More videos from Sarah Cottingham
Video transcript
okay sarah what’s your fifth and final tip please um so my fifth and final tip which sort of builds on from that actually what we just spoke about is that retrieval practice is worth investing time to understand and use and and i think that there’s almost been a little bit of a kind of fad around retrieval practice and i just really wouldn’t want it to kind of dissuade people from from actually using it there’s some brilliant work out there about like how to use it in primary secretary kate jones’s work is fantastic on that and and i think that from ina i tried to get under the hood to understand why it works and it’s just convinced me even more that it’s like a really worthwhile um strategy to use and so retrieval practice just for anyone who isn’t sure is um is low stakes testing so instead of getting that people say to like re-read their notes on something they would uh you would give them some kind of low-stakes questions to check their understanding um and what it seems to do is just enormously powerful for the brain so and whereas when you re-read something you’re telling your brain like this stuff is available in the environment in the future we you know it’s always going to be there you don’t need to commit it to memory re-read it and when you retrieve from your memory you’re telling your brain you know i am not going to have access to this material in the future if you don’t want to go through this effortful process of trying to retrieve again you will store it better and then your brain kind of complies and does that storage that’s one way in which it’s it’s really powerful it kind of speeds up that storage consolidation process um in the brain um and another way it does it which is just super cool when you retrieve something you know you’re not just taking something out of your brain and then slotting it back in again you’re fundamentally changing the way that you understand something you know you’re combining it with new context cues in your environment depending on how you retrieved it and you’re also like changing the the schema that you’ve got in your brain you’re making further stronger connections to other knowledge weakening connections to knowledge that’s less less connected so you’re actually changing the landscape of your schema through retrieval practice because it’s effortful when it it does these these kind of gorgeous things it kind of elaborates the memory trace and connects it with other things and curates connections with other things and so it’s doing loads of dynamic things when you retrieve information and so that’s why i think it’s really worth investing some time in like how you can use it properly and understanding the conditions that it works really well and factoring it in to teaching one thing i would say is that there’s been quite rightly lots of pushback where um people have said you know you can only retrieve stuff that the pupils have actually sort of understood in the first place where is all the thinking about how we kind of get them to understand and make meaning for stuff in the first place so that’s obviously a really important piece but i’m just talking about retrieval practice here once once you have taught that stuff the retrieval seems like a really good way of not just strengthening that memory but connecting it and changing the connections with other memories as well oh this is brilliant i love the bit of retrieval so let’s dive into this so i’m going to start with a big name drop i always chuck this in any time when i had robert and elizabeth bjork on my podcast a few years many years ago now actually i asked robert or bob as i like to call him these days i said what is the biggest misconception people have about how memory works and he said exactly what you’ve said people think that accessing a memory is like trying to find a word document on your computer you go through the folder structure you open the word document or an image is a better idea you open an image on your computer you look at it you close it and then you go about your day and his point there was the the next time you want to access that image you do exactly the same thing you go through it’s still in the same place it hasn’t changed whereas as you say the human brain doesn’t work like that and i like the bjork’s phrase that retrieval is a memory modifier i think that’s really really like a really strong phrase to to bear in mind so i really like that my question to you is kind of a two-part question so the first part of it is what are examples knowing what you know about retrieval that you see in the classroom where retrieval doesn’t it isn’t done properly isn’t the right the right word but not done as effectively as it could be and whilst you’re thinking i’ll give you one without one that i see a lot right so this is your classic starter the starter or the do now seems to be like the go-to place where retrieval happens in the classroom and it makes sense because it’s it can be way certainly math you can do like some standalone retrieval things in that starter that perhaps don’t connect to the rest of the lesson so i’ve got a good example here is something like i don’t know transformations you want to do a rotation it’s quite hard to to kind of interleave that in with other areas of mathematics so let’s do a standalone retrieval opportunity let’s do that at the start of lesson but here’s where it goes wrong the kids don’t take it seriously at all so i’ve seen kids good kids in the sense that you know they generally work hard whilst they start or do now is on the board they’re just sat there having a bit of a rest maybe they’re copying down the date or the title or something like that and i go up to them and i say what are you doing here it’s all well it’s just a starter and they like think that this is something that teaches just putting on the board for a bit of a laugh maybe whilst they’re doing the register or something like that but so there’s two bad sides to that issue one is the kid obviously hasn’t learned anything even if they then like copy the answer