You're listening to the Parents of Hardworking Teens podcast, episode 151, the joy of finally figuring out where a response went wrong, how we ended up on the wrong track, and exactly why marks were lost or criteria weren't being hit.
I'm going to share a coaching moment from literally yesterday evening for me that reminded me why awareness really is the first step to improvement and just how much relief and happiness that can bring to students. It was a classic example of "you haven't answered the question," and I will definitely share that part with you. But the most impactful part for me was how the student reacted at the end of our dissection of their response and the dissection of the original task and question, so I really want you to listen out for that. Let's dive in.
Hey VIPs—very important parents, carers and grandparents. It is great to have you here. I hope you're doing really well. I hope your teens are doing great as we are really getting into term two.
I want to share with you today something that's really stuck with me. It was literally from a coaching session, a group coaching call that I ran yesterday evening for me. We've got a lot of the new students that joined for the start of term two in "next level coaching," which is wonderful. And I had one new student—I'm going to call him Jack—who was on the call and had submitted a business task, a business assignment he'd already completed. And I'm going to share with you what that task was about, what we uncovered, and in particular the takeaway that I have taken with me from it that I think is helpful to put out as a reminder to everyone of just how much relief and joy and happiness can come from just that very first moment of realizing that if your teen is not getting the results that they want or are capable of—they're not coming out with the grades in an assignment or in an exam that match their subject knowledge and the level of effort and time and commitment that they have put in—them realizing why that is happening, that it is not because they're just no good at study or they're just no good at that subject or they're just not working hard enough, them realizing that for maybe not for the first time... having it pointed out to them by an expert and having it demonstrated to them in front of their eyes, that is a very powerful moment and that's exactly what happened on this coaching call.
Now when I say powerful moment, it wasn't some big grandiose situation or action that happened. It was really just very small, but it made a big impact on me, so I want to share it with you. Now I'll just give you a little outline of what the assignment was just so you can kind of get some context in mind for this. It was a year 12 business assignment; there were two parts of it. And the first part was having the students collect their own choice of five articles—it was called a "media file," like a little compilation of five media articles from a range of sources—and they were supposed to be focused on (and this was the words from the task sheet, I'm reading from it now) "contemporary issues facing businesses". That was the first part. It was only worth a small number of marks in comparison to the larger task, which was to use those articles and use those sources and use that information to write an essay. And that was to respond to this question: "Explain how internal and external influences may impact on business opportunities".
Now we spent a little bit of time talking about why, even though that essay question starts with the word "explain," that is not an "explain" level question. So when I talk about command words and the different levels of cognition and the levels of Bloom's Taxonomy, which many of you I know will have heard me talk about before (and if you'd like a little more on that, then I would go to episode four of this podcast, "Essays That Actually Answer the Question"). Because that isn't something I'm going to dive into a lot on this episode because Jack then told me that that wasn't his main reason; the essay wasn't his main reason for actually submitting onto the coaching call. He submitted (and this was his completed piece, he'd already finished and done the whole assignment) he'd done the media file of five articles, he'd also done the essay, but the thing he was most sort of troubled about and confused about and wanted some feedback on was this media file, the "part A," the smaller part. Although it wasn't small, because they had to find five articles and then they essentially had to analyze each of them. So this was actually a really big task; it just wasn't worth as many marks. I think it was worth—let me find it—yeah, okay, so it was only worth five marks, whereas the essay was worth 20 marks.
So you can understand why, number one, it would feel very disappointing to have put in such a lot of work. So this was the work of finding the five articles and then writing—it was like an extended paragraph about each one, maybe 200 to 300 words about each one—and only having it worth five marks, and Jack told me that he'd come out with essentially a "C" grade for that part, which was the three out of five. And I can see why you have done that amount of work and are disappointed to be getting essentially less than five marks because Jack clearly also is a student who is very smart, he knows his subject content, he really enjoys the subject of business studies, you could tell that. And he obviously really enjoyed, I think, going and finding these five articles of looking at contemporary issues facing business.
