"Getting in the Examiner's Head"

My GCSE German class are working really hard, sometimes in the face of adversity.  We have one academic year in which to cover the specification, and some of the students haven't studied German before this year.  They are working really well towards their goals (each different, and some surpassing even their wildest dreams at the moment!).  I am really proud of them for their hard work and commitment to their learning; however, the nature of our course makes it a little tricky sometimes.  We try hard to do some special 'exam paper focus' in between units and modules, and we've just reached the end of a mini unit, so have spent some time this week looking at exam stategy.


In one lesson, I gave the children the questions for the reading exam paper and the German texts and asked them to match it all together - to recreate the exam paper.  Once they had decided which questions and texts belonged together, they had to consider the level of dificulty (and the cognitive challenge involved) of each question and try to reconstruct the exam paper in order from question 1 through to the end.  They worked together really well.

Once they had completed their reconstruction, they had to respond to the questions; however, their groups were complete mixed ability, with one B+ student, 2 C/D border students, and one level 1 student per group - to complete the paper in their groups, the B+ student was not allowed to 'answer' any questions, but could only offer advice, through the use of questions.  The others worked together to decipher the texts and annotated with how they had arrived at the answers.


We talked about what we had learned through the activity - one student stressed that he is always surprised that there are no "translate" questions(!), another commented that he had read more of the exam paper doing this activity than he does normally when doing exam questions, others talked about how they understood the examiner a little more because they had apparently 'done their job'.  My favourite was the child who told me that he had "got inside the examiner's head" and understood a little more about what made the examiner choose the questions that were written on the paper and was more conscious about the actual questions and what was being asked of him as the candidate.

I have never done this before, but will certainly be doing it again - it worked really well.  It is on days like this that I appreciate having 2 hour lessons.  I'm really pleased that I tried this activity :-)