative statement
The Tohoku earthquake caused upwards of $235 billion worth of damage, making it the most expensive natural disaster in history.	Japan is very well prepared for natural hazards, which therefore shows how significant this event was to have caused so much damage to a nation which is so well prepared.

In having students practice evaluating facts in a repetitive manner, when they come to use supporting facts in their extended writing, they will be more likely to follow it with an evaluative statement, than just plonk the fact in without showing why that fact is an important contribution to the argument. At least that is the hope.

In encouraging my students to practice in this manner, I am optimistic that firstly, the students will find the practice more variable and engaging than just writing out practice question after practice question and that secondly, there will be a gradual improvement in the quality of their extended written answers. I will let you know how it goes.