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Parents of Hardworking Teens
Parents of Hardworking Teens
How to Check for Clarity on a Task
Ep. 135
→ Get the Free Parent Guide: 3 Huge Mistakes (Even Smart!) Students Make in Exams and Assignments - and how to fix them immediately so your teen confidently achieves their best ever grades.
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One of the biggest hurdles, unintentional time wasters, and causes of lost marks is: lack of clarity on a task, essay question or assignment.
In this episode I share specific ways I check on students' clarity on various aspects of a task, from the genre-specific features they need to be using and showcasing, to what the specific purpose is behind their work.
Listen in to hear the real life examples and how you can take them and action them with your teen.
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You’re listening to The Parents of Hardworking Teens Podcast, episode 135 - how to check on your teen’s clarity on what a task or question requires and what their response will focus on and how to increase this clarity if things are a bit cloudy or murky rather than crystal clear. And by the way - don’t worry - things are almost always a bit cloudy and murky to start with. The key is deciphering where that uncertainty is and then working on clearing it up.
Hey VIP’s. I hope you and your teens are doing great.
I am great and I’m really excited to record this episode today and share with you something that’s pretty specific and in some ways, kinda high level, but also I’d consider essential. It makes a huge difference to your teen’s confidence and results, but I guess it feels kinda high level because I don’t think a lot of students or teachers spend a lot of time or put a lot of focus on it, so it almost feels more advanced. And it actually flows on pretty nicely from the last episode where I talked about confidence and how your teen can get more of it in their study, exams and assessment.
Today, I want to share another angle or aspect of this - today we’re going to talk about clarity.
Similar but different.
Clarity on what a question is asking or task requires, and clarity around the response and how to keep it focused and high quality.
Now this topic of clarity comes from what I often do or work on with students in coaching sessions, but I’ll share a specific example of where the issue of clarity has popped up recently and what I’ve been doing to help highlight areas where there is a lack of clarity - where there is some fuzziness, some uncertainty. Uncertainty is a word I works well here - sums things up nicely. - and how to increase that clarity, increase certainty, in very tangible, specific ways.
I want to share this with you by sharing an example of some work I was doing with a Y12 student just this week. It was on an English Literature creative writing assessment - it was called imaginative writing - and it was an assessment they’d completed, they’d had their mark back on it and although it was pretty good, they wanted to know what they could’ve done to make it even better.
Now, the interesting thing here, that kind of inspired me to make this episode, was that I mostly picked out where they lost marks, without actually reading their response. I did go and read it eventually, but what I did first was dive into the marking criteria. Which is what I encourage your teen to do before they start any sort of larger task or assignment. Figure out what they’re actually going to be judged on. What will the marker be looking for? How will they get credit? What is the actual point of the task - what is it there to have the students prove or demonstrate?
I did a podcast episode on exactly this: all about knowing what the actual point of any assessment really is.
It’s literally called - what’s the point - (no really, what is it)?
And I’ll put a link to it in the show notes,
In this case, the point was to have them demonstrate their ability to use a wide range of literary techniques and skills, have them pick ones that are most relevant to their specific genre, and be able to relate the idea for their writing to the themes that had been studied.
So, before I even looked at their response, we looked at the criteria and I asked a couple of strategic questions around the choices they’d made.
Now, they had free choice over what genre they could write in, and they’d chosen to do a monologue. They were very clear on that. But what it turned out they weren’t totally clear on was exactly what the features are of a monologue.
Why was that an issue? Because writing according to a chosen genre was one of the aspects being assessed on the criteria.
So, given that, I wanted to know things like:
> What made you choose that genre?
> What are the key features or characteristics of that genre?
In other words - do they know what the marker is going to be looking for? What do they need to demonstrate? Now, their reason for the genre was solid. Because it was a good match for being able to convey the emotion and message and personal aspects of that.
All good - totally agreed, happy with that.
But - the features and characteristics… not so clear.
I wanted them to ideally give me a list of let’s say 5 or 6 elements that are specific to monologues. Elements that would allow the student to show the marker that they are really strong at writing in that form and style. But, this was a bit hazy. They couldn’t give me that list - so straight away, my suspicion was that they’d lost marks here. Specifically on the criteria that said ‘discerning use of the patterns and conventions of an imaginative text’ - because in marker speak, that means: are they employing the specific features of the genre? The structural features and aesthetic features and stylistic devices of the imaginative genre they’ve selected?
Because, hey, if we’re not clear on exactly what we need to do and include - then it’s very unlikely that we’re just going to do it by chance and luck. So, that was a red flag for me and immediately, it made the student realise, that yeah, I probably didn’t do a great job of that. They could see that was something that let them down. I always say this is good news. Not good that they lost marks, but good that they now know why. They can now do things differently in a very intentional and controlled way next time. Not just guessing or hoping.
Okay, the second major thing that I picked up on before even looking at their response, and just by let’s say ‘testing their clarity’ based on the task sheet and marking criteria was around the message they were aiming to convey.
In other words - what point was the piece trying to make? What is the take-away supposed to be for the reader (aka marker)? Because once you get past Year 7 or 8, it’s not enough to just have a nice story or an interesting piece of writing. There needs to be a message and that message needs to be based on a theme. Usually the theme that’s been studied. A theme that the assessment is testing to see if your teen can apply to their own work in an original way. Sometimes this might be called the central idea or key idea.
