How to Instil the Importance of Exams Upon Your Students

How do you instil the importance of exams upon your students without putting the fear of God into them?

This conundrum is one of the biggest challenges facing teachers today in the classroom.

It’s a real problem because of 3 factors: the nature of teenage life, human nature in general, and the nature of schools.

The Nature of Teenage Life

Young people, it’s worth remembering, go through a lot of change and upheaval during their teenage years. Their bodies are developing; their emotions and minds are developing; and they are beginning to find themselves and their identity.

There’s a lot going on, a lot to handle, and an awful lot to deal with during your teenage years.

Not least the pressure of exams.

Human Nature

The psychology behind our actions and behaviour is extremely complex. However, when it comes down to it – in certain aspects – human nature is really straightforward.

When we are faced with pressure, some people seem to thrive on it – even seeing it as some kind of incentive. In essence, we rise to the challenge.

On the flipside, many of us seem to do the opposite when faced with pressure. We find it really difficult to cope with. In essence, we buckle under the challenge.

That can manifest itself in several different ways. We might try to deny the importance of something or put off dealing with the issue head-on – kind of hoping that whatever it is that is causing us the pressure or stress will somehow magically go away.

Which, of course, it never does.

Part of our ability to deal with challenges in our lives comes from experience.

This makes dealing with pressure especially challenging for teenagers. For more help understanding what’s going on inside the teenage brain, check out this BBC article.

The Nature of Schools

Schools exist under the lingering and looming threat of Ofsted. Not only that, schools are at also the mercy of government decisions and education budgets. All of this piles pressure onto schools.

Under constant pressure to continually improve exam results, the pressure school leadership teams feel feeds down to curriculum team and subject leaders. This, in turn, is passed onto classroom teachers.

And – you’ve guessed it – teachers then pass this pressure down to their students.

Teachers are feeling it, so the students they teach feel it too.

It is a vicious cycle that needs to be broken.

So, What’s the Solution?

In all honesty, there are probably at least another couple of blogs waiting to get out (possibly even a book!) on this topic. We’ve actually posted another blog ourselves on the matter. But to keep things short and sweet here, let’s leave it with this:

Just because exams are important doesn’t mean that we have to talk about them all the time.

We don’t have to mention exams in every lesson or every assembly.

Learning, exam preparation, and performance in exams all have a process. Refine those processes and have faith in them.

Think how an athlete responds after a disappointing result or performance. They don’t panic or make any knee-jerk reactions; they trust in the process that got them there in the first place.

Trust in the process is the key.