Insights Teachers Should Share with Pupils (Part 1)

Top tips and ideas that will help your students become 'Brilliant at School'.

This week's newsletter is basically the first 5 tips from a guide I've written called '11 Ways to Be Brilliant at School'. It’s directed at students, so excuse the direct tone! But also feel free to copy, paste, give directly to your students, or - of course - completely discard! :)

There’s 11 tips in total (I’ll put the next 6 in another newsletter soon).

**UPDATE** Go here if you would like to download the whole document.**

Cheers,

Jon

11 WAYS TO BE BRILLIANT AT SCHOOL

By Jon Sellick

Being Brilliant…

Attending school regularly, keeping on top of your work and making sure you are always within range of your target grade is not easy.

So, nobody should underestimate how challenging it is to go beyond ‘satisfactory’ to achieve brilliance.

Being brilliant is hard.

However, the good news is that you are already well on your way.

Simply by reading this, you are displaying an intention to be brilliant. Intentions are deep, powerful and an indication of your inner strength.

How many of your classmates are simply happy to get through their school day without getting into trouble? How many would settle for the bare minimum? How many, let’s be honest, act like they couldn’t care less?

But not you!

You care, you want more than the bare minimum, and your goals go way beyond staying out of trouble.

You want to be brilliant.

Good on you!

What is Brilliance?

“Brilliance is in the eye of the beholder”

What does it mean to you?

• It might mean a H1, a grade 9, or an A* in every subject.

• It might be doing your best - and for most of us that will mean our best grades are reserved for the subjects we care about most.

• It might not actually be aligned with grades - it might be connected to your feelings rather than your certificates: It might mean thriving, enjoying a challenge, growing as a person, gaining a feeling of pride, feeling fit and healthy in body and mind, or simply knowing that you have made the most of all the opportunities that school furnishes you with beyond the desks in the exam hall.

“Being brilliant at school is about exams, lessons, and life beyond the classroom.”

This Guide and How It Will Help You:

This guide will help you in two ways.

Firstly, it will teach you proven ways to enhance your learning. It will demonstrate how research, revision and routine can have an extraordinary impact on your learning. It will provide this information in the form of top tips and advice, broadly organised into 11 sections.

Secondly, it will show you that life choices are just as important than revision strategies and learning tools. It will demonstrate the beauty of how adopting new habits results in increased satisfaction, strength of mind and positivity.

Everybody can be brilliant at school. We know that doesn’t mean the same thing for everybody. But whether you want straight A grades, or to flourish in your well-being and satisfaction, it is important to realise that brilliance - whilst not easy - is undoubtedly achievable.

Eleven Ways: Two Categories

This guide will show you how to establish a routine that brings you satisfaction, peace, and fantastic exam results.

It will change your attitude towards things you already do - like sleeping, eating, and walking to school. In doing so, it will help you see the link between those actions and how successful you are.

It will bring you the tools and wisdom, used by other brilliant students and witnessed by observant teachers, in order for you to excel in the classroom.

Each of the eleven ways is labelled as belonging to one of two categories: either Study Skill or Life Habit. They are equally important and complement one another. I sincerely hope that you will come to view the life habits as vital components of your studying.

11 WAYS TO BE BRILLIANT AT SCHOOL

Sleep Well Life Habit

Ask Questions Study Skill

Establish A Routine Life Habit

Space Repetition Study Skill

Exercise Life Habit

Take Notes (Or Don’t) Study Skill

Visualise Life Habit

Recognise Topic Sentences Study Skill

Learn Something New Life Habit

Draw Study Skill

Focus on Today Life Habit

1. SLEEP WELL (Life Habit)

Have a great night’s sleep - every night!

Really good sleep is the foundation to all your future success.

Sleep is everything.

Your sleep routine is the most important routine of all.

Which, on the face of it, may come as very good news to teenagers like you, who are well-known for and wrongly criticised for your sleeping. The chances are you love nothing more than a good lie in, and hate nothing more than the sound of an alarm or, even worse, continued requests from mithering parents to “get up!”

