More tips from Kate Jones
Video transcript
okay kate what’s your third tip please oh my third tip i need to remember which one i said i was gonna oh yes this is a mantra that i use and that’s um low effort high impact now this is an approach with retrieval practice but it can apply to other things and so i’ll just elaborate first of all the low effort doesn’t mean no effort so it’s not about being lazy because as teachers there’s so many things we have to put effort into reports and feedback and planning and so on now retrieval practice is going to be sustainable in the sense that teachers are doing it every single day it has to be workload friendly and this is a key message i share with school leaders this is something that you’re looking for every lesson then then think about the workload implications of that and that’s the low effort for the teacher but the high impact is on student learning so whatever you do with a retrieval task in terms of your planning delivery and how feedback is provided it can be low effort for the teacher but with every retrieval practice task that we design and deliver it should have a high impact on student learning now both you and i have done the other way around in the past so the example that i think of with you which is high effort from the teacher and the low impact on learning was your swiss roles exactly and it was exactly the same for me in my career i um remember early on i was creating sorting cards and i actually had my three sisters helping me one was printing another was cutting another was putting and laminating putting them in envelopes such a high effort task i put more effort in the actual task design instead of the question design that’s where my efforts should have gone i gave them out in the lesson the students completed it in about 30 seconds it wasn’t challenging it was low impact on learning but high effort for me so now i’ve completely flipped that narrative especially with retrieval practice and anyone who says that’s not possible with retrieval practice i can show them how it really is possible oh well you you’ve hooked us in there okay so so a couple of things to say there first you you’re absolutely right um it’s and it’s so frustrating as a teacher you put a lot of effort into designing a task and an activity and then it just the impact just doesn’t match anywhere near the effort that you’ve put in so i’ve certainly tried to go down this path myself and and flip it around so you’ve you’ve done a bit of a hook there okay say that it’s definitely possible can you give us some examples of some of these low effort teacher activities that have the high impact on on learning yes so i’m going to talk about multiple choice questions and technology and that’s a great example there are questions that are already made and available and could be marked online instantly providing immediate feedback to the teacher and the student now the effort that low effort should be the teacher quality assuring the questions and checking them and then checking and looking at the results but that is something that is really easy to implement retrieval practice with mini whiteboards the effort should be the teacher thinking about the questions that will be asked but then obviously you had a great um chat with adam boxer about many whiteboards and that’s it it’s immediate responses from everyone in the class the fact that they rub the answer off makes it low stakes the fact that you can skim and scan with multiple choice questions quickly and easily means you can be responsive and there isn’t that that’s taken me hours to plan and that’s taken me hours to mark but it hasn’t done that but it’s had a high impact whether it’s check for understanding or retrieval practice but this is the same for students i tell them to do retrieval practice they need a pen and paper or sometimes they don’t even need that if they do it verbally but pen and paper write down everything you know from memory and then they can self-assess it they can check it again alongside the textbook and dylan william has said the best person to mark a test is the person who’s just taking a test so all of these things the fact that there’s question banks out there the fact that the self-assessment works with retrieval practice and there’s templates all of these are very workload friendly that support the low effort approach but if the questions are designed effectively then they should have a high impact on student learning that’s fascinating that um i want to ask you something okay that i’ve been meaning to ask you for for a long time this sounds like a perfect opportunity here so i love speaking to non-mathematicians because there’s something that happens in maths with regard to retrieval practice and i’m intrigued whether it also happens in history and so on and so forth and that is there are certain topics in maths that it’s quite hard to design retrieval practice activities and tasks for because they require like certain equipment so a good example is constructions so you’ve taught students to construct with rulers and compasses and it’s all fine because all lesson they’ve been using the ruler and the compass and protractor but then let’s say next week you’ve moved on to another topic but all of a sudden you want to make sure that they you provide an opportunity for them to retrieve how to construct something well then you’ve got to get out the ruler get out the compass get out the protractor and it’s a real hassle and another example is a lot of the geometry and graphing work we do in maths may require grids to be drawn axes to be drawn which have got to be handed out to the kids and so on so what you often see in mata and i’m guilty of this is a lot of the um like diagnostic questions used in mathematics or a lot of the mini whiteboard activities are for the kind of more easily quizable elements of maths the ones that lend themselves more to the students not needing as much kind of equipment with them so two questions follow up from that is that something that’s true in like history for example are there certain aspects of history or certain styles of questions that are more that lend themselves better to to quizzing in this way and is there anything we as teachers can do about it i don’t know if you have any thoughts on that no i do have have thoughts on that well i would say um and actually this is moving slightly away but i’ll come back to your maths example um the learning process um by arthur melton is described as encoding storage retrieval now that’s great that’s really helpful but the problem that i have with that is that it suggests retrieval is the final step in the learning process we need to add two more blocks we need to add application and transfer so in my subject of history they’re never going to do a multiple