down or whatever you know they haven’t done that effortful retrieval that you speak of but the the the or the more subtle downside is the teacher thinks that they’ve provided a retrieval opportunity so they think are brilliant well we’ve retrieved rotation we did that three weeks i taught it in three weeks so we retrieved it now so i can forget about that for a few months so i call this the illusion of retrieval the fact that just because something’s there you think that the kids are getting all these benefits from retrieval but if they’re not putting the effort in it’s a waste of time so that’s something i see and i particularly see that in the starter i think there’s something about the start of the lesson because it’s busy kids are arriving at different times maybe the teachers handing out notices and stuff something about the starter that i don’t think it’s the the best place to do this retrieval but that’s just one thing i see what what do you see sarah that’s really interesting i i did oh yeah i can see how uh i can see how that would happen um you know if it’s not if it’s not yeah if it’s not taken seriously this is this is just the first five minutes and those kids sorry to introduce what’s the interesting thing those kids who do that whenever the lesson in inverted commerce starts properly in their eyes so when the teacher says all right today we’re going to be doing this they sit up the pens are ready that’s when they’re attentive so it’s like they think it’s some kind of warm-up or something like that it just fascinates me no that’s that’s really interesting i i hadn’t um kind of realized that but it makes perfect sense that that would that would happen and then of course they’re not doing any retrieval exactly right and and and even worse the teacher might be thinking yes we’ve achieved something here which is yeah is is really is really bad um so yeah that that’s a really that’s a great one i’m going to add to my bank of things that go wrong um we talked about talks about a couple of them so i think i think one thing that gets really missed out is the what what are they retrieving why are you choosing that to retrieve like is it is it the most important thing that they could that could be retrieving if we see retrieval as like activating knowledge then like would it be best to kind of use that retrieval and link it into the lesson so would that knowledge be better to be linked into the topic that you’re going to be teaching often you see kind of retrieval practice questions are um sort of quite random and and and that’s what i say random they they appear random but the teachers often thought well i’m spacing so i’m dragging this up from another topic but it doesn’t relate to the lesson and i guess my question is and i don’t know the answer to this but my question is like is part of what makes retrieval practice at the beginning of a lesson potentially effective is that it reactivates some of the knowledge that is useful for that lesson in which case if we’re doing this wild spacing thing then is that better in homework and actually we then have like it’s something that leads into the lesson so that that’s my what my what question um there the effort and success thing is interesting and we want to we want to balance effort and success um retrieval practice is a desirable difficulty yeah you know the view of york’s much better than me my good friends i love that by the way i love that podcast it was one of my favorites and that you did with them and i think that effort and success thing is potentially a kind of a difficult one to achieve because we also want to be motivating for pupils especially at the start of a lesson as well and so we probably want to make it slightly more on the success side with some groups um but generally speaking around a kind of 75 correct kind of benchmark is probably providing the research suggests a kind of about right balance between effort and success but that’s that’s not perfect and it obviously depends on your group and i think that’s where we get the kind of research as a compass thing because like you know you know your group and if if getting you know a quarter of the answers wrong in the in the uh in the start activity is going to be hugely demoralizing for them we might want to actually hit it more like a kind of 90 um success rate uh to get a bit of effort and a bit of success the other thing that’s really cool about retrieval practice is if we’re going for success um rather than uh rather than effort we can provide cues because that’s how the brain works we love we love a contextual cue to kind of trigger our memory so if we go around and we’re looking at how they’re answering the questions and we’re like um question three they’re just like they’re not nailing this one we can always go on the board and put up a word that’s going to trigger their you know trigger their memory for it or or drop in a few hints some way or another and that can kind of boost the the the success there um the feedback one is is interesting um i think because i i think generally speaking is it’s a very good idea to to give the feedback but obviously feedback’s its own realm isn’t it um and you know it we could say i’ll give give feedback after retrieval practice but are they paying attention to the feedback like what are they doing with this feedback to kind of internalize it and so that’s its own kind of realm of are you doing the feedback um are they paying are they paying attention to it as well but that seems like a good bet for making sure they’re not strengthening the kind of the wrong answers i guess that’s interesting just one thing on on this if we just just jump back to the starter just temporarily and the reason i’m a bit obsessed with that i i am obsessed with starters i’ll just throw that out there every lesson i’m looking to watch i’m fascinated by looking at how the teacher starts the lesson and as i say particularly what the kids are doing while someone else that’s happening so what you see maths and i’m interested i’m interested in your perspective both as an english specialist but also as