Progress Over Time- Part 2- Individual Practice Implications for Teachers

In this series of blog posts, I will share with you memos that I am issuing to all teaching staff at my school, Wyvern College, to update them on a whole-school ‘Progress Over Time’ teaching & learning development initiative. The teachers at Wyvern are a talented, highly-committed and special group of people. I’m sure you will agree, the work they are producing in exploring how to effectively implement retrieval practice, spacing and interleaving is quite inspirational…

Earlier posts in this series:

Part 1 -Using Research- How Robust is the Effect

Part 2-Individual Practice Implications for Teachers

The differences between ‘performance’ and ‘learning’ are …

Factors that ‘prop up’ students’ performance in lessons, but that are not there on delayed tests include…

In which knowledge and skills do students need to build high-levels of fluency?

Across the college and our taught subjects, it was clear from meetings with CLs that one notion that seemed to resonate significantly was that in order to perform well on the respective ‘higher-order’ exam-style questions, there is a ‘foundational base’ of knowledge within in each subject that students need to develop high-levels of fluency in.

Fluency alone is not enough, of course; students still need to be taught the higher-order skills.  However, if students lack fluency with the prior foundational knowledge from which the higher-order abilities build, teaching those higher-order skills becomes much less efficient. Making an analogy- teaching factorisation of quadratics to a student that doesn’t know their timestables is near impossible.

In our meetings with CLs thus far it has been fascinating to explore what these particular skills and knowledge looks like across the taught curriculum. Here is a non-exhaustive sample of what CLs have expressed to date about their subjects:

Laraine (Languages)– More than just vocabulary, it is tenses and common phrases too. Laraine has done excellent work looking in detail at what this knowledge is for the year 7 Languages curriculum and has already put strategies into action to build students’ fluency.

Emma (Religious and Personal Studies)– Religious teachings- the central beliefs, ideas and instructions of each religion (including atheism!). Essential vocabulary associated with the content and also English translations of Hindu words.

Bryan (Music)– While there are many foundational skills with regards to performance, of particular interest was recent additions to the Music GCSE in the form of a Special Study. Within this students are expected to study Haydn’s Clock symphony and other pieces in great depth. To do this successfully, students need fluency with understanding the composer, other works, elements of sonata form, instruments that form a ‘Classical Orchestra’, dynamics, harmony, melody, rhythm and metre, timbre, structure and the related associated vocabulary.

Craig (Science)- Key definitions of vocabulary, fundamental concepts in the periodic table, conceptual understanding of energy types, significant areas of fluency with maths such as area and unit conversions, cause and effect relationships, fundamentals of atomic structure, fundamentals of reactions.

Matt (Media)–  Key vocabulary such as enigma codes and action codes. Camera concepts such as crabbing, extreme close-up, tracking, jump cuts and crash-zoom.

Steve (Technology)– The new 9-1 Technology GCSE is first examined next academic year, a year behind most subjects’ first 9-1 sitting and two years behind English & Maths.  Accordingly, issuing of the new exam specifications and indicative sample papers is still relatively in its infancy. Steve quite rightly is holding back from attempting to fully ‘atomise’ the knowledge students need to be fluent in within his subject until the government and exam boards have put a little more ‘meat on the bone’ with regards to specifics of what the exams will assess. Nonetheless, there will certainly be a whole raft of technical vocabulary in which students need to be fluent such as ergonomics, thermo-polymer, anthropometric data, environmental impact etc. Material properties are another fundamental knowledge base. Furthermore, students need fluency with contemporary trends, including ’emerging technologies’. Finally and similarly to science, the mathematical demand has dramatically increased, and fluency with calculating missing angles, areas and so on is an essential prerequisite.

Katherine (Art)– What makes a great artist? Do you need an understanding of the artistic genres to be a great artist yourself? What difficult questions these are to answer! With regards to fluency, there are elements of technical ability, understanding of colour theory and use of composition etc., but there is also a purely creative, expressive dimension too. Katherine and I had a fascinating discussion exploring these ideas which are challenging to pin down. Katherine talks about students who ‘can see’ and students who ‘can do’ and all variations of these- those that can do but can’t see etc. Concerning fluency, there are elements associated with both ‘seeing’ and ‘doing’.