Your love of sleep and your difficulty getting out of bed in the morning does not mean you are lazy. It does not mean you are somehow deficient or not as good as others. It means you are a teenager, and there are sound scientific reasons why sleep may be something of an issue for you and your household.

So, before we go any further, let go of any idea you might have that you are inferior because you need to sleep so much. And embrace the idea that sleep - rather than being a hindrance to brilliance - is an acutely important component of your success.

So, does that mean the next time your parents shout at you to “get out of bed” you can simply retort by quoting this guide and snuggling back in for twenty more minutes? Not exactly.

World class performers will tell you that they dedicate every waking hour to their craft. Every waking hour is an idiom that is often used as shorthand for a level of dedication that consumes individuals; the type of dedication that becomes obsession. Many thinkers believe that a certain level of obsession is required to become seriously good at anything. You can’t take a passing interest in ballet and expect to suddenly find yourself top of the bill at The Metropolitan Opera House.

But the term is deeply flawed. Because if what we do with our every waking hour is somehow a marker of our success, it stands to reason that the more hours we are awake, the more successful we can be.

Not so.

The truth is that the time before we wake holds the key to our successes.

It is sleep that matters most. It is sleep that underpins our ability to do everything we do when we are awake well. It is sleep that underpins our ability to carry out all the other suggestions in this book. It is sleep that is our most under-valued tool of all.

Sleep is everything!

The quantity of your sleep and the quality of your sleep are incredibly important to you.

I cannot overstate how important sleep is. And you can tell I’m giving it a good go!

That’s why sleep is the topic of the first chapter in this guide.

And if you really do want to be better at school, then you will start paying attention to your sleep now.

If you improve the quality, quantity and regularity of your sleep, you will notice the difference within days.

It is true that some students' desperation to achieve brilliant results often leads to them attempting the opposite of sleep - the ‘all-nighter’ - in which they stay awake on purpose t cram in as much last-minute revision as possible.

This is the antithesis of everything this guide sets out to promote. So, understand that you should never pull an ‘all-nighter’. Ever.

Instead, you should put in place now the building blocks of sleep that will ensure you never have to contemplate such a self-destructive act!

The superpower of our dreams (pardon the pun) lies (see what I did there?) in our sleep.

And we need to consider two things: the regularity of our sleep and the quality of our sleep.

Regularity

Let’s cut to the chase here: you need 9 hours of sleep every night.

For the purpose of giving you clear advice, let’s assume that you have to leave your house at 8am to get to school on time. You can adapt the times accordingly to fit your own departure time.

Setting your alarm for 7am will give you a whole hour before you need to leave the house.

Most of you will live close enough to your school to mean that setting your alarm for 7am will give you ample time to get to school on time.

So, that means a 10pm bedtime to enable you to get 9 hours.

That’s pretty clear advice in my book: the first finite thing you can do to become brilliant at school is to go to bed at 10pm every night and get up at 7am every morning.

That is it right there.

That is the secret.

If this guide had to be boiled down to one single piece of advice, then that would be it right there:

“Go to bed at 10pm every night and wake up at 7am.”

Bingo.

And, ok, perhaps a little adaption will be required depending on some of your own personal variables: some of you - perhaps after reading the exercise section in this guide - will want to build in some extra time for a workout in the mornings; some of you will have longer commutes to school; some of you will have other classes or clubs you attend in the evening. So, you might have to shift the times slightly to suit.

But as for the 9 hours and the consistency: do everything you can to make those two elements of sleep permanent fixtures in your life.

Quality

It is important to remember that we are talking about 9 hours of actual sleep. You’ll only be fooling yourself if you think being in your bedroom for 9 hours or lying in your bed for 9 hours will give you the kind of superpowers that 9 hours of actual sleep will provide.

So, you should be looking to give yourself the best possible quality of sleep.

Here’s how…

Preparation for a good night’s sleep should begin as soon as you wake up. Take your sleep preparation seriously by dividing your day into three parts: the beginning, middle and end:

The Beginning:

Just one rule here, but it’s a deceptively important one: make your bed! Making your bed is an incredibly powerful action. Firstly, it marks the beginning of your day and helps you avoid the temptation of ‘five more minutes’; secondly, it gives you a powerful sense of accomplishment - your day is only seconds old and you have already achieved something! In turn, this encourages you to complete other small tasks (you will become addicted to that feeling of accomplishment and you will begin to realise that, in life, the small things matter!). Finally, it guarantees that when bedtime comes round again, your bed will be comfortable.

