Leah McGinnity: Go ahead and start your warmup.

Dr. Jim Heal: In order to learn something, we need to partially forget it. We have our working memory, which is the site of thinking, and it’s very, very finite. And then we have our seemingly infinite long-term memory. The more times you go to your long-term memory to pull a piece of information back into your working memory, it strengthens what’s called the memory trace between those two parts of your mind. And strengthening that path is part of the act of learning.

McGinnity: …and make sure you’re showing your thinking for both of them.

McGinnity: I think that all teachers should know and understand what retrieval practice is. Students are going to forget what you taught them if you don’t keep putting it in your learning. And so we do Blast From the Past.

McGinnity: Make sure for number one, it is not just communicating, so it’s not just your sentence, I want to see everything.

McGinnity: We are currently in our geometry unit. The lesson today was on how to use adding and subtracting to find missing angles, but my warm-up was on place value and fractions because it’s important for them to still practice those skills. We haven’t done place value in fractions in months.

McGinnity: Make sure for number two, that you are not just modeling it, but you are also explaining what your model says. You need to communicate your ideas.

McGinnity: There’s always two problems for our retrieval practice or our Blast From the Past. They work on them independently and they normally work for about 5 minutes or so, and then we will share.

McGinnity: Describe the relationship between the 6 in number A and the 6 in number B. Caroline?

Student: The 6 in number A is 10 times…

McGinnity: I call on a lot of different students for each problem so that we can actually talk through their strategies. So not only are we focusing on problems that we haven’t talked about recently, they also have that math discourse with each other while we’re going through the warmup.

McGinnity: Amy, I’m gonna call on you because I love your place value chart. So how did you know that it’s 10 times greater when we move to the left?

Amy: Because then it moves to like a, a greater place value.

McGinnity: Okay, and that greater place value is how much greater? Every time we move to the left…

Amy: Uh, 10 times.

McGinnity: Good, 10 times greater. So every time we move…

McGinnity: Retrieval practice, at least for me in my classroom, is a routine. It is not just checking that you understand the answer, I really want to know that you truly understand where your answer came from.

Heal: If all you’re doing is checking whether or not something was learned, you are not inviting acts of retrieval. It’s a surface level appreciation. That’s different than ingraining a set of habits that says, “Part of what we do when we learn around here is that we go and fetch prior learning, because if we don’t go fetch it, we are gonna lose it.” So she wasn’t just getting them to retrieve, she was getting them to retrieve robustly.

McGinnity: I think that it’s important for all of our students to understand how their brain works, and the fact that if I teach you something once and don’t come back to it and you don’t understand it, you’re not a failure. You’re not, you know, dumb or all the names that they call themselves. We haven’t set your brain up for success.

McGinnity: Right? We’re getting it into our lesson on angles, so go ahead and quickly close that.

Sugarloaf Elementary School

.css-1sk4066:hover{background:#d1ecfa;}Making Retrieval Practice a Classroom Routine

Making Retrieval Practice a Classroom Routine