There is, of course, more work that CLs want to do with their teams in this area and all of them that I’ve met with over the last few weeks expressed the desire for Wyvern to plan time for them to do it. Indeed, one of the messages I will be passing on as a result of this work will be a request for dedicated time in future INSET days for further exploration and documenting of the knowledge and skills within each of our subjects in which we want to focus on developing high-levels of student fluency.

Which knowledge and skills makes the ‘fluency priority list’? Once we have that defined, to build the fluency we plan within our lessons to retrieve, space and interleave…

How are different teachers putting retrieval practice, spacing and interleaving into action?

It is clear from our discussions with CLs and many teachers across the college that there is a healthy level of understanding amongst the teaching staff of the importance of using retrieval-based strategies for building retention of learning. In simple terms, recalling previously studied information is the very process that builds retention. ‘Consuming’ information multiple times with strategies such as highlighting and rereading are much less impactful in this regard.

While retrieval practice is essential, of course, it is only one part of effective teaching and learning. There are naturally questions about where the correct balance lies in lesson planning between learning new content, deepening understanding of that learning or building retention and fluency with the previously studied material. All ships need to rise simultaneously. Academic-based research does not give us many clues here, and I’m confident there are no silver bullets, one-size-fits-all solutions. Your professional judgement, experience and intuitions as experts in your subject pedagogy are essential in deciding where the correct balance is for your students and your subject.

There are many ways in which Wyvern teachers have been incorporating retrieval, spacing and interleaving into their practice right across the college. With great excitement, I am pleased to share some examples with you now.

Laraine has put in place Knowledge Organisers for her Y7 French course based on essential vocabulary, common phrases and tenses that relate to the content of each taught unit.

The language she is using with students for these resources is ‘non-negotiables’ which does emphasise the importance with which she wants students to treat them. Students are currently getting a weekly retrieval practice quiz on this content whereby columns in one or more of the tables are blanked, and students fill in the blanks. To interleave, sometimes blanks are made in different tables, getting the students to jump between thinking about vocabulary to thinking about common phrases or tenses.

Laraine and her colleagues have some challenging questions to consider concerning time to devote to this type of retrieval practice quizzing versus covering new content, delivering assessments and feedback etc. I don’t envy them! While it may be desirable to quiz on a daily basis, is weekly the practical and realistic frequency taking into account the many factors a languages teacher has to consider? This question was indeed a common theme expressed by CLs across the subjects, not just languages. It’s certainly something we had to weigh up due to the increased content demands of the new Maths GCSE. One way around this point that I know some other schools use is to set daily, short Look-Cover-Write-Check retrieval practice as homework for students based on their Knowledge Organisers as supplementary to the more in-depth homework tasks. Things for us all to think on.

Bryan has taken a similar, Knowledge Organiser approach to building the fluency of his students’ knowledge for the new ‘Special Study’ part of the music GCSE.

In this exam, students will be expected to apply the knowledge Bryan has identified in these Knowledge Organisers in context. For example, students need to describe how Haydn used particular musical devices to create specific effects and so on. An important and challenging consideration for Bryan is the vast quantity of information with which students need the fluency to answer this exam versus the relatively small proportion of the Music GCSE exam grade towards which it counts. Again, the question is raised, ‘what time should we be devoting to fluency-building retrieval practice?’ I don’t think there is an easy or obvious answer. It is something that is very subject-specific, and you are all the experts in your own subjects. Using this memo as a vehicle for sharing common themes and ideas etc., in addition to the previous point about scheduling retrieval practice in student homework, I think Bryan and myself explored some interesting ways of using mid-and-long-term planning with the scheduling of the curriculum to make this more efficient. We’ll look at this in a future memo.

Emma and her colleagues have been conducting regular retrieval practice ‘revision quizzes’ with their GCSE classes based on their fluency priority knowledge.

Interestingly, for their research cluster project this year, Emma and Karen are looking into the difference between giving retrieval practice quizzes in free-recall or a multiple-choice answer formats. They are comparing quizzes with the same questions, but varying the answer format and looking at the impact on student outcomes etc. A fascinating project and I look forward to hearing their findings later in the year.

Also, Emma has already noticed some effects on student motivation; more about that in a future memo.

