Student: Female, 16, GCSE

Louise has just had a fabulous lesson with me.

Something has just clicked with her and I watched, beaming, as she began answering exam questions PERFECTLY.  And I mean even the 'workings' she used to check her answers midway through a question were well-placed in the answer space.

It was even a calculator paper and she didn't even reach for one throughout.

Over the past year and a half I've been working with Louise who, at the beginning of our very first meeting, declared herself "terrible at Maths".  Over time our short time together, this has proved to be quite different from the truth.  A slow grow of confidence and an unpicking of the knotty topics with which she was struggling and we found ourselves stumbling around with Exam Craft.

How to answer exam questions, the process of answering.  Making life easier for the examiner marking your question paper.  And picking up all the points for each question.

In this particular lesson we were concentrating on Ratios.  We had a handful of exam questions on Ratios and we read through them all in order to create our 'Leave Me / Watch Me / Show Me' table - where we put questions in columns according to how confident the tutee feels about them.  For example, questions in the 'Leave Me' column means the tutee is confident enough to do the question herself without intervention from me.  Questions in the 'Show Me' column mean she has no confidence and wouldn't even know how to begin answering them.

Leave Me / Watch Me / Show Me table

As she tackled each question I watched her use my "PDR?" technique.  This is where we [P] Plan / Prepare, [D] Do the Maths and workings, [R] Review our answers and [?] ask ourselves whether we should move on to the next question yet.

Louise 'Prepared' by highlighting the words and numbers she wanted to focus on - unpicking the meaning of the question itself.  She then 'Did' the maths - worked out, using a new line for each new change that she made - giving short labels to each of the important numbers she found.

I was watching her arrive at the right answer but INSTEAD of just putting her pencil down with relief that the answer was over she continued by revisiting the wording of question and then retracing the steps of her answer.  'Reviewing'.  She had asked herself "Does this answer feel right?".

It was then that she concluded she didn't need to add to the answer any further and decided to 'Move On'.

It was like watching the perfect answering technique in action. And if I was the Examiner marking her answer here then I would have been in no doubt as to what Louise had done in order to work through the problem - making the Examiner's job as easy as possible and giving them no choice but to award full marks.

Student: Male, A Level

Tony is a hard worker.  Good at maths.  In fact, after the first couple of sessions I wasn't sure what value my presence was offering - usually it's a straight forward case of tackling a topic at a time but Tony knew what he should be doing.  I was barely keeping up with him.

Having said all that, he wasn't always getting things right.  The consistency wasn't there.  Silly mistakes were being made and time was taken up in working backwards through his answers in trying to detect where these mistakes were occurring.

He was very confident in his ability and quite stubborn in his lack of acceptance that his technique was causing him problems.  I noticed that he was doing too much of the working out in his head without writing it down - he didn't want to waste his time writing this stuff when he knew he was right and it didn't seem worthy of committing it to paper.

The Eureka moment for him came when I asked him to pretend that I was a year 10 student and he needed to teach me how to answer a question.  I observed him stumbling over some of the basics as he hadn't had to articulate certain steps before - he just 'did them' in his head.  Having to explain to a year 10 student what he was doing forced him to really think about every bit of information he was processing.

This helped me to convince him to use a new line for every change he made to an equation, or make a note of the narrative that was going through his mind - he resented the way it slowed him down but when he began to realise that he was making fewer 'silly mistakes' [like missing off minus signs or basic multiplication errors] and that his answers were becoming more reliable, and his answering was more disciplined, he started enjoying himself.

I was then able to open him up to the concept of Exam Craft.  His hard work and newly-discovered discipline helped him achieve the A* he wanted.