Chris Gunner, Tassomai’s Sales Manager and former Second in Department at The Portsmouth Academy, discusses how to use Tassomai to help your students with their mocks.

Email Chris: chris@tassomai.com

Autumn, half-term 2.  The days are shorter, the temperature’s dropping, the Christmas holidays are still too far away - and yet the kids are already getting excited about it.  Sound familiar? If so, you might also recall a word that begins to be uttered, in hushed, fearful tones, around this time of year...

Mocks.

In our culture of data-tracking and cyclical assessment, there’s no escaping mock examinations as a means of ensuring your students are on track to meet their targets.  Love them or hate them, it’s clear that regular mock assessments are here to stay. Fortunately, Tassomai is an excellent tool for ensuring that you can get the most out of your mock exams, for both your students and your department.

The first step is to determine what your students need to prioritise in their revision.  From my own experience as a teacher, I found that some of my kids would tell me that they didn’t know what to revise - so they didn’t do any revision! To reduce this stress-inducing scenario from happening, simply use the Understanding Grid on the Teacher Dashboard to help you pinpoint exactly what each of your learners should be focusing on in the runup to their mocks. Find the grid by clicking on the Understanding Tab along the top of your dashboard.

The Understanding Grid provides teachers with a Personalised Learning Checklist, or PLC, that is generated by the data of your students’ work on Tassomai.  Constantly updating every time a student completes a quiz, this PLC gives you a visual insight into the strengths and weaknesses of your classes. It’s incredibly intuitive; clicking on each of the subject names will break these down into their relevant topics, allowing you to be specific and objective when setting revision tasks.  

Not only does the Understanding Grid show you the class average for each topic, but it breaks this down for each of your respective students, allowing for easy, individualised revision without the need to trawl through exercise books and past assessments.  What’s more, you can identify your top pupil in each area, and make them your student helpers in your revision lessons. In fact, using the Understanding Grid’s data, you could even create bespoke seating plans that partner up those students in need of a boost with a class expert. For more information on the power of the Understanding Grid, click here.

So, now you know what areas your classes need to prioritise...how can you ensure they’re working solely on these topics? Behold the power of the Lesson Plan tab!

In the countdown to the mocks, you’re going to want to ensure that the work your learners do helps them to prepare for that paper - or papers!  The Lesson Plan tab allows you to customise the content your students will see when they login into Tassomai. Uncheck the topics not covered on the mocks, then hit ‘Apply changes’.  Your students’ quizzes will immediately focus solely on the areas you’ve chosen. There’s just two things to be mindful of here: firstly, you’ll need to go back and update the Lesson Plan post-mocks to ensure your students continue to see new content.  Secondly, warn your students in advance of the changes, so they can expect it and prepare. Hopefully.  The Lesson Plan tab allows you to customise each of the classes that you are using Tassomai with, but it cannot be done on a student-by-student basis. To get individual students focusing on specific subjects, guide them to the Subjects tab on their dashboards and instruct them to take quizzes on areas they’re struggling with - although our intelligent algorithm does this for your students too!

So, that’s how Tassomai can help you and your students prepare for the mocks.  With a little bit of time invested in exploring the data on your teacher dashboard, you can ensure that your students have clear, personalised revision topics, and a streamlined Lesson Plan tab ensures their usage on Tassomai is tailored directly to the content on the mock.  The only thing we can’t do is mark the mock for you.  Sorry about that. As someone who understands the stress that mock season can bring, I wish you the best of luck, and hope that this blog helps you achieve your best ever set of mock results!