choice quiz on an a-level exam they’re going to write an extended answer and if i rely too heavily on quizzing and multiple choice they’ve got a bank of isolated facts they need to be able to apply them and transfer them where where’s necessary so whilst i’m not in the same don’t need physical resources i we do have to every subject we do have to go beyond the quizzing and i’m a big fan of multiple choice questions and quizzing but it’s limited it will only take us to a certain point and i’ve spoke to other subjects that have had that issue um i spoke to a design technology teacher and obviously that there’s a lot of equipment there one of the things that they did in terms of retrieval was they provided a comic strip and they said can you for memory write down this process of how you did that how you did something so that they were still so with it instead of repeating that action they were still getting them to go through the the recall of the step by step um and i know that is difficult different to the protractor and i i always you know i always use you as an example for maths because i do feel that maths is a really it all subjects are unique but lots of the retrieval tasks that i have created lend themselves really well to humanities and english and even science and then maths is different i’ll tell you another way i talk about you a lot in my sessions is um i talk about well i’ll get to this sorry there’s so much multiple choice questions i read somewhere that you said maths diagnostic questions 10 seconds students should be able to answer them i don’t know if you remember this it’s yeah and i always you i say right craig barton is a maths expert so that’s in his subject i’m not going to disagree with him and then i show a question from my subject where i say this needs longer than 10 seconds and i purposefully show that to say we’ve got the math specialist who knows what works in his subject and then we’ve got even though he’s a he’s an expert and i’d learn a lot from him i then have to think well what does it look like in my subject so there’s so much we can learn from each other and maybe subjects like practical subjects like design technology could collaborate with maths in that sense the same way that i collaborate with english departments but then also then we have to as a community figure out subject community how do we do this how do we overcome this whether that’s with retrieval practice or anything teaching and learning based so i don’t know if that is it certainly does it’s really interesting so i’d never thought to do that that comic strip idea or the equivalence of kind of all right describe how you would construct an angle bisexual describe how you would measure an angle that’s really smart i i can really see that working obviously alongside that at some point they’ve got to have the opportunity to physically do it but i really really like that idea that sounds really good the following question i had was um often again i’m fascinated to know whether this is true in other subjects one of the key retrieval opportunities that happens in math certainly for prior knowledge is in the do now or in the starter and you can imagine kids come into a room and on the board there’s five questions or maybe it’s the starter grid that you alluded to before one from last lesson one from last week and so on and so forth and just going back to what you said there about kind of um in history obviously you’ve got to practice the whole skill of writing the longer form and kind of essays and arguments and so on it’s a similar thing in maths where you’ve got to practice the kind of five or six mark questions that pull in lots of different areas of mathematics and so on my fear is often that if retrieval only happens in the do now you kind of get a skewness towards those the do now lends itself better to those kind of short sharp ones you know the quickfire retrieve this one mark questions and so on and so forth and i often worry that if if the retrieval kind of gets crammed into the do now and we don’t provide those other retrieval opportunities to do things like you say like do the long-form essays or in my my case answer the multi-mark more complex exam questions kids aren’t getting an opportunity to kind of finish kind of finish the journey as you say the retrieval isn’t the end of the the kind of story it’s okay retrieve all these individual things but then put it together to do this more complex problem so that was just a bit of a long rumble just to say that’s sometimes my concern with the do now that it lends itself better to a certain type of retrieval if that makes sense i think this is a really common problem that some schools are only doing retrieval practice at the start of a lesson with a do now and i say to them this is one of the most effective teaching and learning strategies why would you limit it to just five minutes and something that i did with curriculum design was fit in lessons probably once every half term that a whole lesson was retrieval practice retrieve and reflect and i recall doing this with the gcse group and they had said to me miss we’ve finished the content in other subjects and we’re revising when are we going to revise in history and i was outraged because we had been revising for two years i didn’t want to cram retrieval at the end i spaced it out throughout the curriculum and that was something that wasn’t happening everywhere but that is sort of very common that it’s five minutes at the start of the lesson to eight minutes and i understand why it’s a great way to start a lesson it links in with rose and shine’s daily review but i have not read research that says it has to be at the start of a lesson if you were to have a lesson and students need to come in and finish something off why can’t you do your retrieval as a transition and i i say to teachers about um the phrase nike just do it like think more about it like that with retrieval practice just make sure you do it um try not to fixate on it has to be at this point it has to be eight to ten minutes sometimes it will be quicker sometimes something pops up a misconception or a mistake and you think actually i need to tackle this right now so we’ve got to have we’ve got to plan retrieval practice in and think carefully about curriculum design because if you are adding in those extra lessons then obviously you will finish teaching the content later but it’s worth it it’s so worth it and that class that we where we’d be revising for two years didn’t feel like we were coming to the end and we had to feel like re-teaching everything again it was just we’re at a point where we’re just boosting the retrieval strength so we do need to go and go beyond do now they’re great for multiple choice great great for quizzing but it has its limitations