This episode of the Tips for Teachers podcast is proudly supported by Arc Maths
You can download an mp3 of the podcast here.
Sarah Cottingham’s tips:
- Use tips when they act as solutions to problems you face (04:16)
- Always build from what they know (17:21)
- Beware the curse of knowledge (30:14)
- Use research on learning not as a prescription but as a compass (38:56)
- Retrieval practice is worth investing time to understand and use (48:51)
Links and resources
- On Twitter, Sarah is: @overpractised
- Sarah’s blog is: overpractised.wordpress.com
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Watch the videos from Sarah Cottingham
Podcast transcript
Craig Barton 0:00
Hello, my name is Craig Barton and welcome to the tips for teachers podcast. The show that helps you supercharge your teaching one idea of the tongue. This episode I had the absolute pleasure of speaking to former English teacher and that teacher educator at the fantastic ambition Institute, Sarah Kotick. So Sarah is an expert in neuroscience retrieval practice schema, and lots of other things that are super useful for teachers to know about. I’ll tell you why this is one of my favourite episodes so far. Now, just before we dive in a quick word of thanks from our lovely sponsors. And sad news here, this is the end of this current batch of sponsorship by arc Max, I’m so grateful to our max, you know, they’ve supported the show from the start, they supported Mr. Barton last podcast, and it means that I can pay for hosting. But more importantly than that, I can also pay for my time. And what I mean by that is I can essentially pay my wife to let me spend hours speaking to people producing podcasts, producing videos, and so on and so forth. So thank you to our paths. So let’s hear about them. This episode of the tips for teachers podcast is proudly supported by RT maths as hopefully you know by now, ArcMap is a fantastic app designed to help your students remember all the math content at key stages three and four. It’s built around research into how memory works, specifically York’s work on the power of retrieval practice, on the Spacing Effect ensuring students don’t just practice what they’ve just studied, but are regularly exposed to content they’ve encountered days, weeks and months before. If you want to find out more simply search arc maths and mentioned my name is Art with a C, and I’ve got the next round of sponsorships lined up for future episodes, but there will be slots coming up available. So if you’ve got a product or a company or an event that you want to promote to 1000s of the very best listeners in the whole wide world, then just drop us an email. Easiest way to get in touch, Mr. Barton laughs@gmail.com. But there’s links on the tips for teachers website. Anyway, two things to remind you about before we get cracking into today’s episode. Firstly, as hopefully you know by now, we don’t just record the audio here we do the videos. And indeed, you can view the videos of all Sara’s tips, plus the tips of my other guests plus over 20 exclusive video tips from me on the tips for teachers website. These are great to share in departmental meetings or training sessions. And I’ll tell you why. Here’s a little easter egg. Look out in the background from some of Sara’s videos here, you get a little bit of a cameo appearance. That’s all I’ll say that. Secondly, you can sign up to the tips for teachers newsletter to receive a tip in your inbox every Monday morning to try out with your classes in the coming weeks. But certain dead good ones so far, lots of nice feedback for that. And please tell your colleagues about this if you think they’ll find it useful as well. Find out all about both of those things on the website. That’s tips for teachers.co.uk. And if you find this podcast useful, this is my one request. Please take a moment just to review it on your podcast player. It really does make a difference. Anyway, shut up Cray I know what you’re saying here. So back to the show. Let’s get learning with Today’s guests are wonderful Sarah Cottingham, spoiler alert, here are Sarah’s five tips. Tip one, use tips when they act as solutions to problems you face. It’s a brilliant one that you know, to always build from what they know. Number three, beware the curse of knowledge. Tip for use research on learning not as perscription but as a compass. And finally, Tip five retrieval practice is worth investing time to understand and use. If you look at the episode description of your podcast player or visit the episode page on tips for teachers dot code at UK you’ll see I’ve timestamps each of these tips so you can jump straight to anyone you want to listen to first or real listen to enjoy the show. I know you.
Well, it gives me great pleasure to welcome Sarah costume to the tips for teachers podcast. Hello, Sarah. How are you? Hi, Craig. I’m really well. Thank you. That’s fantastic. Right, Sarah for the benefit of listeners. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself ideally in a sentence?
Sarah Cottingahm 3:59
Yeah. So I am currently a teacher educator working for ambition Institute, designing on the NP Q’s. Before that I was an instructional coach. And before that I was an English teacher. So English teacher turn teacher educator.
Craig Barton 4:14
Amazing. Fantastic. Well, let’s dive straight in. What’s your first tip for us today, Sarah.
Sarah Cottingahm 4:19
So my first tip is is perhaps a bit rogue given that I’m giving a tip on how to use tips. So my first tip is that when you want to use tips about teaching, you should always try to match them with problems that you’re having in the classroom. And those problems should be rooted in learning. So I’ll give you a bit more detail on that. So when I was teaching the back in the day, we were encouraged to be like magpies. It was kind of like the fast fashion teaching where we pick up a technique we try it out. And then we’ve been it off and we do something different and it was just like what’s the next shiny thing I don’t think that that made my teaching much better. And it probably made me quite stressed out trying to keep keep keep up with all the new stuff. And so my my tip is that when you’re taking on tips, you want to be thinking about what problems Am I having in my classroom right now that I need to solve? Does this tip act as a solution to the problem I’m trying to solve? And and how is it going to benefit learning for my pupils. And that presupposes quite a lot of knowledge about like the problem in your classroom or the problems that you’re trying to solve. And I don’t mean problem in a really negative way. I think we’re all trying to solve problems in our classrooms all the time. But we want to understand what we should be like trying to solve and get better at, rather than just like collecting loads of solutions to things in one type of problem.
Craig Barton 5:57
I love this. This is great. This, I definitely want to dig a bit deeper into this. You’re absolutely right, I was exactly the same for many, many years, you go looking for the bright, shiny thing. And I think it’s almost even more problematic these days with I mean, certainly in the maths world, but I’m assuming this is the same in English and other subjects. There’s so much good stuff out there like your bank, you go on Twitter, and you’ve got ideas flying at you left, right and centre. And it’s almost like the classic Fear Of Missing Out you think, well, if I’m not doing that, or my God, that’s that’s not a good thing. So you’re all I’ll try that tomorrow. Try that tomorrow. Try that tomorrow. But I guess the point is that that might be that that’s all well and good. But if there are bigger problems that are more fundamental, they should be the things that you’re aiming to tackle first. What would that be about? Right?