And so I scrolled down to this part of his response and the information he collected and the paragraphs that he'd written, the analytical paragraphs about what those five articles were showing. But what I started to see was—and this could not have been a more definitive example of not answering the question—his five articles were all contemporary issues facing businesses. But—and this is where I will get more into this, I'm sure, in a moment—this is where I'm so keen to train students in the strategy behind a lot of these assessments. He had treated it as "I do part A and then I'll look at part B". But because part B was the essay, and the wording was "explain how internal and external influences may impact business opportunities," he had just found five articles about contemporary issues facing businesses. So they were super interesting, but they weren't great examples of being able to dissect and discuss internal and external influences, or being able to really coherently and cohesively link that to business opportunities.
And this was the issue. And as I read through his paragraphs (and we particularly focused on one, I asked him which one would you most like me to look at, and he told me which one because I think he thought that was one of his best ones, so he was like, "I'm really confused why I wasn't hitting higher criteria") it was an example of essentially summarizing the article. So what we had done is fallen into (and I have the criteria right here in front of me) he'd fallen into the criterion that says "provides a summary of each article that demonstrates some understanding of contemporary business issues". That could not have been a more direct descriptor of what Jack was doing. For four marks and five marks, the criteria were "analyzing each article" and then "critically analyzes each article".
And I had to tell him very kindly, but bluntly, this is not analyzing, this is recounting, this is summarizing. And we have not focused on internal influences—highlighting what they are, naming them, identifying them, discussing them with regards to that business or the issue—same with the external influences; have we identified them, named them, what is going on with regards to the business issue, and what is the opportunity? What opportunities have maybe been cut off, and which ones have maybe been created in that process?
The other descriptor that I thought was really interesting to mention here is that within that same part A media file collection of five media articles that have been analyzed, not summarized, it also says "constructs a media file of business articles" and it says that's the "C" grade from varied sources, which he absolutely had done. But for a "B," the four-mark descriptor, it says "constructs a media file of relevant business articles". Now, is that relevant if we haven't picked business issues or news articles that don't allow us to discuss the internal and external influences and the business opportunities associated? I would argue not. Same with the grade "A," the five-mark descriptor: "constructs a media file of well-considered business articles". Are they well-considered if they do not clearly represent internal and external influences and the impact on the opportunities for that business?
As soon as I shared this with Jack, I could see him jotting down notes. We went through this in a little bit more detail. And another great moment actually was when he pushed back a little bit on something I said, which is fantastic—I always want students to question me or question the things that I'm saying because maybe I'm not picking up something that they have gotten down on their paper and that's really good and really useful, or maybe it shows something that is still missing, something that hasn't clicked, maybe a misconception, maybe a gap that we need to fill. So either way, it's a great thing.
And he said about one of the elements in his writing that I was commenting saying we haven't really shown how that ties to a business opportunity, he kind of went, "Oh, but it is linked to a business opportunity because..." and then he went on to explain how it ties to the business opportunity. And I was like smiling and giving them the thumbs up while he was giving me this explanation because I was like, "You're absolutely right; everything you've just said is absolutely correct, and I think you've explained it really clearly and connected it really clearly, but you haven't written it". So this information was in his head; it just wasn't down on the paper.
And I even explained—this is what is called for markers "reading meaning into an answer". So I was like, "This is a perfect example: I can understand that because this, this, and this is happening, that would mean X, Y, and Z for the opportunity or lack of opportunity, but we have to explicitly and directly write that down for the marker to credit it. We are not allowed as markers to make that connection for the student, so even though it feels obvious (I often say this is stating the obvious), we still have to write it". So everything he just said was absolutely spot on, but it was not written in his response or in that paragraph. And again, he smiled at that point and went, "Yeah, I can see. No, it's not written, but yeah, I can see why it's in my head but needs to be on the paper".
