Educational Research Doesn't Have to Keep Failing
Here’s a brilliantly reasoned blog on Do Now retrievals. It asks all the right questions about educational research, applying it to your setting and, crucially, to your classroom.
She writes convincingly about how research can’t be applied uniformly in a school. She completely buys into the need for retrieval practice, but even though she is a senior leader, cannot manage it at the beginning of her lessons. So, she finishes the lesson early and writes her 5 retrieval questions for the next lesson.
This sounds like a rational approach to research and applying it to your setting. Clare Harley’s students will learn more this way, because the alternative is doing no retrieval.
But, I wonder if she is asking the wrong question. She shouldn’t be asking ‘how can I adapt this research to my context?’ Instead she should be asking a more powerful question:
How will this help my students learn more?
Here’s her brilliantly argued blog post.
Read this and ask yourself if Clare’s students would learn more if she spent the last 5 minutes firing recall questions at them orally - often repeating them to different students.
How many questions would she get through? How many students would feel safe opting out? Ending the lesson this way would be much less effort for Clare as well.
The students won’t learn more because Clare has written the questions down in her book, or because the students write their answers down.
They will actually learn less, because this limits them to only 5 questions. It is the best case scenario that they try to retrieve all 5. In fact, many students will try to retrieve as few as possible.
But it is another loss of learning, because those 2 minutes at the end of the lesson involve no learning, no thinking hard, no retrieval. Sure, it is only 2 minutes. But it is more than that.
The detail she uses to justify her use of the last 2 minutes is probably a clue to how much effort it costs her psychologically to end the lesson this way.
If you want to read my book about how to apply educational research in ways which save you time and effort, but get much greater progress from your students, click here: The Slightly Awesome Teacher, where edu-research meets common sense.
Perhaps ending a lesson with the task of the students to create their own key learning bullets, and their own retrieval questions to start the next lesson may be even more effective, as it: a] engages the students in identifying key learning within each lesson b] focusses their minds to recall these key points for next time and c] gives them the recall questions to remember.... And the billy bonus.... Reduced teacher workload! It's the students who should be working harder.... The teachers already are! [or should be!]