a retrieval expert this is your two hats i need you to have on sarah during this this ramble if that’s okay so one you you often see three types of inverted commas retrieval style starters in maths lessons in my experience anyway so one you definitely get the the kind of that looks random but as often kind of built in with with spacing in mind but crucially as you say it’s four kind of disconnected questions they’re not related to each other and they’re probably not related to the rest of the lesson and the logic that behind teachers using those is spacing they’re making sure that they bubble up things that i learned in the past now i’ve never thought before that perhaps they’re best suited to a homework because maybe it’s advantageous to have things that connect to the the lesson that’s coming up so that interests me but you definitely see these kind of standalone starters and i’m not convinced kids take those all that seriously just generally the second thing you see are kind of pre-requisite knowledge checks so maybe you’ll have those four questions or maybe it’ll be diagnostic questions but crucially they will be designed to assess you know that baseline knowledge that the kids need in order to kind of build the new knowledge and knowledge on and that tends to happen more often than not at the start of the topic unit and you’ll often get teachers who intersperse the two types there so they’ll have to start the topic unit their starter will be on prerequisite knowledge and then lesson two they’ll revert back to one of these kind of four disconnected starters and so on and so forth but the third one and i’d say this is probably the most prevalent in maths lessons but i’m interested in your view on this as i say both as an english specialist and a retrieval expert have you seen that um last lesson last week last term last year framework so this this is used loads and math and again this almost seems to do the best of all the worlds if the kids take it seriously because the last lesson is kind of your prerequisite knowledge and it kind of triggers what we’re going to be doing this lesson and then you get kind of tapping into what we know about kind of spacing schedules in the fact that last week has been bubbled up quite quickly something from last term has been a longer gap something from last year there’s been a longer gap so i quite like that but i’m interested in in your take perhaps on those kind of three structures the randoms the prerequisites and the last lesson last week and if any of that kind of yeah triggers anything in your mind yeah wow that’s great i love how quickly you can you can kind of categorize those given how many lessons you think that’s amazing um i i mean the short answer is i don’t i don’t know what’s what’s what’s best and so i’m i’m again i’m using research as a kind of compass sure um so the the the prerequisite knowledge text like feels to be like a great way to kind of like yeah to check for understanding and to warm up that knowledge that’s then going to get built on and used the the last lesson last term i can see how that that seems to maximize spacing as you were saying and so that kind of that seems to make sense maybe you leave the last lesson one as the final question so that’s just been reactivated before i go into it i don’t know i wonder with that like whether whether that is a proper warm-up for the lesson or whether it is doing something different which isn’t going to necessarily where it’s too much interference almost to kind of to do that i don’t know and also i am guessing at the fact that warming up the knowledge would be the best thing to do in that starter activity but i think it’s a reasonable guess yeah and given how kind of how the brain works so i think i think number two or number three sound sounds like those kind of best bets as you were saying um for us there but it is it is a um it is a difficult one to say um what i also say is like we we think a lot about retrieval practice and sometimes we forget that all lesson is retrieved like all of the lesson is pretty much retrieval practice and in many ways like any cold call question we ask we often don’t let them look at their notes to do it you know unless we’ve got insane in displays on the you know next to them they can look at they generally speaking are retrieving for a lot of the lesson so if we decide that a startup activity is actually better for them to read a you know a short passage which will guide them into the learning for the lesson we can still build in retrieval at different points that don’t necessarily mean we have to kind of pack it in that in that first five minutes especially as you said craig because sometimes they don’t take those five minutes necessarily as seriously as they should or they come in late or something like that but yeah i’d go for i’d go for two and three there just as a kind of best bet i can shift one to a kind of homework because the thing i i don’t know if it’s true in english you often get some topics that don’t they aren’t prerequisite for any new topic if that makes sense so i get rotations a good one rotation is kind of a bit of a standalone topic in many senses so once you’ve taught it once unless you schedule in some retrieval opportunities it’s not really going to bubble up all that much like fractions would do or something like that but i like that idea of shift well i like two of your ideas i really like the idea of shifting those to standalone and then maybe making that last lesson last week shifting the last lesson on to the last thing that’s again experiment with that that’s good i think a great way that people are organizing uh their curriculum now is allowing for this um this this stuff to happen through like organizing around concepts so i know a lot of kind of english teachers that are thinking about having a sort of concept-led curriculum and then you can kind of like pull the concept through quite a lot of lessons and have that retrieval around the concept so sometimes in in in english and potentially other subjects that that seems to work quite well as well fascinating