The Middle:

Ensure your day contains at least 45 minutes of physical exercise: this might be accounted for in a PE lesson; your commute to and from school might be on foot; you may have football or hockey training after school; or else ensure that you find the time for a long walk or a good run. Of course, a gym membership might be your preference - but they are expensive and when you account for the time spent packing, travelling, and changing, often don’t prove as efficient as a simple walk or run.

The End:

Create your own micro-routine before bed. This is the easiest place in your day to establish routine because so many of us already have habits in place for this time (like drinking a glass of water, visiting the bathroom and brushing our teeth). Consider the following bolt-ons to your existing routine: make sure your school bag is packed for the following day; lay out your clothes for the morning; read a good book; make a habit of saying goodnight to each member of your family (and your pets!); and, most importantly, ensure your alarm is set!

2. Ask Questions (Study Skill)

Ask your teachers questions - answering them is what they’re paid to do!

Asking questions does not mean you are stupid.

Not asking questions means you probably are being a little bit stupid (no offence).

Consider the following:

1. The whole point of teachers is to help you learn.

2. How can teachers help you learn effectively if they don’t know what you don’t know?

3. How much more would you know if you had asked more questions in the past?

Whilst you might think that a silent classroom is everything a teacher wants, the truth is that there are times when a silent classroom is soul-destroying. If they are doing their jobs well, then teachers should be creating a thriving learning environment: a classroom in which pupils are enjoying the challenge of learning new information; a classroom in which they are challenging themselves to make their understanding of topics deeper and permanent; a classroom (and this really would be nirvana) in which pupils are enjoying learning for the sake of learning!

The biggest single indicator that those things are happening is that pupils are asking questions. If pupils are asking questions, then things are going really well. If you have the fortune of already belonging to a class like that, then you will already appreciate how helpful it is.

The three big advantages of asking a question:

1. You get an answer! OK, perhaps this one is a little obvious. But it’s also often overlooked by students. Please, if you don’t know something, just ask!

2. By asking questions, you are communicating. The more questions you ask, the better communicator you will become.

3. To form a question in your mind, you have to engage in some thought about the topic you are being taught. This type of thought is incredibly useful. It helps you retain information for a longer time, and it helps you think critically about the topic you are learning about. Thought is incredibly important. A very clever man called Daniel T. Willingham once said, “Memory is the residue of thought.”

The Magic

There is another element of asking questions which happens to be a little bit magical.

When we ask ourselves questions, we prompt ourselves to answer questions too. In doing so, we force ourselves to retrieve information from our memory.

Ask yourself: what is alliteration? And you will prompt yourself to retrieve the following information: alliteration is the occurrence of the same letter at the beginning of closely connected words in a sentence.

Ask yourself: according to Pythagoras, what is a hypotenuse? And you will prompt yourself to retrieve the following information: a hypotenuse is the longest side of a right-angled triangle.

Asking questions of yourself like this, at spaced intervals (see chapter 4), starting from after immediately having been taught something, all the way up to the eve of an exam, is an incredibly powerful way of learning and revising.

In fact, it is scientifically proven to be far more effective than simply taking notes.

Taking notes is better than not taking notes of course.

But it’s not nearly as efficient as writing down questions.

The idea is that when you then revise, instead of reading your notes, you ask yourself the questions you have written down.

You don’t have to write your answers down. You just have to answer in your head. If you don’t know the answer, you immediately know what you need to look up. Then you look it up. You repeat the process until you can answer all the questions. There is more information on this in chapter 6.

Success

The most successful students in the world ask questions. The most successful professionals in the world ask questions. The most successful entrepreneurs in the world ask questions.

Asking questions does not show a lack of knowledge.

Asking questions shows a thirst for knowledge.

It’s as simple as this:

Ask questions.

3. Establish A Routine (Life Habit)

Make a positive routine a non-negotiable!

Routine is defined as a series of actions regularly followed.