Sarah Cottingahm 6:40
Yeah, I think so. And when when you’re talking there, Craig about like, you know, that fear of missing out and that touching all the different things you see, there’s an opportunity cost with that isn’t there, if you’re doing one thing, you’re not doing another thing. And so my kind of advice is like, let’s try and understand what what problems you are actually trying to solve. There is a caveat to that, though, that there is a kind of engineering thing in teaching, like everything you do, could be done slightly more efficiently in some ways. And I think when someone offers you a tip on how to make something that you’re doing already a little bit more efficient, then that’s the kind of thing you could take on quickly. So let me give you an example. When I was a teacher, I used to use mini whiteboards, I know a lot of us do. And one time a teacher came in to observe me and they were like, you can’t see those mini whiteboards very easily. When you look around the room, what you want to do is you want to get the kids at the back to hold them higher, the kids in the middle to hold them here and the kids at the front. So hold them here. That’s the kind of tip you can just take on straightaway. And that’s where I think what I’m saying kind of falls down a little bit. But generally speaking, if you’re going to take on something that’s going to change your teaching, it should be a solution to a problem.
Craig Barton 7:52
This is fascinating. Just on the on the whiteboard thing. I can’t stop talking or thinking about whiteboards at the moment. I the similar thing where for years, I’ve been using mini whiteboards. And you get that visual overwhelm. Whenever you hold them, the kids hold them up and you’re like, oh, okay, what’s going on here? And I heard a similar thing just on Twitter. A guy said, just ask the row in the back to show you this first. So you can just take that in. And then Okay, put those on now the middle row, so you can take it in. You’re absolutely right. Little things like that, that can tweak existing practice. I’m all in favour of those. And I want to return to that other part of the kind of fundamental the big changes. I think you alluded to this era that sometimes as novice teachers, it can be quite hard for us to identify where we’re struggling, sometimes we know. But often, like, things just don’t feel right in the lesson. And it’s like, well, what am I doing wrong here? Any advice on where teachers can? How we can identify those kind of big areas that we do need to find tips and advice on anything springs to mind there?
Sarah Cottingahm 8:48
Yeah, so really good question. So I think often, and you’ve kind of alluded to this, Craig, what you just said, like, we don’t really know what’s what’s wrong, we sort of get a sense of it, maybe. But we may not know, especially if we’re if we’re quite new to the profession. And so having someone who’s able to come into your classroom who’s trained to do that. There’s a lot of schools now who are using training coaches to do to do that kind of work. It could just be a peer, though, who’s able to kind of come in and just be that extra pair of eyes, and to have a look at what’s going on. However, I think it’s really useful to think about the problems that we’re all facing as teachers in the classroom and quote and try to frame them around those sorts of problems. So one example would be focusing attention. If the pupils aren’t focusing attention on the on the key learning in your lesson, and on the person who’s speaking be at you or one of their peers, then they just cannot take in what’s being said. So it could be that a school kind of as part of their teaching learning policy has a sort of set of problems, a well understood set of problems and a shared language. I know a lot of schools are kind of starting to do this now. around teaching and learning. And if you think about how much easier that makes this process, if I go into your lesson grave, and we’ve got a shared understanding of what learning is, and we’ve got shared understanding of these problems, I can go in and I can say, actually, I think today, you know, you do this doing this really well helping to solve this problem. And I think that this problem is the one we want to be working on together. And here’s a potential solution to this problem. Just a hypothesis, you know, I don’t know if it’s going to solve it. But here’s my potential solution. And that way, what we’re doing is we’re not just throwing techniques that you craved, where you have to sort of pick up the the next thing, we’re actually saying, like, let’s talk about a diagnosis here. What’s the problem? How do we diagnose this? What’s a potential solution? And you could say, Sarah, that sounds like a great solution. Let’s practice that, give it a go together, and then I’ll put it implemented in my classroom. Or you could say, I’ve got another solution, would this work, I’d feel more comfortable doing this. That might work as well.
Craig Barton 10:55
That’s nice. I just want to dig a bit deeper into this. This is something I’m terrible at Sarah. So for fee, I’m very lucky, I get to watch loads of lessons. And one thing I’ve done for many years is I’ve fallen into those classic cliches like when you sit down and chat to the person afterwards, you say things like, Oh, you need to work on your pace, your challenge your differentiation, and it’s meaningless, it’s absolutely meaningless, because he said, without those kind of concrete kind of strategies, or even even that concrete example of what you mean by pace and challenge, or otherwise, it just becomes abstract nonsense. And the other thing I think, is when I’m when I’m lucky enough to have a teacher watching me, I find it really beneficial if I can tell them ahead of time, what I want them to focus on. And I’ll say, right, I’m going to really try and improve the way I do cold call, or the way I use mini whiteboards to take your previous example, that then I always find gives much more effective kind of feedback and conversation afterwards, then if it’s just just kind of come in and watch me, but this is a bit of a ramble. I don’t even know where I’m going with this. But but that kind of final point, in essence, sometimes it can be tricky. If you’re this novice teacher, and you sense something’s going wrong. You can’t quite pinpoint what you want the person to look out. So maybe in that case, you say, Okay, come in and watch me see if you can figure out what’s going wrong. And I guess, then the burden of responsibility is on that observer, to try and make what they see as concrete as possible. And as you say, offer a diagnosis and a potential solution as as as just a big rumble. But any thoughts on
Sarah Cottingahm 12:21
that? Oh, yeah, that’s, that’s really interesting, because I think it’s making me think about, like the purpose of someone coming into your classroom, and that the purpose of coaching and like, I’m lucky enough ambition to work with some people who think really hard about this stuff. And, and what they’ve kind of taught me is like, I used to think that coaching was about the specific element of it, and just just about the specific the specific technique you tell the teacher to do, and the practice that you get them to do in the coaching. And actually, I’ve realised through reading and speaking to my colleagues, that it’s about the mental model that we’re trying to build for the teacher. So if I go in, and I just look at your teaching, and I say, You know what, I wouldn’t have done it like that, I would have used this technique that Craig’s not doing. I’m missing a trick here, because I’m just teaching you a technique. But if I go in, and we’ve got a shared understanding of learning, and I can say like, this is the learning problem, I think Craig’s needs to work on, this is a potential technique, and I can communicate that to you. And we have that shared language, you’re building a mental model of not only that technique, but why it works, how it works, how it links to learning, that’s going to make eventually your knowledge a lot more flexible, about how to use that technique, I think,
Craig Barton 13:33
yeah, that’s a couldn’t agree more. And, again, it’s this the more I think about and read about and experience this, this notion of shared shared vocabulary, shared understanding, it’s so important, isn’t it, because if you take some of those terrible examples, I use that pace challenge, I mean, pace, that can mean a million different things to to all different people. But even something like, you know, checking for understanding, or that even something that seems really specific, like that could mean different things to different people. So establishing the shared vocabulary between the teachers, and even the kids is is so important. I love that. Um, just to kind of bring this to a close because I’m fascinated by this, you’ve really got got me thinking now about the notion of, there are kind of two types of tips you want to be kind of looking for as a teacher, and correct me if I’ve got this wrong. So one is something that addresses something fundamental in your lessons, or your practice that you think needs to change. And that feels like something where you’d want to get some advice or a tip for but then the other one, I really like this idea of something that isn’t going to fundamentally change your classroom practice, but may just improve an aspect of it. So it’s not going to it doesn’t require a big wholesale change. Will that be right there? They’re kind of two two sources of help we should be be looking for.