Craig and his colleagues in science have been delivering retrieval practice multiple-choice starter questions to GCSE classes at the start of every lesson. Craig has found that by making these multiple-choice, it has made the quizzes much faster to deliver in class as the answers can be reviewed by reading out a list of letters rather than needing to cite sentences and then decide if individual students’ responses were close enough to the correct answer.

In theory, multiple-choice questions are not as effective at building retention of learning as real free-recall questions because they don’t require a retrieval on behalf of the student, only a logical selection or elimination. However, the upshot is that if retrieval practice activities in some contexts, can be delivered much faster and therefore with higher frequency if they are in a multiple-choice format, then it may indeed be the format that is most pragmatic and beneficial in a real classroom context in your subject. Is multiple-choice daily more beneficial that free-recall weekly? This question is undoubtedly a professional judgement call for individual CLs and teachers.

There are ways to improve the retention-building benefits of multiple-choice questions; the Bjorks have done a significant amount of work in this area. Firstly, it is crucial that incorrect answers are plausible ‘competitive alternatives’ with the correct answer. Secondly, if a wrong answer on one question is the correct answer to a later question, students will perform better on the following question for having to effortfully eliminate it as an answer to the former question previously. Finally, the Bjorks have shown that it is possible to set up scoring procedures whereby students indicate not only their response but their degree of certainty which can be used to guide them into the elimination thinking processes which cause a partial-retrieval and thus still build retention. This later technique currently requires computer programs to deliver at scale and so at this stage is not ready for secondary school environments.

Simon Watson in PE has also created some retrieval practice quizzes for GCSE PE theory content which he and colleagues are now using at the start of PE theory lessons. What is particularly impressive about this work is how he has planned the sequencing of the questions such that they incorporate the Spacing and Interleaving Effects.

As the year goes on, the questions in the quizzes include not only content from the current topic, but also previously studied subjects from half-terms before. The number of items devoted to current versus previous content changes each half-term and thus Simon makes sure that each question is visited many times over the year in a spaced (and interleaved) way. See how the proportions change in his diagram above- 6 Qs on each half-term, 4 Qs on each half-term etc.

I know some colleagues have expressed that now they have incorporated regular retrieval practice into their lessons, they are starting to think about ways of scheduling it to get the benefit from the Spacing and Interleaving Effects. I think Simon’s work in this area is tremendous and I’d thoroughly recommend a chat with him if you’d like to explore this further within your practice.

Matt has been experimenting this year with implementing the Spacing Effect in a particularly novel way. He realised he could build spaced study opportunities into the formative assessment cycle! Within his media lessons, he has taught students a topic and got them to write an essay. Then he has moved on to new topics again with students learning and writing an essay on that content. After approximately three weeks after writing the first essay he then gives students their marked work on the first essay, he gives them feedback, and they make corrections and improvements. Another week after that they then sit a test.

This approximately 4-5 week schedule of study>-space->essay->space->feedback->space->test is followed across the media topics and so lessons from day-to-day can transition from looking forward to looking back etc.

Matt’s approach is impressive, and one of the reasons I like it is that it builds spacing and interleaving into mid-term planning, thus ensuring it definitely happens rather than it being reliant upon day-to-day planning and the ebbs and flows of daily workload. To refine and maximise impact even further there are things to consider which I know Matt has in hand such as optimising the spacing gaps (in theory these should expand each time) and also ensuring that the feedback phase includes retrieval-based strategies as well as imparting the feedback. What a creative solution and well-thought-through implementation this is!

To finish with, if you are Twitter-inclined, there are many teachers currently sharing their journey and findings of implementing these ideas in practice. I’ll end with a couple of images of designs that looked different to what I’ve seen within Wyvern so far, just to seed some thought…

Are there engagement benefits to be had by attributing scores to low-stakes quizzes, incentivising with higher marks for content from further back…?

Next time we’ll take a look at what we’ve learned across the college about the social and motivation factors that influence putting Desirable Difficulties into action…

The differences between ‘performance’ and ‘learning’ are …

Learning is retention over time and transfer of knowledge to new contexts. Performance is just a snapshot of what students can do at some point during instruction. Performance is often a poor predictor of learning

Factors that ‘prop’ up students’ performance in lessons, but that are not there on delayed tests include…

Recency, mimicry, cues, scaffolding and differing response formats

first seen http://www.greatmathsteachingideas.com