There isn’t a single piece of advice in this guide that will work if it isn’t regularly followed.

So, getting yourself into a positive routine really is essential.

Getting Started

We can all get stuck in bad routines. Often, a bad routine is called a rut. If you feel trapped in a cycle of not studying, handing in homework late, going to bed in the early hours of the morning, endlessly scrolling, getting up late, not exercising, barely eating breakfast and being late for school, then you are stuck in a rut.

Let’s be realistic. You’re not going to be able to switch from anything resembling the type of routine I have just described to a world class routine overnight.

To begin with, you should aim to establish a basic routine.

The most important element of a routine is routine.

Meaning that if you propose a set of actions to regularly follow but they are too challenging to stick to, there is no routine.

So, don’t begin by telling yourself that you will complete a 10k run and a novel every day. You won’t.

Over-ambition prior to the launch of a routine inevitably leads to failure. And that can result in a downward spiral of self-esteem.

Instead, you should start by deciding on some realistic, do-able, daily actions.

The beauty of starting small is that successful completion of those actions will result in an increased sense of self-esteem. You will begin to believe that you can achieve. And whilst I’d still warn against daily 10k runs, it won’t be long before you can implement additional helpful habits into your schedule.

So, a basic routine should look something more like this:

Before school:

• Wake up at the same time everyday

• Drink a glass of water and do some light stretching/exercising

• Eat a nutritious breakfast

• Check your bag

• Leave for school in good time

After school:

• Arrive home at a similar time everyday

• Change into comfortable clothes

• Have a nutritious snack and unwind a little

• Complete your homework (preferably before your evening meal)

• Brush your teeth and go to bed at the same time every night.

Don’t expect to change overnight. And don’t feel bad when you don’t.

Whilst I have presented the above as a ‘basic routine’, it’s still a stretch to imagine anybody going from no routine to a basic routine in the space of 24 hours.

Build in some transition time.

Give yourself a week or two to transition from no routine to a basic routine. On day one, you might simply aim to set your alarm for a specific time and go to bed at a specific time. (Read chapter 1 again for a reminder about this). The next day, you might decide to complete your homework before your evening meal. By the time you have built up the routine over a week or two, you will be confident and consistent in your routine.

Then you will be able to make additions to take your routine to the next level: the brilliant level.

The repeated actions that make up routines are called habits.

A habit is defined as ‘a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up’.

There is an unshakeable relationship between routines and habits. Successful routines are purposeful collations of positive habits.

In a nutshell, routine is repetition, repetition, repetition!

So…

Establish a routine.

Establish a routine.

Establish a routine.

4. Space Repetition (Study Skill)

OK, repetition isn’t rocket science.

But SPACED repetition is clever stuff!

Revision is rereading. It is the act of rereading stuff you have previously read or done to improve your knowledge.

It stands to reason that the more you reread something, the better chance you will have of remembering it. That is the beauty of repetition. Pupils who leave everything to the last minute deny themselves repetition.

Repetition works.

But not indiscriminately so.

The key to effective revision is spacing.

You need to space out your revision over a sensible period.

The three key things to remember about spaced repetition are:

• Little and often!

• Leave space between your revision sessions

• Embrace the challenge of remembering stuff

Little and often

Consider how long, in total, it will take you to revise something to the point of mastery. If the answer to that question is six hours, do not plan to revise for six hours on a single day.

Do not plan to revise for three hours across two days either. Do not even plan to revise for two hours across three days.

Instead, plan for 20 minutes across 18 separate days. Remember, little and often!