Sarah Cottingahm 14:44
I’ve come to this conclusion. I wrote a blog where I didn’t quite say this because I’ve my my thinking has come along a bit. Craig, you know, you know what, it’s like you write it down. I wish I’d written something else. But yeah, I think I think for me, it’s more like it Hip would be more like the engineering problem about your teaching, like just quickly do this, this this little thing, and it will make this quicker and easier. The, I’d say it’s more a technique, if you’re trying to embed it into and that’s just, that’s my language that I understand it with. It’s more technique, if you’re saying like this is to achieve this goal, it’s less of a tip more techniques. So that’s probably how I’d, I’d kind of categorise it. But exactly as you’ve said, like something that’s quick, but something that takes a lot more embedding into my mental model to understand how to use it would be a technique,
Craig Barton 15:31
that’s great. I need to rebrand the site tips and techniques for teachers, I’m gonna go into the rebrand after there. So that’s good. Final question on this, this is probably the worst question I’ve asked you already. Already. is, why do you wait, where do you go for these tips and techniques? Do you have kind of either favourite sources? Is it all kind of just looking for expertise around you? Or do you have to have certain places you’d go? If you’re looking for a tip? Or you’re looking for a technique?
Sarah Cottingahm 15:53
Yeah, it’s a really good question. So I think like to not answer your question to start with is that I think, I think we need it we need that understanding of learning. And we need that shared understanding of learning because everything is couched in that or should be couched in that mental model. So if we’re a teacher that wants to improve our practice, but we don’t know what we’re trying to aim for, so we don’t really understand learning. And, you know, there’s not one definition of learning learning is massive. So we have to kind of read up on particularly, I like the kind of cognitive science stuff stuff about making meaning. If you read that sort of stuff, you start to get a broader understanding of what you’re trying to achieve through your teaching. And then for techniques, I am a huge dog lover of fan, because not only does it is he incredibly clear about the techniques, but he, in his newest version of the book, he links it into learning as well. So it’s like teaching with learning in mind. So that’s where I, I go for techniques.
Craig Barton 16:51
That’s great for the benefit of the people watching on YouTube. Here. Look, so I’ve got it next to me here. But why do you see this so this is gonna make you jealous when you see this? A flippin signed copy? Oh, yeah, that’s amazing. But yeah, I couldn’t agree more. It is the single is such a good book, right? It is just ridiculous. And I’ve read, I’ve read the original, I’ve read 2.0 I’m reading three points, like a brand new book. Like it’s just ah, yeah, what a book. What a book. Brilliant. Right, sir. That was fantastic. Okay, what is your second tip you’ve got for us today.
Sarah Cottingahm 17:25
Okay, so my second tip is probably the one I feel most passionate about, which is always build on what the learner knows. And I feel like we all intuitively know what I mean by that, like build on prior knowledge. That seems like a really obvious thing. But through kind of my studying of educational neuroscience, and through like reading and stuff like that, I’ve realised, I’ve come to realise that this is just underappreciated by myself, and others, like, people will only learn stuff that connects to what they already know. Otherwise, we’re kind of doing more kind of like rote learning and trying to sort of brand something onto their brains, rather than kind of like stitch it into kind of like the tapestry of what they know. So we want to always like pick up the thread of what they already know, and link that in to the new material. And what we already know, as people is just completely shapes what we learned. We pay attention to stuff based on what we already know. So we’re, you know, you as a teacher, we know this when you were first training, and you were told to go into that expert teachers lesson, and watch what they were doing, and then come away and emulate it, you’d go in and you’d sit there and you go, this just looks like magic. Like there’s no way I’m going to be able to teach like this, because you don’t have a mental model that allows you to see what’s really happening in that lesson. So you often want to go in with somebody else who’s more experienced, you can whisper in your ear and kind of tell them what you’re doing. Or you want to go and see someone who’s kind of just a notch above where you are, and have some support with that. But we don’t see stuff, we miss stuff. Based on our prior knowledge, our prior knowledge dictates what we actually see of the world. And it also dictates therefore what we can learn. So if we’ve got really good prior knowledge of something, it acts like that kind of mental Velcro. And we’re able to learn stuff far more quickly. If we don’t have a lot of prior knowledge. We don’t and we need stuff like break broken down and really carefully LinkedIn to what we know. So I just think what blows my mind about about the stuff we already have in our in our brains and our mental models is that it fully dictates what we get out of any situation and what we can learn and I just think that’s so important.
Craig Barton 19:58
Wow, okay, well, we need to we need to dig into this this is this is brilliant. I’m a bit obsessed with this, as well. And the other thing I kind of add to that as well, if you agree, it also, our prior knowledge also kind of determines the things we pay attention to as well, right? Like it’s, it’s not just what and obviously what we pay attention to is what we learn, you can get to two teachers have different experiences, or two students have different personalities. And they will be looking at completely different things like I always think students, if you give them a kind of contextual maths problem, some kids will be focusing on one thing like a surface feature, whereas the others will be looking at was immediately noticed the deep math. And as you say, to take your teacher example there, you’ll get two teachers watching the lesson. And they’ll pick completely different aspects are out of it because of their prior knowledge and experience. The attention parts fascinating isn’t
Sarah Cottingahm 20:47
it is absolutely fascinating. You’re totally right. And I think that’s, that’s why I think this is one of the most important things that people can know. And I think another another important thing that was drawn to my attention by someone else speaking to yesterday, who’s absolutely brilliant. He was saying, you know, your knowledge therapy, you kind of see knowledge in quite a narrow way. Think about knowledge, it depends on people’s cultures. You know, if you’re teaching an IRA lesson, you’re you’re trying to build on someone’s knowledge of Christianity, what is their knowledge of Christianity? It’s not just what you taught them last lesson or last half term, it comes from their, their backgrounds as well. And actually, you know, how often do we kind of dig into how someone thinks about the knowledge that we’re teaching in that way? And it might be more applicable in some subjects than other subjects? But yes, it’s certainly absolutely fascinating.