There’s loads I could talk about here in relation to themes, messages and central idea of a text, but for now, let’s just say that it’s important to have one. And not just to have one, but to be ridiculously clear on what it is, and how it’s going to be conveyed.
Now in fairness to the student, this was a piece that they’d completed last term, so the task overall was a little hazy in their memory, but nevertheless, when I asked:
‘Okay so what was the message you were conveying, what was the point of the text, what was your central idea?’ even allowing for the time that had passed, their response was not clear enough for my liking.
Here’s what I want when I ask that question: I want them to be able to answer me in one simple sentence in words that a ten year old could understand.
If they have clarity, then they should be able to do that. If it’s convoluted or complex, then it’s not clear enough. A bit like the idea that you know you truly understand a topic when you can teach it to someone else in a way that they’ll understand.
Not that there can’t be nuances or different aspects to it, but those should be able to be distilled to one key message. Whether it’s clarity about a text that they’re studying, or one that they’re writing, your teen should be able to tell you in words you easily understand, even if you’re not a literature person at all, which I should add - I’m not either. I’m not an English subject specialist - they should be able to tell you in a simple sentence - what’s the central idea or message or point of the text.
For example, there are many themes and aspects to the novel The Great Gatsby, but the overarching message is that materialism and going after social status, striving for the american dream - can lead to corruption and moral decay. Or in other words - even more simply, going after the dream of money and status is actually not going to create happiness. I only know that because I worked with another student recently on this. I haven’t even read the book. But I can understand that key message.
Now of course, they don’t have to write it in those basic words in their actual assessment, but they need to be that clear on it in their own mind - either to analyse the text effectively if they’re writing an essay on it, or if they are clearly and effectively going to convey it, in their own creative writing.
If your teen can’t succinctly and clearly state this message, then again, it’s unlikely that they’ve done a great job of clearly conveying it to the reader in a sophisticated and high quality way.
The probability of that happening by accident or by luck is extremely low.
This isn’t something that needs to happen as they write. This clarity or lack of it needs to be established before they start writing anything. If they’re not clear from the outset, before they start, at the initial planning and decision making stage, and then ongoing as they develop their ideas, as they plan what their content and features will be, and as they write and edit the finished product, then it’s never going to result in a top scoring piece.
It’s not going to have for example - and I quote from the task I’ve just shared the coaching from: discerning manipulation of values and attitudes to invite audiences to take up positions - i.e. make the audience think a certain way or consider a certain viewpoint or issue from a certain perspective.
Because unless you’re clear on what that precise position is, how are you going to guide your reader to see it or land at it?
Any element of uncertainty or lack of clarity leads to answers or writing that are superficial rather than specific and deep. That are a bit waffle-y or disjointed. Or even that are contradictory - that aren’t in marker words - consistent or sustained.
Now, honestly I would say I spent about 80% of the time and discussion with the student on this, questioning them around the mark scheme and criteria and wording of the task, and only about 20% actually reading through and then picking out where they’d done well and why - and where they could’ve improved and why.
We could discern a big chunk of things just from that. Which I hope serves here to emphasise just how important this is and why it’s important to clarify at the very beginning. And I hope you can also see that this can be done with any type of extended task. A Science inquiry, a humanities research task, an analytical essay, - any genre or format with any key idea.
This idea of testing clarity. Clarity on what’s actually being assessed and how it’s being marked or judged, clarity on what they need to do and how they need to do it. Clarity on what the actual output needs to demonstrate and how will they make that happen. Because so much of the final mark and degree of success of an assessment is determined at the planning and initial stages. And these initial stages should be constantly referring to and using the mark scheme or success criteria. Because it doesn’t matter how good the writing is if the message and direction and focus isn’t clear.
Your teen isn’t going to get a great mark for — vocabulary, - if the vocab is complex or high quality but the CHOICES aren’t effective. In other words, those word choices don’t create the emotion or message or point that they need to.
They need clarity to make that happen. And asking some strategic questions to help highlight any lack of clarity and uncertainty - either from you or from me - or for your teen to ask of themselves, though honestly - this is less effective - it’s just too easy for us to think we know, or genuinely feel like we know. One of the tricks our brains like to play on us.
So having an outside party, and ideally I’ll say it - an expert who knows what to ask in what way to really get to the nitty gritty of things, that’s ideal.
If you’d like that for your teen, and you don’t want it to be you who has to become the expert, or you don’t have a teacher or tutor who’s got years and years of training and experience and expertise in all this, then drop an email to support@rocksolidstudy.com and I’ll send you details of the coaching and training combo where I can work with your teen personally, on this and much more.
It’s a new set up that I’ve been running so it’s not on the website. But it’s going so well, that I’m going to keep it going. And maybe it’ll make it onto the website soon - we’ll see. I haven’t actually needed to put anything official up, it’s kinda just spreading and filling up from me mentioning it here and in my emails.
So, clarity. And questioning that clarity. That’s my share for today.
Have a brilliant rest of your day and I’ll meet you back here next time!