How using Oak for revision has personalised revision plans and reduced teacher's workload

Mia O’Gorman, Science Teacher at Hammersmith Academy, spoke to us about how using Oak National Academy to support revision has been beneficial for both pupils and teachers.

Like so many teachers, Mia and her colleagues have been helping their pupils with exam preparation. With many students having isolated or falling sick themselves, there’s been inevitable disruption to their learning - which is now making their revision planning across the three science topics more challenging.

As Mia says: “For GCSE science, students do six papers so it can get a little bit overwhelming for them to try and map their revision because they might have missed topics when they were isolating.”

To help her students figure out themselves what they need to relearn and what they need to revise, Mia has used Oak’s lessons to create a simple but highly organised ‘independent learning pack’ which has been shared with her pupils over the school’s learning platform.

Oak’s sequence of lessons provide ready-made revision resources

Mia explains: “We say to students that we obviously know there's been a little bit of lost learning and here we’ve brought all these amazing resources together for you so that once we've helped you identify these gaps in your knowledge, you've got this resource to go away and revise or relearn whatever you need.”

The learning pack consists of all of the relevant Oak quizzes, lessons and resources that align to the chemistry, biology and physics GCSE papers. Mia also includes links to other resources in her pack - and links to past exam papers.

Mia explains: “Now we've had advanced information from the exam boards on what’s to be covered, it’s been really easy to update the pack and let students know topics that are going to be a main focus.”

Oak quizzes are a great way to identify gaps in knowledge

For each of the topics, Mia has linked to Oak’s quizzes. Before students start revising each topic, Mia directs them to take the quiz so they can identify their level of learning - and from there they decide whether they need to relearn the topic or just revise.

Mia says: “We find the unit quizzes really useful especially to pinpoint whether there’s a need to catch up on lost learning or to just revise. For example, if a pupil gets less than 20% on a unit quiz, you know that’s a unit they need to relearn.

“If a student does better on a unit quiz, then we tell them to watch the review lessons.

Using Oak has reduced workload

Thinking about how Oak helps with her workload, Mia says: “Oak’s helped us with our planning at a time when there's been so many other things that have taken priority.

“We've been showing the pack at the start of every lesson and just reminding students it exists. It's constantly available on SatchelOne as homework, so they've always got access.

“And we just hammer the availability of the resource home in every lesson - whenever they ask us a question I ask, have you been on the independent learning pack?”

Don’t spend hours creating revision plans from scratch

Take inspiration from Mia and check out our new revision pages, or search our teaching resources to get started.