More tips from Craig Barton
Video transcript
hello i’m craig barton and welcome to this tips for teachers video now this is actually part two of a double bill all about routines so if you haven’t watched the video or seen the tip about justifying the steps of a routine i’d really recommend checking that out so just to recap there are loads of routines involved in teaching there’s a selection of them there you might have routines for setting out your work how students ask questions what they do if they finish what they do if they’re stuck and so on and so forth loads of routines that we want our students to remember now routines are dead important in teaching i think because they can increase time and attention dedicated to learning so if we just take a very simple model of memory here and we appreciate that working memory’s got a finite capacity students can only think or pay attention to a certain amount at any one time then if students are thinking hard about the routine itself what do i do here what do i do next then that takes attention away from thinking about the things that are really going to make a difference to students so if we can get students to automate that routine then we free up attention so students can think much more or much harder about the stuff that’s going to help them learn so the big question of course is how on earth do we get students to remember these routines and the steps involved within them so they can be automated well i’ve been making a huge mistake with this for many many years i thought the key to it was explanation so explaining to students about the routine why it’s important and so on but that was missing two key things so the first we covered in the previous video and that is how do we get students to pay attention to that explanation what i’m going to look at in this video is the part that comes afterwards and that is the importance of retrieval retrieval for routines now there’s so much research out there about the importance of retrieval over time revisiting things at different intervals in the future to help those memories become strengthened but i’ve always just applied that to mathematics how do you remember how to add fractions when you teach students fractions and then you keep revisiting that over time until it becomes automated but i’ve never done it for steps of a routine but that’s daft right because whatever we want students to remember memory doesn’t change so we’ve got to use that same process so what i now try to do is provide opportunities to retrieve the steps of a routine so let me give you an example of this let’s imagine that we’ve got a homework so on that homework i’m going to have my normal kind of maths questions here so one on kind of proportion a bit of substitution kids are having a great time then we get to question five what are the three things we do if we get stuck so i’m providing an opportunity for students not just to retrieve mathematics but to retrieve the routine because i want my students to remember this just as much as i want them to remember this or let’s look at another example maybe we do a do now or a starter we have our usual kind of starter style questions but here we’ve gone one step further why do we not look at other people’s mini whiteboards when trying to answer a diagnostic question so not just remembering the steps of a routine remembering the justification of that step that we looked at in the previous video so what do you think of that how do you help your students remember your routines do you ever build them into retrieval opportunities would that work in your subject let me know and also if you could like the video and subscribe to my youtube channel oh i will be over the moon visit tipsforteachers.com for more tips like this thanks so much for watching