I love to read, and I read widely around education, teaching. Maths, anything that interests me. However, no matter how much I love to read the amount of time I am able to spend reading is significantly less than I would like it to be. Prior to my current position, unfortunately the only real time I devoted to reading was when there was an urgent need. I was preparing for interview for my previous position I was trying to find some research that was relevant to what I was discussing in my presentation.
I know this is the wrong way round to do things the research should have informed what I was doing beforehand but we were where we were and the interview was in 2 days. I am pleased that I now allocate myself coffee and reading time once a week to keep up with the latest blogs and developments. I love my coffee and reading time and it is sacred, I need it to be so. That doesn’t mean that if work is busy and I don’t get time to read at work I will make time to sit at home with a coffee and read, point is I read weekly! Whilst preparing for my interview I came across retrieval practice. Retrieval practice had nothing to do with what I was presenting in interview but it instantly sparked my interest.
I ended up spending all my interview talking about retrieval practice and openly admitted that I haven't used it yet because I just found it but since I got the job and have begun using retrieval practice. I am not an expert but am happy to signpost you to the experts here: https://www.retrievalpractice.org/
Retrieval practice works on the basis that if you regularly retrieve small bits of information you will deepen your understanding. It was really nice to finally find something that was current, relevant to my teaching and unusually appropriate to a maths lesson. Too many times as a maths teacher I have felt left behind. Whilst other subjects make huge strides in questioning and feedback I find myself trying my hardest to make it work in maths but most of the time answers are right or wrong. The guys at https://www.retrievalpractice.org/ shared a retrieval practice grid where the topics that have been covered previously were colour-coded by how far in the past they had been. This was easily replicated into my lessons and it looks a little bit like this.
Red is 4 lessons ago, orange is 3 lessons ago, green is 2 lessons ago and blue is last lesson. This replaced my bellwork. Students arrive and these are on their desks already they sit down and begin working through the grid. Every lesson I would change the questions and colours. It really wasn’t an onerous task. The aim of it being a little reminder a little refresher and in total would take less than 5 minutes to go through the board. So I would give the learner's 5 minutes to come in and do it and then 5 minutes to run through at the board I felt that it was worth the sacrifice in my lesson time but I appreciate not everyone has 90 minute lessons like we have. (We only have 1 90 minute lesson a week though!)
My adult resit learners would sit and discuss the questions. You would overhear questions about when to use ADAM or DINO. I would spend the 5 minutes catching up with any absentees from the previous week or any messages that I needed to pass on to my learners. The next time when I would look up the powerful maths discussions that were taking place were jaw dropping. The collaboration and cooperation of learners in reminding and refreshing each other with how to answer the questions was lovely to see. Age gaps disappeared and mature adult learners were working at the same pace and stage collaboratively with teenage adult learners. Over time our little routine expanded into each table being responsible for sharing the answers rather than me standing at the board. My application of the grids also evolved in that the red section became a place for poorly answered topics to be repeated and recovered. For example nth term would be in the red section for one class for a few weeks whereas for another class it was factorising. Using these grids I was able to personalise the retrieval practice that each group needed.
Having taught resit groups for a number of years the impact in my results was significant. The topics that have been regularly and consistently answered correctly on my retrieval practice grids were regularly and consistently answered correctly in my mock exam papers. It was evident that those 5 minutes made all the difference in keeping topics ticking over. When we came to the actual exam one learner asked me for a copy of all the previous retrieval practice grids to revise from. This was a Eureka moment. Thanks to Google Docs I had a bank of sheets that I could print off and issue meaning we had instant revision packs ready to go! Google docs is brilliant for this because it has version history allowing you to revert to previous versions. If you would like to know more about Google docs I will talk about this at a later date.
Not only did retrieval practice improve my in class testing, it helped create an empowering collaborative working environment which was an outcome I wasn’t expecting. It also enabled me to have a class specific time relevant revision pack for learners appropriate to their stage and ability. I am a big fan of curating revision collections for my learners based on the topics and how well they have done in them. Retrieval practice did this for me!
