If you have limited time and are looking for something a little less comprehensive that can still allow you to make positive changes to your classroom, have a look at our blogs on the subject. Here are the ones we recommend you start with: Use different colour flash cards for different subjects, such as green for science and pink for history, or use different colours for different categories or topics. Colour coding is purely to help with organisation, not recall. There have been various forms of retrieval practice used in classrooms for many years ranging from a paper-based quiz, mini-whiteboards and as technology has evolved teachers are able to use different online tools for quizzing. However, quizzing and testing have also been used a lot in the past to record data, as an assessment tool rather than as a tool to enhance and support teaching and learning. No doubt, you would probably feel quite proud of yourself. You would start to feel competent in whatever subject you had decided to really commit to. Re-reading is, cognitively speaking, easy to do. Reading is easy. When we re-read material we have a voice in our head saying, “Yes, I got that”, no problem.

I worked with the British Council as Connecting Classrooms Co-ordinator 2015-2016. I was a WJEC History GCSE Examiner 2014, 2015 and 2016. Organiser and host of #TeachMeetNorthWales & #TMHistoryIcons. Voted as a finalist for the 2018 Middle East Education Influencer award. Another role I really enjoyed was being a Governor on the Advisory Board at Manor Hall International School Al Ain, Abu Dhabi from 2017- 2019. Participants who had done the least amount of retrieval practice thought that they would recall the most. Participants who had done the most amount of retrieval practice thought they would recall the least. Kate Jones has written a practical book called Love To Teach: Research and Resources for Every Classroom, published by John Catt. While this takes place, I’ll whizz around the classroom and make a note of any common misconceptions. The whole episode takes around five minutes. Try throwing in some questions where the answer is already correct (ie where something is the same in both dimensions) and see if they notice! Memorise this…These changes are possible because of how well-researched retrieval practice is. Cognitive scientists have spent decades investigating its use as a memory technique. Though nothing in science is ever beyond question, the positive results across a vast number of studies certainly seem to suggest it’s an effective method. New discoveries This retrieval practice grid doesn’t include multiple choice options. This is because, according to Professor John Dunlosky, “students will benefit most from tests that require recall from memory and not from tests that merely ask them to recognise the correct answer”. How to use the grids It may seem counterintuitive, but that effortful struggle is exactly what produces the strengthened retrieval in future.

We are thrilled by the overwhelming interest in our resources, including our free guides, strategies, and book recommendations. New information which is not linked to anything else stored in your long-term memory will have a low retrieval strength, as well as a low storage strength. Flash cards are a very useful revision activity for many reasons. They work across all subjects, they can be used with the recall of facts, dates, quotes, definitions and more. They are a very simple technique for learners to use – low effort but high impact. As well as being an effective learning strategy flash cards are also popular with students. In a research survey carried out in 2018 more than 50% of college students reported that they do use flash cards to study. Advice taken from the wonderful book Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning by Pooja K Agarwal and Patrice Baine. Whilst I still believe the start of a lesson can be a time to complete an interesting, stimulating and engaging task (I really do want my students to enjoy lessons and enjoy learning – I think every teacher does) it should be beneficial to learning. The task should enhance learning not distract from it. I can recall many starter activity tasks I delivered that at the time seemed like excellent practice but on reflection, I fail to see how those tasks supported the teaching and learning taking place in my classroom. There was a culture of snazzy starters and we have moved away from that now.This concept can be applied to the classroom with a twist, focusing on daily review of five a day to promote healthy retrieval. It could simply be five quiz questions to start the lesson.

Second, we can consider how well connected and robust the knowledge is – known as ‘storage strength’. Finally, information can have both high retrieval and high storage strength. An example might be the name of your current best friend.If you have already read this book or are looking to expand your knowledge of teaching practices further, we recommend reading:

In this episode of The Cult of Pedagogy podcast, Jennifer Gonzalez speaks to Pooja Agarwal about what retrieval practice is and how you can start incorporating it into your classroom right away. Instead, we’re moving towards a system where we remove the revision lesson and replace it with frequent opportunities for retrieval practice built in to the main sequence of lessons. Keynote speaker: I have presented at various high profile events across the UK and. Events in the UAE include a keynote presentation at the UAE University focusing on innovation across the curriculum and I am delighted to be the keynote speaker at the Abu Dhabi Teaching and Learning Conference in February 2020. I have also presented at Qatar, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Hong Kong with upcoming presentations in The Netherlands and Kuala Lumpur. Participants in a study used either re-reading or retrieval practice to learn material, but in varying amounts. After they had a set amount of time with these techniques, they were asked to predict how well they thought they would recall that information in a week or so’s time.The problem we now have is some schools (not my school and certainly not all schools) are adopting a different and perhaps extreme type of culture that has an inflexible approach to classroom planning and taking the autonomy away from teachers. This can be seen here in this tweet below: In the short term, your students will hate retrieval practice. They will hate the feeling of not knowing an answer or getting things only partially correct. But the science is clear: it works. Retrieval Grids include spacing: Students are challenged to retrieve the concept or answer to a question. Each box is color coded for the time when students first learned or encoded the concept: concepts from the last lesson are in blue, last week in red, two weeks ago in green, etc. Space it out! They’ll tell you about how funny it was to think about Alexander having a Nando’s. Some children may not get the joke and actually think Alexander the Great did eat Nando’s.