Author: Mr D WARREN

Issue 9 Autumn 2023

Teaching & Learning Bulletin

Can You Remember?

bowdenc@wellandparkacademy.com

What’s the first record you bought? Can you remember the room you played it in, over and over? The wallpaper? The feeling the songs brought you?
Can you remember the equation to measure stopping distances? When the Ides of March occurs, Julius Caesur? How to ask when the next train to Paris from Lille is?
We remember things because of one or more of three things: emotion; how recently it happened; how frequently we refer to it. As teachers, we can’t add emotion to everything—how exhausting—or tell students everything just before the exams. But we can utilise retrieval practice or spaced learning.
Come to the Teaching & learning Group to discuss more.

We know low-stakes testing is crucial for retrieval. Quizzes, cloze passages, Kahoot, entry tickets, 5 questions, tiered questions all support retrieval of what students already know. Crucially, they must already know it—gaps in learning are reinforced if the outcome of these tests is not used to inform further teaching.
Frequent, low-stakes testing also helps those who have little experience of tests (this is not to say these youngsters haven’t frequently faced challenge). As Marc Rowland says in his article Crossing The Rubicon, ‘Remember the joy of tests. Many pupils from fortunate backgrounds have lives full of financial, social and cultural capital. And they are often being tested, experiencing the highs and lows of that testing experience in equal measure, whether being tested on the gymnastics beam, in the swimming pool, in social interactions or through games, through risk, through general knowledge tests in the car.
Children who are tested frequently learn the benefits of testing, and learn what to do to maximise their chances of success. They also learn to persevere when they are not successful first time. They develop strategies to overcome challenges. They develop self-confidence and they learn to harness stress.
The things that we remember in the long term are an imprint of our emotional connection with a learning experience, positive or negative. Our memories are a Sargasso sea of our emotional experiences.
By contrast, life is more challenging for our time poor and materially poor families on low incomes. They may experience insecure employment, housing, relationships, poor health and more. Clearly, pupils from the least fortunate backgrounds are tested every day too, often overcoming extraordinary challenges to come to school in the morning. But they do not necessarily experience the positive emotions and joy of overcoming those tests. They are challenges, rather than tests that improve learning. They create stress, rather than reduce it. Testing has a crucial place in our schools. Disadvantaged pupils need to thrive on testing in the way their more advantaged peers do. And you can’t take a test unless you are present – tackle the attendance gap too!’
This year, our Teaching & Learning focus is Retrieval. Let’s help our young people remember more of what we teach.

Retrieval In the Classroom

Issue 9 Autumn 2023

bowdenc@wellandparkacademy.com

Tips for Developing Retrieval

Involve everyone: Good techniques involve all students checking their knowledge, not just a few and not just one at a time as you might do when questioning.
Make checking accurate and easy: it should be possible for all students to find out what they got right and wrong, what they know well and where they have gaps. Every technique involves students testing their knowledge and then checking their work for accuracy and completeness. (This is not the same as giving students extended mark schemes to mark longer assessments which, for me goes beyond a simple retrieval practice activity)
Specify the knowledge: Where appropriate, it’s better if students know the set of knowledge any retrieval will be based on, so they can study, prepare and self-check. It must be possible for students to check their own answers which has implications for the way the knowledge requirements are laid out.
Keep it generative: students need to explore their memory to check what they know and understand; this means removing cue-cards, prompts, scaffolds and cheat-sheets; it means closing the books and thinking for themselves.
Make it time efficient: The idea of each technique is that they can be used repeatedly in an efficient manner without dominating whole lessons.
Make it workload efficient: None of these methods involve the teacher checking the students’ answers, creating unsustainable workload. A teacher might choose to check the occasional test but that’s no use for routine practice.
Tom Sherrington

Issue 9 Autumn 2023

bowdenc@wellandparkacademy.com

Disrupt Forgetting

Still not convinced? Consider using retrieval strategies to disrupt forgetting.
1. Retrieval should be easy
Failure is only ever a useful learning experience when built upon a firm foundation of success. You need enormous self-belief to contend with set backs; if set backs are your normal experience, one more is just further evidence you’re not good enough. But more than that, retrieval needs to result in success in order to be beneficial. The ‘difficulty’ comes from having to remember something you haven’t just been told.
2. The information retrieved should be useful
Arguably, all knowledge is useful but the information we ask students to retrieve should be stuff we will ask them to regularly use.
3. Retrieval tasks should be regularly repeated
Once we have selected a body of simple, useful information we want students to fluently recall, we should ask them to recall this information again and again until it is thoroughly embedded. Sometimes we set retrieval tasks consisting only of information from recently learned topics, sometimes we select only information that will be used in the coming lesson and, more frequently, there’s a balance between the two. Instead, we need to understand the need for students to master currently useful information and to recall previously mastered topics. In the first instance, if some students have struggled to answer a question today, ask them the same question tomorrow.

Issue 9 Autumn 2023

bowdenc@wellandparkacademy.com

Staff Library: new books

Read something inspiring? Or heard about an education/ leadership book that you’d like to read? If you’d be happy to write a short review for the next issue, let me know. There’s a selection of books in the staff library section of the LRC, or we may be able to order it in.