When I started teaching, back in the mists of time, the three-part lesson was king. You began with a starter, then came the main part (broken up into different activities) and finally a plenary to check what had been learned.
I still remember an early CPD session, in my very first year of teaching, on how to begin a lesson. We were told that the aim of the starter task was just to get pupils in and settled and that the activity here could be divorced from the rest of the lesson. We were encouraged to use word searches or, if we were feeling fancy, perhaps a crossword.
Over time this approach to starters fell out of favour. It would seem that, as a profession, we realised that spending the first 10 minutes of the lesson on something unconnected to what students needed to learn was a mistake and that there were better ways to settle a class than hoping they’d get on with yet another wordsearch.
More from Mark Enser:
Over the past few years, in just about every school I have been into, across phases, teachers have been encouraged to start the lesson with retrieval practice. Students spend time thinking about previous learning and trying to recall it, with an aim of making this learning more secure.
There are many different ways to carry out retrieval practice. But a combination of teachers being busy people and leaders asking for easily observed consistent practice seems to have led to the domination of one way of beginning the lesson: the five-question quiz. Often with a set number of questions drawn from this topic, the previous term’s topic and perhaps one from last year.
On the face of it, this seems like a pretty good way to begin a lesson. However, having observed hundreds of lessons in recent years, I have noticed the same pitfalls occurring again and again.
Three pitfalls with retrieval quizzes
Firstly, many people have misunderstood the purpose of this practice. Rather than students having to struggle to recall prior learning, they are directed to, or allowed to, look back in their books for the answers. Transferring the information from one place to another requires very little thought and is unlikely to do much to support learning.
Secondly, many pupils simply opt out. The teacher is busy at the front of the class welcoming pupils or taking the register. In most classes I have been in, a large proportion of pupils are just sitting there waiting to be given the answers to the quiz. Once these are displayed, they faithfully write them down. This points to a common error that learners make, thinking that completing something is the same as learning it.
Finally, many of these quizzes, which are intended to be quick, stretch on into the lesson. It isn’t uncommon to be 20 minutes into an hour’s lesson and to find the teacher still diligently going through the answers by asking pupil after pupil for their responses.
At times, this might be entirely appropriate. A quiz might reveal a common misconception that needs to be addressed, but too often it happens simply because there hasn’t been enough thought given to how to give feedback on answers in an efficient and effective way.
A quiz at the start of the lesson can be an excellent way to start that lesson. But if we are going to do a quiz badly then we might as well go back to handing out a wordsearch.
Mark Enser is an author and head of department in the North West of England