Craig Barton 21:37
This is interesting. So okay, so a couple of big questions here, which again, may or may be bad questions and vague questions. Where do you see people go wrong with this, and that you could approach this from either kind of teachers trying to get better? Or teachers working with students? Where do people go wrong? Where does it how do they not do this, if that makes sense?
Sarah Cottingahm 21:55
So I think I think when you when you recognise just the fundamental importance of what somebody knows, and then you also recognise that everybody knows different stuff, even if they follow the same curriculum with you. It’s better if they have if they followed that curriculum, and you know that you’ve inherited this class of Craig Barton, and you know, that he would have taught them this stuff. So you know, you can kind of bank on that being, you know, their prior knowledge, that’s really helpful. But even then, everybody’s got this, this different knowledge, because everybody is different. And that’s both simultaneously brilliant, and really annoying, isn’t it for as a teacher, so I think that where it can kind of fall down is that people don’t appreciate quite how idiosyncratic everybody’s like prior knowledge is. And so we might ask, like, one, one hinge question with a misconception that and think, right, gosh, they’ve got it, like, let’s move on, actually checks for understanding. Doesn’t need to be quite like deeper than that. And there’s a there’s a brilliant blog I read a little while ago that we’re not checking for we’re not checking that they understand we’re checking what they understand. Because like, it’s they’re not going to understand exactly what you transmitted to them. But what direction did they take that knowledge in? Did they take it in the misconception way? Did they take it in the, you know, understood it exactly. As the teacher said it way, or did they take it in some other way? And how do we check for that understanding? And I think we think we’re good at checking for understanding, because we’ve got all of these techniques to do it now. But if do we really under it? Do we really appreciate kind of how different everybody’s knowledge is and how many directions we can take things in? And our OB, checking for understanding? Is it robust enough? I suppose is my is my annoying question. There.
Craig Barton 23:48
Sir, I’m frantically scribbling the Africa about everything you say. I’m just ideas are flying here. So I’ve got a few things to ask you. Anything could come out my mouth for you just just to warn you. So the first thing to say is anytime I think about this checking for understanding, I always go back I go back to Dylan William just just generally in life anyway, he’s always got a quote for summer. But I really like well, he has his classic thing of we need to start where the student is not where we think, want the student to be. I always like that one. But I also like what he says, when I’ve fallen into this trap, where I’ve said to kids, come on, you’re in year nine, surely you know this. And Dylan’s point is, well, the way you get into year nine is you’re in year eight, and you have a summer holiday and then you’re in year nine, like there’s no you know, it’s not like you have to pass an exam or anything. So to move up a year so yeah, but so that was the first thing I wanted to say. The same thing. I love this, check what they understand. That’s really that feels really powerful to me. So I’m a big, big user of diagnostic questions to to check for check for prior knowledge, particularly prerequisite knowledge. I really like using them for that. But the the kind of advantage of diagnostic questions is they’re really quick to ask and collect responses in. But of course, the downside is well first is multiple choice you could guess What if but also, it’s a very kind of you’re assessing a very specific thing. Certainly with maths like if I ask a diagnostic question on equivalent fractions, it’s a very specific thing I’m assessing their understanding of. But if I really want to know what they know about it, that one question is probably not going to cut it. So either I need to ask more questions, or I need to ask them to explain their responses that sometimes works quite well or generate their own examples. It’s, it’s taking it above and beyond isn’t it to go and this idea of depth in terms of check for understanding I think we often think in terms of depth of kind of new learning and learning something new going deeper, but but a deeper check for understanding checking what they understand. That feels really good. Again, just in just a ramble, this area is
Sarah Cottingahm 25:42
so important, and I need to credit Johnny grand on Twitter who said the check, check what understanding which is I just absolutely light bulb moment for me, and brilliant blogger. And I think like what you just said there really hits to the heart of something, which is that what does it mean to understand in your subject, but we can say like, I, you know, we know that I’ve taught it, they learned it is false. But like, what does it mean that learning isn’t banking information? Learning is developing the mental model. So what does it look like at different stages of that development of mental model in maths in history, whatever it is, and therefore, what do we use to check that different those different levels of understanding? So for example, like your your diagnostic questions, brilliant, and then it’s like, so can you explain to me why the answer isn’t see? Yeah, and you will do all of that stuff. That stuff, Craig, but it just gets you to that level of of check. That’s like, that’s, that’s actually like, it’s appreciating that understanding develops over time, and that it’s not something that just happens.