So we had a really effective bit of coaching happening. But I did feel kind of bad; it wasn't a great feeling of essentially highlighting all the ways that this student had missed out on marks and yet had very detailed, accurate, factual information. They definitely got a media file from a range of sources discussing contemporary issues facing business, which is what the wording of that part of the task was asking them. But what they hadn't done is reverse engineered back from the main part of the task, which was the essay, the 20 marks part, in order to make those fit in the most (and I'll use those words from the criteria again) in the most well-considered, appropriate way.
And so as we started to wrap that part up on the coaching call and that work with Jack up, I asked, "How are you feeling?" I sometimes ask that as a quite open question to students just so I can kind of see where they're at—has this landed, are they feeling overwhelmed, are they feeling confident, like where are things at? Because in my head I was personally getting ready to make him feel a little bit better and give him the positive, the good news of "it's okay, we're going to... I'm going to give you the training, you're going to be able to figure all this out for yourself, this is totally fixable". I felt like he's going to be feeling terrible and I'm going to need to try to finish this on a high so that he doesn't go away just feeling awful and annoyed and frustrated—those were all the things I thought he was going to be feeling. I expected him to say, "Oh, I'm just really annoyed, I'm really disappointed, oh, that's really frustrating," and essentially just feeling kind of fed up that all of these things were coming out now.
But—and this is the part that I felt was most impactful, at least for me—was his response. He just paused for a second and he's went, "I feel really good". And I was like, "Oh, okay, great, tell me why". And he just said, "Well, now I understand why". Like all this time I was just feeling confused about why am I losing the marks, what am I supposed to be doing differently, I put in loads of time, I put in loads of effort, I kind of did what it said in the actual wording of the task (which is very true, absolutely; it just didn't align with the criteria and the next part of the task that was leading into, which is why we need to get so good at this stuff).
This is why I want the students to have the skills and the techniques and the strategy and the understanding of how all of this works and have the skills to execute on it. But for me, it made me realize just how much value there is in simply knowing where it went wrong, why it didn't hit the demands of the question and the requirements of the criteria. And just seeing this kind of vision of relief in Jack, in this student, was a good reminder that awareness really is that first step. That there is a huge amount of comfort in knowing and understanding that it's not that you wrote the wrong information; it's just maybe that it wasn't the right or the best or the most appropriate information for this task in the first place.
This is why I often advise students: bring a new task to a coaching call early. We want to make sure that we're getting on the right track, the best track, we're finding the best information that's going to lead us on the path to success for either that particular task and hitting the associated criteria, or for even the next part that is coming after. But there's such a huge amount of positivity into knowing that things can change, knowing that we can eliminate any guesswork and getting away from just having to do our best. That whole idea that as long as we do our best, that's all we can ask, which is in my opinion a very big problem when doing our very best, putting in a huge amount of effort, learning so much content, finding so much research, still may not create the results that reflect the knowledge and effort and time and dedication and not knowing what else to do about that. (If you want more on that, I covered that in episode nine of this podcast, "Just Do Your Best and Other Things They Don't Want to Hear").
But it's not great for our mindset when our best, when the hard work and the diligence and the effort that we're putting in don't create the results that we want and that we are truly capable of. This is absolutely the case for students that have good subject knowledge, that know the content, they're learning everything they need to in class, they're understanding what they're being taught; it's just about getting across in an assignment, in an essay, in an exam—that's the part where application of that knowledge comes in.
So the next step is training Jack and the other students that have come to join me in "next level" and your teen if you would like them to have this kind of training and coaching in the techniques, the skills, the systems that will have them be able to dissect this stuff, strategize, reverse engineer, align their decisions and their responses to the marking criteria and to the precise wording of the task. That is what this podcast, my programs, my training is all about.
So if you would like your teen to have this training and coaching from me in these skills of application, then just drop me an email: support@rocksolidstudy.com or you can reply to any of the emails if you're on my email list, and just type in "next level" either into the reply or into the subject line and I will send you information about how all of that works. And I hope that me sharing this experience, this moment, this little excerpt of coaching has been helpful. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week, and I will see you back here again soon.
Take care. Bye!
