Typically an A level course at school or college involves 360 hours of teaching over 2 years (see: AQA teaching guide). Obviously revising the whole 360 hours in a day or on the residential courses a day and half is impossible. Even if you could cover the material ten times quicker there are literally not enough hours in the day. In addition to it being impossible it would also be pointless. There would be little point in covering topics which the student(s) are completely comfortable with.
So, we work strictly to the syllabus, covering whatever the students wish to tackle from the relevant syllabus. There is, of course, the caveat that the tutors will have a list of topics that they know from experience the student believe they understand but don’t. These will also generally be checked.
For A level we offer courses that focus on specific papers. For example, we may have a course running for A level Chemistry, exam board: OCR A, paper 2. This particular paper accounts for 37% of the marks for that A level. So that teaching block is intended to cover just over a third of the syllabus.
For GCSE we offer courses that focus on the specific subject. The approximate number of teaching hours for a GCSE or IGCSE is an estimated 120 hours.
For IB higher level is 240 hours of teaching and for standard level 150 hours.
Obviously not all tutors will do things exactly the same way, but the underlying ethos is to establish which areas the student(s) wishes to cover then do that.
We suggest that our tutors try, as far as possible, to run a democracy. This is best explained via an example.
Here is how I used to tackle GCSE Physics groups. I would write of list of 8-12 topics on the board and essentially get students to “vote” for which topics they wish to cover. I would then ask if there was anything else, add that to this list, then add that and collate votes for the addition(s). I would then start with the topic with the highest number of votes, unless there’s a topic which needs to come first.
Furthermore I would have a list of things that I think students often are convinced that they do understand but in reality, they don’t. These I would add in, often via a question to the group, as appropriate.
The key point is that we are focused on problem areas for that particular group of students.
Operating a student-led tutorials is more straightforward for one-to-one tuition. Here it is essentially a dialogue between the tutor and student. As with groups the tutors will have certain problematical key topics in mind.
As an example it maybe that a student just doesn’t “get” Shakespeare in which case a very broad brush approach is needed; at the other end of the spectrum it maybe the nuances of the relationship between Hamlet and his mother is a source of confusion.
Whatever the case the tutor will always be “checking-in” with the student to see what they want to do.
We have an excellent blog on Learning to Love Shakespeare.
A summer course giving students an introduction to their forthcoming A levels (i.e. intro to the first year) is radically different to a single day course in May a handful of days before their final A level exam.
An intro to A level summer course, as an example, is intended to inspire a student, build confidence and ensure that all the GCSE knowledge is in place. It is also intended to remind the students what it is like to study after the post-GCSE/summer holiday hiatus. The intro to courses are deliberately relaxed and not too obsessively focused on the syllabus – the exams are roughly 2 years away and motivating and inspiring is more important than the fine print of the syllabus. Furthermore, it would hardly be reasonable to expect students to know what they want to cover from a course they haven’t even started yet.
Conversely the Easter course or May weekend courses for students a few weeks away from their exams are obsessively focused on the syllabus and will honed in on the details of mark schemes and examiners reports. Here the objective is to maximise the student’s potential in their forthcoming exams. For revision course very close to the exams we are unashamedly obsessed with exact syllabus content and exam performance.
For certain subjects we do ask for information prior to the course. For History and English Literature A levels, as an example, knowing which texts and periods is absolutely key.
We used to do this for all subjects, but to be blunt, it just doesn’t work. What used to happen is that a large percentage of students didn’t fill in the topics and those that were completed were frequently out-of-date by the time the student arrived on the course.