Craig Barton 26:52
Slip hit are great. Well, I’d say what I’ve got one kind of comment, and then one question, so feel free to comment on the on my comment, or feel free just to kind of nod or shake your head, because that’s nonsense. So the, the thing I often get when I say to teachers, okay, right, we’re going to do a pre it’s good idea to do a prerequisite knowledge, I’m going to need to dig a bit deeper, and so on and so forth. They’ll say, Well, I haven’t got time, I don’t have the time, the curriculum is so jam packed, my time has got to be spent teaching the kids the new stuff, because we’ll never get to the end of the scheme of work or whatever it is. And my response is always well, if you don’t do the prior knowledge check, and that knowledge isn’t there. They’re going to come and stop later on. And it’s just going to cost you more time as things go through. Would that be can you hear this? And would that be kind of your response as well? Or is there anything else we can say? Yeah, I
Sarah Cottingahm 27:37
think that it’s a great, it’s a great response. But so it’s a great question, like tight time is so precious. And if we’re going to ask teachers to do something, we have to be sure, don’t worry that it’s something that is worth their time. And I think your answer is great their grade, like you almost don’t have time not to do this, because because if we appreciate that they’re only going to make things meaningful. And that’s going to say, forgetting happens, doesn’t it, we know that forgetting is way more likely to happen faster, if we’ve tried to kind of brand it onto their their memories rather than, like linked it in. And we can only link it in if we understand what they know. So what is worth, in my opinion worth the time, time investment, as you say,
Craig Barton 28:24
I love it. Final question on this. And this is something I had a discussion with Joe Morgan, a math teacher who was on the show. And she said and when she said this, I thought you know, you’re absolutely right here. She said, a lot of emphasis goes on training teachers and supporting teachers to get better at this checking for understanding whether it’s mini whiteboards diagnostic questions, whatever it may be. But if we then don’t put equal emphasis on how you then respond to that information, then it’s a waste of time. And I see this in lessons. It’s unbelievable. Like, you’ll get a teacher who does a prerequisite knowledge check. Arthur could start flipping clue what’s going on with it and teach it just cracks on or the teacher just says, Okay, well, you do it this way. And then moves on assuming that that one sentence explanation is going to magically Do it. Do you see this that actually, the respond part of responsive teaching sometimes gets kind of overshadowed by the actual mechanisms of collecting in those responses if
Sarah Cottingahm 29:17
that? Oh, 100%. And I think I think it links into what we were saying in the in tip number one, which is about that we need to understand learning and the mental model that sits behind these techniques. If we understand that we’re supposed to be checking for understanding and here’s a technique to check for understanding, then we fall short. Because, you know, we just think that that’s the job done the check for understanding. But if we realise that the check for understanding and that’s an inbuilt part of our schema that we need to check for understanding in order to then change our teaching, because learning only happens when we link to what they know now we know they know something different. And then then we realise that it’s this process and this what Ali kav talks about, The Loop. Yeah, we’ve checked for understanding. And then we’ve responded and checkpoints and then we’ve responded. So it’s like it becomes part of a loop rather than, like, done the technique tick.
Craig Barton 30:11
Move on. Okay, Sarah, what is tip number three, please.
Sarah Cottingahm 30:17
So, tip number three is one that’s quite close to my heart, I think because it’s, I think we all do it all the time. So tip number three is beware of the curse of knowledge. So a lot of people know what the curse of knowledge is. But for those who don’t, the curse of knowledge is that when you gain knowledge in an area, you are you’ve kind of built up your mental model, or what some people call that collection of schemas, which are kind of your networks of knowledge. So as you get more expert, you kind of built those networks of knowledge. And you’ve streamlined your thinking on something, it’s therefore very difficult for you to think like a novice, again, because you’ve kind of built up this schema. And teachers are probably much better than most people at this because they also have schemas about how to teach their subject, which has caused them to have to sort of think about how to break it down and things like that. But we can never really go back to being the novice, the novice learner. So we’re always teaching in a way that overestimates what the learners in front of us are going to take from what we say, we’re always thinking, you know, we’ve been clear enough there. Surely they’ve, you know, I can assume they know that I can see, these things are quite implicit. But we’re kind of always making those assumptions. And obviously, you can see what the downside of that would be. It would mean that we ended up kind of pitching things to high leaving gaps, and then our learners are kind of getting lost. Is that okay? Great if I tell you about the study that sort of linked to this, because I really loved I really loved this study. So it was a study by Elizabeth Newton. And what she did was she got a group of people in pairs, and each pair had a tapper and a listener. And the tapper was told to pick a kind of well known song like Happy birthday, and they were going to like tap the song for their listener partner. And they were going to see how many of those listener partners were able to guess correctly the song from the tapping. And what was really interesting was that they said to the tappers, they said, have you know, how many of your, you know, listeners do you think are actually going to get this right? And they predicted about 50%. In real life, it was only about 2.5% of people who got it, right. So it’s that idea that like, we’ve got this tune in our heads, and I like I like it as a metaphor. Like, we’ve got this tonight, we’ve got this knowledge that we know. And we’re tapping it out, we’re saying it to the class, and we’re assuming that they’re kind of keeping up with it. But actually 2.5% of them? Maybe not that low, but like, yeah, not not that many are.
Craig Barton 33:15
Wow. So I guess the obvious question is, how do we overcome this, this this curse of knowledge as teachers? Is it as simple as just improving our check for understanding?
Sarah Cottingahm 33:24
I think I think that’s definitely that’s definitely part of it. is like, is there anything more important than a good check for understanding? I’m not sure. But yeah, and that’s definitely part of it. I think it comes in the in the planning stage as well. And I’ve been in wonderful planning meetings with with departments where they, the way they think about what they’re communicating, and they how they plan to communicate. And they share the examples that seem to work for their pupils with the rest of the department, and they share their concrete examples, they share their analogies, and they share those things that really kind of get allow their learners to understand at the level that their learners are at the knowledge that they’re trying to convey. So like really good, really good kind of sharing of good concrete examples, good analogies, and sometimes even listing out the knowledge that it takes to understand a particular concept can really be eye opening. Because then if you sit down, you force yourself to say like, do they have these prerequisites? Do I know how do I know? Then you start to realise just how much they need to know in order to access what it is that you’re saying?
Craig Barton 34:37
Can I just ask you a bonus question sir, I don’t get to speak to many English English teachers or former English teachers. I’m all in a massive massive bubble occasionally our last science teacher and nobody says mainly what are some of you will check for understanding techniques what what we what works well in English,
Sarah Cottingahm 34:51
so I had to hold my hands up Craig and say, I was a terrible English teacher. When I was an English teacher. I now feel like if I went I want I will one day go back into the classroom and hopefully be better. But it’s a bit like your book How I wish I taught math. And how I wish I taught English. So I can’t say that I was particularly good at it. I used to use whiteboards for like quick and easy things that I could see. And I used to, there used to be a lot of like, think pair share kind of stuff that I would do, I thought think pair share was particularly useful, just after you had delivered some new material. And I now realise that the reason I was finding it useful was because of that idea of what we say, hits the interface of the pupils mind and changes. And I think what happens when you do think pair share is that you’ve allow them that time to process, but what you’ve said and link to kind of what what they already know. And you can go around and go, Wow, that is not what I said. That is not what I said, so Oh, wow. Okay, that’s really landed. And I think it gives you that quite immediate check that they’ve sort of it’s kind of hit hit the right note, I suppose.