Leave space between your revision sessions

Plan to leave space between your revision days. The following 35-day model is ideal for 18 x 20-minute revision sessions:

Day 1 Revise (20 mins)

Day 2 Rest

Day 3 Revise (20 mins)

Day 4 Revise (20 mins)

Day 5 Rest

Day 6 Rest

Day 7 Revise (20 mins)

Day 8 Revise (20 mins)

Day 9 Revise (20 mins)

Day 10 Rest

Day 11 Rest

Day 12 Rest

Day 13 Revise (20 mins)

Day 14 Rest

Day 15 Revise (20 mins)

Day 16 Revise (20 mins)

Day 17 Rest

Day 18 Rest

Day 19 Review (20 mins)

Day 20 Revise (20 mins)

Day 21 Revise (20 mins)

Day 22 Rest

Day 23 Rest

Day 24 Rest

Day 25 Revise (20 mins)

Day 26 Revise (20 mins)

Day 27 Revise (20 mins)

Day 28 Rest

Day 29 Rest

Day 30 Rest

Day 31 Revise (20 mins)

Day 32 Revise (20 mins)

Day 33 Rest

Day 34 Rest

Day 35 Revise (20 mins)

Embrace the challenge of remembering stuff!

On your first day of revision after a day or more of rest, begin your session by recalling what you revised last time.

This will be difficult, especially in the early days of your plan. However, you must embrace this feeling. Research tells us that by forcing our brain to recall information, we strengthen our ability to retain the information in the future. Begin each session by challenging yourself to write down everything you revised last time - you will love the feeling of satisfaction you gain as you progress. By day 25 you will be able to recall everything almost automatically.

Change your attitude towards homework

Some days you will get lots of homework, some days you won’t get any. Make that irrelevant: give yourself homework every school night - in the form of making notes about what you covered in each lesson that day.

Don’t do it as soon as you get home - remember that space is important. But after taking some time to get a snack and some relaxation, sit down to recall what you covered. If you can’t remember, think hard - remember how important that process is! If you still can’t remember, take your books out and look for yourself. If you still need clarification about something discussed, or something still doesn’t make sense, remember what we covered earlier (about asking questions), make a note, and ask your teacher next lesson. This type of homework won’t take you too long - especially when you get in the habit. It will put you way ahead of your classmates, consolidate your learning and, in the same way as going to the gym regularly builds your muscles, it will build your resolve and your ability to recall.

5. Exercise (Life Habit)

Healthy body, healthy mind.

Exercise increases endorphins and endorphins make us feel fantastic.

Exercise is incredible.

Exercise will bring you so much happiness that, once you start, you won’t be able to figure out how there are people on the planet who choose not to do it.

Exercise is a gateway to success and joy and satisfaction and all the good emotions.

Most usefully for you, exercise will improve your motivation, your concentration and your memory. So, for any aspiring scholar, exercise is key.

Understandably, exercise is often associated with sport. So, those who are particularly interested or gifted at sport will naturally exercise on a more regular basis than those who aren’t.

If you are reading this as somebody who plays football three times a week for a local team, or attends swimming classes, or is a member of their local netball team, then you will probably already appreciate how good it feels to exercise. Or, more specifically, how good you feel once you have finished exercising.

But exercise is not just the preserve of the ‘sporty ones’: exercise is for everybody.

If you hate PE and think that exercise is only for those who love it, you must reframe your thinking. Because exercise is not just a product of sporting activity.

Exercise is a goal.

Which means that you are free to carry on hating PE, but you must begin to exercise for all the joy and success it can bring you in all the other subjects.

You need to exercise for the sake of exercising. And once you have done that, on purpose, regularly, for a month, you will realise that you are no longer exercising for the sake of exercising; you are exercising for the sake of feeling happy, motivated, and content. Furthermore, you will be exercising for the sake of helping your brain work faster, smarter and with more clarity.

So, whether you currently play sports or not, you need to begin exercising - every day for 20 minutes - for the sake of exercising.

Cardio is key. This means exercise designed to raise your heart rate. There are more 20-minute YouTube workout videos than you can imagine. So, you could simply choose one, stick to it, and do it.

However, my advice is to get outside for 20 minutes and pound the pavement. Either walking fast or running will do the trick. Perhaps start by walking fast and take it from there.

The bonus of exercising outdoors is that you will be outdoors.

Come rain or shine, you will gain all the advantages of fresh air.

There is no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothes.

So, get outside and get moving.

Do so with intention, and know that alongside all the health benefits - physical and mental - your actions are having fabulous impacts on your learning, your memory, and your academic performance.

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Part 2 Coming Soon!

Thanks for your interest, and if this was useful, please subscribe - It’s completely FREE - and it would be great if you could tell any teaching people you know!

Jon