In my previous two columns, I explored how the retrieval quizzes forming Do It Now tasks were sometimes backfiring and then some principles to put them right.
Both of these articles considered retrieval practice in the form of a quiz. There is something to be said for the consistency of a well-designed quiz at the start of each lesson, but it isn’t the only place where we can see the benefits of asking pupils to retrieve knowledge from their memories.
1. Retrieval as curriculum
Firstly, it helps to remember that retrieval isn’t only a matter of pedagogy, it is also a curriculum consideration. A well-planned curriculum will be sequenced so that pupils are drawing on and building on prior learning. It will also signpost where they will use what they are currently learning again.
It is useful to make these links very explicit in any curriculum plans - and where possible on individual lesson resources - so that those teaching the lesson are reminded to draw on them.
In some subjects, you can also build retrieval through the curriculum choices you make. For example, in geography, I could make sure that I used the same place to study both tropical storms and tectonic hazards. I could also return to that place when looking at barriers to development or resource management.
Pupils can then retrieve their prior knowledge of these topics to help them make sense of what they have gone on to study.
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2. Retrieval through tasks
Once the curriculum decisions are made, links can then be made to prior learning throughout the lesson. This is something you often see in lessons when teachers remind pupils of their previous work. “Do you remember, we looked at the earthquake in Haiti and how they struggled to rebuild afterwards? What problem do you think they will have faced after this hurricane?” a teacher might ask.
However, this habit of reminding pupils of what they should know might be less impactful than asking them to retrieve what they should know. Asking “Which country did we study when looking at earthquakes?” and “What problems did they face?” means that the pupils are having to do something, they are having to think.
We can also create tasks that are predicated on the idea that pupils should be able to draw on prior learning rather than simply on things they have just been told or that are immediately in front of them.
If they have just studied a hurricane in Haiti, we could ask them to draw a table showing how the impacts were different to those of an earthquake there. This helps to demonstrate a need to not just complete work but to learn. It creates an expectation that this knowledge should be there to use in the future.
One of the risks of this approach is that pupils worry that they’ll make mistakes. They might want to just wait until the answers are revealed instead of doing the uncomfortable work of trying to remember. This is where mini whiteboards can be useful. It means that pupils feel confident in giving something a try, safe in the knowledge that mistakes can then be erased.
3. Retrieval through starter tasks
Finally, we can return to the beginning. The start of a lesson might be the perfect place for pupils to practice retrieval. But we don’t need to always default to the five-question quiz format. Sometimes there are other ways in which we want pupils to retrieve information, sometimes so that they can both retrieve and apply it.
For example, if pupils have previously studied development indicators and in a different lesson looked at scatter graphs, I might want to combine them so that pupils retrieve their knowledge of both and see what they can do with it. So I would ask them to study a scatter graph of wealth against health and to draw conclusions about what it is telling them.
Or I could show them a picture of the aftermath of a tropical storm and ask them to annotate it to show the contrasts with the effects of the tropical storm studied in Haiti.
Sometimes, I might want to start not by asking them to retrieve their substantive knowledge from a particular topic but their procedural knowledge of how to go about answering a particular type of question that they have struggled with in the past.
What really matters, as with so much else in the classroom, are those deliberate choices that we make. If we don’t have the opportunity to think about the purpose of what we are asking pupils to do then it is unlikely to do what we need it to.
Mark Enser is a freelance writer, author and a head of geography in the north of England
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