Craig Barton 36:11
That’s really nice. And one final thing on curse of knowledge. So what about this for a twist? So I didn’t see this coming? Right. So you’ve you’ve made the point, I think it’s completely valid, that perhaps teachers we are slightly better at avoiding the curse of knowledge than perhaps other other non non teachers, because we’ve experienced and we’ve also, yet we think about how to teach things to novices. That’s, that’s, that’s the essence of the job. But what about this twist? Right? So I was in a school last week, and it was a school where they, they set in maths, and they also have parallel sets. So across the year, right to be split, you’ve got two top sets, two second sets, and so on, and so forth, just because a timetable issues. So I was working with a teacher of a bottom set year eight on one side, but also the teacher of the equivalent bottom sat on the other side, if that makes sense. The teacher, one of the teachers was very experienced, I think, I think she’d been teaching for maybe like, let’s say, seven or eight years, something like that. The other was an arc you’d see in a first year. What was fascinating was that the experienced teacher when she was planning the lesson had much lower aspirations for where the kids were going to get to, because she was saying, well, the bottom set, so she’s obviously taught lots of kids in the past, as the mom said, they’re not going to get there, blah, blah, blah. So she’d set the bar fairly low. The acuity didn’t have a flippin clue. So she’s asking all these hard questions left, right and centre, low the low behold what happens? The kids made far more progress if for whatever we define progresses, but they were answering more complex questions in the AKI T’s lesson, then in the experience, teachers lesson, so I just wonder whether sometimes more experienced as a teacher, obviously, it’s a good thing. But if it’s sometimes we kind of, you know, don’t realise that every class is different. And also, you know, and have these check for understanding things in there. There’s a bit of a danger that that that kind of curse of knowledge might actually be Yeah, you know, what I’m trying to say here that I just thought was a fascinating kind of scenario. I’ve never seen that before.
Sarah Cottingahm 38:09
Yeah, yeah, that’s, that’s really interesting. And it just goes to show like, the expectation seems to Trump most of what we’re saying here. And yeah, and that knowledge could be is knowledge in different domains, like knowledge of what you think the pupils are able to achieve as well. So yeah, like, I think that’s a really important one with all of these kind of tips that we’ve we’ve got is that, in teaching, teaching is mad, isn’t it? Like there’s so much stuff going on? Everything is kind of intersecting. So whereas this this tip, this kind of tip in isolation, sounds good. What you’ve just said it’s kind of throwing that a little bit in a different direction, which is brilliant. But yes, I think I think expectations. Yeah, drive drives, everything really doesn’t.
Craig Barton 38:53
They certainly think okay, Sara, what’s Tip number four, please.
Sarah Cottingahm 38:59
So tip number four is something I’ve kind of come to through the MA in education, neuroscience, what I’ve been thinking about how does, how can we use neuroscience to help teachers, and this is this tip is that we want to use research on learning, not as a prescription, but as a compass. So what do I mean by that? Well, I mean that your classroom is incredibly complex. So research in psychology, particularly in neuroscience, you know, it quietens all of those conditions. It’s not taking place in the in the classroom, it’s taking place in a lab, often not always. And it’s done on materials like word pairs, which are very different to the kinds of materials often that we use in classrooms. And there are lots of different things that make it kind of not as ecologically valid to kind of just translate it to tourists just transport it, I suppose, and just plop it into the classroom. So I I think that whilst that’s kind of demoralising, sometimes that we can’t just like get what we need out of out of out of this research. I think it’s also really empowering. Because we are the experts, as teachers and teacher educators in our classrooms, we are the professionals and the experts, and we do the translation into the classroom. So research doesn’t prescribe to us exactly what we should do. It can give us these kinds of principles, these ideas, these heuristics that we can take and use in a classroom, but they’re unlikely to be exactly how the researcher used it in a particular study. And they can kind of give us ideas how about how it might work. But when we take it into classroom level, it acts as a kind of compass for us, it directs us to doing something, but it doesn’t tell us exactly how to do it.
Craig Barton 40:58
I feel super, super smart advice that Sarah, I’ve certainly been guilty of this, I spoke about this before how I’d never read research for 12 years, then I started reading it, first thing I read, I thought, well, this is the best thing I’ve ever read in my life. Just apply that left, right and centre. And then the more you read, the more you realise things contradict each other a bit. And as you say, if you dig into the experimental design, you think, well, this isn’t the same as teaching quadratic equations to a year nine on a Friday afternoon, and so on and so forth. And just well, to kind of follow up questions really, one is do you have any examples of this Sarah, either that you’ve seen when you’ve been working with teachers or sign of where a teacher has taken a essentially a research finding, but then adapted it to make it work for for better for their class, anything springs to mind with with that?
Sarah Cottingahm 41:41
Yeah, I’ve seen it kind of the one example is routines. So we we have this, like, general sense that routines are important, like they’re there in a lot of the assessment frameworks for teachers are that you need to have these routines. And I think like if we understand what sits behind the benefit of routines, or lots of things sit behind the benefit routines. But one thing in particular is, if you’ve got good routines in your lessons, then it decreases the people’s kind of cognitive load of like, all of that kind of stuff, so that they can focus on the hard stuff in your lessons, which is learning the content. So we’re almost like quietening, all the like, you know, the stuff that’s like handing things out and sitting down and what the task structure is going to be. But then we actually kind of can put in some some harder stuff for them to focus on. And that means that when you go into lessons, you might see different routines kind of playing out differently for different teachers, there might be a bit of personality injected into, you know, different ways of doing the routines. But the teachers, they don’t stray from the fact that routines are important need to be in there, wherever they should be there, they’re there, and that they are kept the same every lesson. So I think that’s a really easy one that you that you see. Another one which which has kind of been taken to the extreme a little bit is retrieval practice. So I did my dissertation on retrieval practice, I’m a bit obsessed with it. But it’s everybody quite rightly thinks it’s a great thing to do. There’s lots of benefits of retrieval. So we’ve kind of mandated these these sorts of retrieval practice star to activities at the beginning of lessons. And like, one of the things we need to recognise I suppose about retrieval practice is it does matter what you retrieve, you know, it’s not just five random questions. But what is the important knowledge in your subject takes a lot of understanding of your subject to set good retrieval practice questions. And I feel like that’s got slightly lost under the idea that we should just do retrieval practice starter activities. So we want to really understand they’re some of the stuff on research that can act as a compass for us. So one of those is like, it matters, what you retrieve. One of them is like retrieval should be reasonably effortful. We need to balance effort and success. So we don’t want to be getting them to return free stuff, it’s too easy. And we want to be using feedback. So if we’ve got these five retrieval practice things, but we were only spending five minutes on it, and Craig, I don’t really have time to get back to him. But I need to do retrieval practice ticket off the list and move on, then then what we’re doing is we’re we’re kind of, we’re using it as a you know, we’re using it not even really as a prescription, we’re just kind of we’re sort of throwing it in there, but we need to use it as a as a way to use the research as a compass that understand the research in order to do the technique kind of properly.
Craig Barton 44:39
Or this is fascinating. I’m gonna ask you a terrible question. I’m gonna put you on the spot here, Sarah. So I see a really bad advantage go for anyway. The I really like there that you’ve got kind of retrieval and you’ve got a few kind of Best Bets is a phrase I often use the kind of guiding principles that you think you know, I’m pretty sure that this is solid. And now When it’s up to the teacher to think what the what they can do to make that work in their lesson. So the facts do retrieval first make retrieval effort for give feedback, they feel like pretty, you know, Best Bets. And then there’s it’s up to the teacher to try and make them work. Same with the routines rooted pretty, pretty good bet that having retained is a good thing. Now, it’s about how we try to translate that into the classroom. But terrible question is, do you have any more of these kinds of things that you would consider to be pretty, pretty good bets that you would say to teachers, all right over to you now, this is what the research says over to you. How can you make this work in your classroom?
Sarah Cottingahm 45:33
Yeah, so another one, which we know is really robustly spacing, spacing stuff out, rather than rather than blocking? So we’re not we’re not 100%? Sure, on the on the perfect schedule for spacing. But yeah, we never will be though, because it will depend on what your learners know, and how quickly they forget it, which would depend on how you taught it would depend on what they know. And then it’s all just a big mess, isn’t it? But spacing is it does seem like a good bet. Combining spacing and retrieval seems like a good bet spacing to the point where you think your learners are just going to be about to forget, completely. But that’s really hard to do. But yeah, space spacing seems like a good one, I was just having a really great conversation with an expert on interleaving. And I think that that is a really misunderstood or certainly by me, strategy. So he was fascinating on this, Craig. So he was saying, you know, it’s, if you want to teach someone a concept, and teach them, like the boundaries of the concept, interleaving can be really good for saying like, it’s like this, but it’s not quite like this, and you’re sort of that discrimination. But he made the point that like if we tried to interleave at a macro level, like on a Monday, we teach this topic, on a Tuesday we teach this topic, we’re not getting that discrimination, because they’re on different days. So we’ve sort of, we’ve taken the research, and we’ve gone, you know, perhaps lethal mutation with it, rather than treating it as a compass to kind of guide us. So it seems like interleaving useful for discrimination. And forgetting, sure use this in maths for getting during the practice stage without apply different strategies for different questions. But at that macro level, he’s not sure that there’s that research that shows that it’s going to it’s going to do the job.
Craig Barton 47:24
That’s fascinating that month. My last question, again, this is this is this isn’t great, either. The you mentioned lethal mutation. Now I was having a conversation, it’ll come out the episode before this with Bradley Bosch, who I think might have even been on your interleaving caucus, he was telling me he was going to be speaking speaking to you as well. And Bradley, we were talking about research. And Bradley made a really interesting point that I’ve never considered before. And he said that sometimes what we consider to be lethal mutations can actually turn out to be really positive things because somebody may take the research, and Alright, even if you completely misinterpret the research, he’s probably not going to be great. But if you take the research and perhaps think it’s saying something, and you then try to apply that, and then it changes and stuff in your classroom, actually, the result can be something that works, you know, particularly well, so maybe these because there’s a danger in that you hear the phrase lethal mutation, and that says to me, okay, best practice is to stick to exactly what the research suggests I could do. So try, you know, create the conditions and it never works. Whereas if we say, okay, you know what, exactly to say your phrase, let’s use it as a compass, then maybe we get some of these mutations, which aren’t lethal, but which actually worked really well for your either your classroom contexts, or maybe even better, your school context, and so on and so forth. So, all not all mutations are lethal, I guess, is what I what I’m trying to say here.
Sarah Cottingahm 48:37
I love that. I love that. I think that’s great. Yeah,
Craig Barton 48:40
I need a snappy phrase for it that I don’t know what the opposite of a lethal
Sarah Cottingahm 48:44
or non lethal mutations.
Craig Barton 48:47
From that I need to Brandon on this. Okay, Sarah, what’s your fifth and final tip, please.
Sarah Cottingahm 48:55
So my fifth and final tip, which sort of builds on on that actually, what we just spoke about is that retrieval practice is worth investing time to understand and use. And I think that there’s almost been a little bit of a kind of FAD around retrieval practice. And I was 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, his work is fantastic on that. And I think that for for my MA, 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 strategy to use. So retrieval practice, just for anyone who isn’t sure is, is low stakes testing. So instead of getting people say to like reread their notes on something they would, you would give them some kind of low stakes questions to check their understanding. And what it seems to do is just enormously powerful for the brain. So whereas when you read 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, reread 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 really powerful, it kind of speeds up that storage consolidation process in the brain. And another way it does it, which is just super cool with like, when you retrieve something, 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’re combining it with new context cues in your environment, depending on how you retrieved it. You’re also like changing the schema that you’ve got in your brain, you’re, you’re you’re making further, stronger connections to other knowledge, weakening connections to knowledge, it’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. So it’s doing loads of dynamic things when you retrieve information. So that’s why I think it’s really worth investing some time in, like, how you can use it properly, understanding the conditions that it works really well, and and factoring it in to teaching. One thing I would say is that there’s been for quite rightly, lots of pushback where people have said, you know, you can only retrieve stuff, you’ve the pupils are actually sort of understood in the first place. Whereas all the thinking about how we kind of get them to understand and make meaning from stuff in the first place. So that’s obviously a really important piece. But I’m just talking about retrieval practice here once a year, once you 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.
Craig Barton 52:09
Obviously, for me, I love a bit of retrieval. So let’s dive into there. So I’m going to start with a big name drop. I was taught this at any time, when I had Robert Elizabeth Bjork on my podcast a few years, many years ago now actually, I asked Robert or Bob, as I 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, 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 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 phrase that retrieval is a memory modifier. I think that’s really, really like a really strong phrase to bear in mind. So I really like that. My question to you as it’s 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 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, that one that I see a lot, right. So this is your classic start at the start, 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 either transformations, you want to do a rotation that is quite hard 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. Once they start or do nails on the board. They’re just sat there having a bit of a rest, maybe the 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, as are? Well, there’s just a starter. And these like think that this is something that teachers 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 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, the method for retrieval that you speak of. But the the other more subtle downside is the teacher thinks that they’ve provided a retrieval opportunity. So they think, Oh, brilliant. Well, we’ve retrieved rotation. We did that three weeks. I taught him three weeks. I 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 start. I think there’s something about the start of the lesson, because it’s busy kids are arriving at different times. Maybe the teachers handed out no To say some stuff, something about the starter that I don’t think it’s the best place to do the dish retrieval. But that’s just one thing I see what what do you see, Sarah?
Sarah Cottingahm 55:09
That’s really interesting. I did. Yeah, I can see how I could see how that would happen. And you know if it’s not if it’s not Yeah, it’s all taken care of it’s like this is this is just the first five minutes. We’re all kind of coming those kids
Craig Barton 55:21
Sorry to interrupt. But what’s the interesting thing those kids who do that, whenever the lesson in inverted commas start properly in their eyes. So when the teacher says, Alright, today, we’re going to be doing this the set up the pens already, that’s when they’re attentive. So it’s like they think it’s some kind of warm up or something like that is just fascinates me.
Sarah Cottingahm 55:38
No, that’s, that’s really interesting. I hadn’t kind of realised that. But it makes perfect sense that that would that would happen. And then of course, they’re not doing any retrieval in that time. And even worse, the teacher might be thinking, yes, we’ve achieved some things here, which is, yeah, is really is really bad. So yeah, that’s a really great way I’m going to add to my my bank of things that go wrong during retrieval practice. And we talked about that talked 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 was 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 of that you’re going to be teaching? Often, you see kind of retrieval practice questions are a source of quite random. And and that’s what I say random, 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 reactivate 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 there, the effort and success thing is interesting. We want to we want to balance effort and success. And retrieval practice is a desirable difficulty. Yeah, you know, the beauty of York’s much better than me, Bob, and Liz, yep. I love that, by the way, I love that podcast, it was one of my favourites that you did with them. And I think that effort and success thing is potentially kind of a difficult one to achieve. Because we also want to be motivating for people’s 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. But generally speaking around a kind of 75% Correct kind of benchmark is probably providing the research suggests or kind of, about right balance between effort and success, but 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, in the start activity is going to be hugely demoralising for them, we might want to actually hit it more like a kind of 90% success rate, 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, rather than that, 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 round, and we’re looking at how they’re answering the questions, and we’re like, 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 drop in a few hints some way or another. And that can kind of boost the the success there. The feedback on it is interesting, I think, because I think generally speaking, it’s a very good idea to give the feedback, but obviously feedbacks its own realm, isn’t it? And you know, we can say, Oh, give give feedback after retrieval practice. But are they paying attention to the feedback, right? Like, what are they doing with this feedback to kind of internalise it? So that’s its own kind of realm of are you doing the feedback? 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.
Craig Barton 59:34
That’s interesting. Just Just one thing on this if we just just jump back to the starter just temporarily and the reason I’m obsessed with it, I am obsessed with started. I’ll just throw that out there. Every lesson I’m looking at to watch. I’m fascinated by looking at how the teacher starts the lesson and as I say, particularly what the kids are doing whilst whilst that’s happening. So what you see maps 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 well I’m Sarah during this this ramble if that’s okay, so what you you often see three types of in inverted commas retrieval style starters in maths lessons in my experience anyway. So one, you definitely get the kind of looks random, but as often kind of built in with with space and in mind, but crucially, as you say, it’s for 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 are 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 lesson that’s coming up. So that interests me, but But you definitely see these kind of standalone status. And I’m not convinced kids take those all that seriously, just just generally, the second thing you see are kind of prerequisite 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 a new knowledge 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 the start that type of unit, their start will be on prerequisite knowledge. And then lesson two, that we’re back to one of these kind of four, disconnected, and 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 and a retrieval expert. Have you seen that last lesson last week, last term last year framework. So this is used loads in 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 they’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, there’s 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, if any of that kind of Yeah. Triggers anything in your mind.
Sarah Cottingahm 1:02:12
Yeah. Wow. So it was great. I love how quickly you can you can kind of categorise those, given how many lessons you think. I mean, the short answer is I don’t I don’t know. What’s what’s what’s best. So I’m, again, I’m using research as a kind of compass here. So the prerequisite knowledge texts, like feels to be like a great way to kind of like to check for understanding and to warm up that knowledge that’s then going to get built on and used the the last less than last term, I can see how that that seems to maximise spacing, as you were saying. So that kind of that seems to make sense. Maybe you leave the last lesson one as the final questions. So that’s just been reactivated before we go into 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 we’re 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, 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, for us there. But it is it is a it is a difficult one to say. What I also say is like, 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 displays on the, you know, Alexa that they can look at they generally speaking are retrieving for a lot of the lesson. So if we decide that a start 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 could 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. Yeah, I go for I go for two and three there just as a kind of best bet.
Craig Barton 1:04:34
I can shift one to kind of homework because of the thinking we 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 again, rotations are 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 will do or something like that. But I like that idea of shift. I like to have your idea So I really liked the idea of shifting those to standalone. And then maybe making that last lesson last week shift in the last lesson one to the last thing that’s experiment with that.
Sarah Cottingahm 1:05:09
I think a great way that people are organising their curricula now is allowing for this, this stuff to happen through like organising around concepts. So I know a lot of fair to 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 English and potentially other subjects that that seems to work quite well as well.
Craig Barton 1:05:36
Fascinating. Well, Sara, I have learned absolutely loads this is my page just absolutely rammed full notes. This is this is absolutely incredible. So let me hand over to you. What should listeners check out of yours? It’s time to time to do a bit of plug in what would you want to?
Sarah Cottingahm 1:05:53
What should they check out? I have I have a blog. If anyone wants to read the blog, it’s over practice.com Where I blog about teacher education and about education, neuroscience in teaching, trying to make the connection. And I’m on Twitter at over practised with an S. So if anyone wants to follow up, sometimes I put some threads up and then cross my fingers that I haven’t said anything wrong. Yeah,
Craig Barton 1:06:21
that’s pretty well, they’ll be links to both of those in the show notes for people to check out but honestly, so this has been Yeah, it’s blown my mind give me loads of practical things to think about. It’s been absolutely brilliant. So thanks so much for joining us.
Sarah Cottingahm 1:06:32
No, thank you, sir. Pleasure. Lovely to meet you, Craig.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
