Doug Lemov's field notes

 

We’ve been reading up a lot on retrieval practice lately.  Hopefully we’re not alone in that. From a cognitive science standpoint it’s absolutely central to improving learning.

You might recall  Daniel Willingham’s assertion about the importance of knowledge:

Data from the last thirty years lead to a conclusion that is not scientifically challengeable: thinking well requires knowing facts, and that’s true not simply because you need something to think about. The very processes that teachers care about most — critical thinking processes such as reasoning and problem solving — are intimately intertwined with factual knowledge that is in long-term memory (not just found in the environment).

There are two parts of Willingham’s assertion:

1) You can only think deeply and critically about what you know well—what you have a lot of knowledge about—and

2)  To aid thinking, that knowledge must be encoded in long-term memory. Retrieval practice is the tool that encodes knowledge in long term memory.

Having to recall something -especially having to struggle to recall it after a bit of forgetting has begun–strengthens the neural pathway in which it is encoded making it stronger and easier to recall.

Of the two ideas—1) knowledge is important so 2) you have to encode it in students’ long term memory–the latter is probably more dissonant and difficult for many teachers because the encoding process requires what they think of as lower order questions—retrieval practice. Even if you know students need knowledge and you know that simple questions now support rigorous questions later it can be hard to make yourself do.  It’s one of the most important things we can do to ensure learning and yet we call it or think of it in the back of our minds as ‘regurgitation.’

As part of our upcoming workshop on Ratio this month we’re going to talk about the connection between knowledge and higher order thinking and so we’ve just finished cutting our first video of teachers using retrieval practice in the classroom.  We’ve got six teachers two math, two history and French teacher and an English teacher in the montage.

Here it is.  We hope you can steal some useful pointers.

EA.RetrievalPractice.GRM.MultipleTeachers.’Retrieval Practice Montage.’Clip2729 from TLAC Blog on Vimeo.

One thing we thought of as we watched was that we needed a teachers working definition of ‘retrieval practice’-a more specific definition than the one we got from the ever-helpful Pooja Agarwal, one of the leading scientists studying retrieval practice. She defined retrieval practice as “remembering,” or “pulling information out instead of putting it in.”

For classroom use however we wanted something more specific so we’re going to use this:

Retrieval Practice occurs when learners recall and apply multiple examples of previously learned knowledge or skills after a period of forgetting.

Here are some key things we were trying to highlight in our definition:

• Retrieval is relevant to skills (hitting a baseball, solving for perimeter of an octagon) or knowledge (dates in history; formulas, vocabulary).
• In the classroom it involves groups of questions in blocks as opposed to arguing that I “ask retrieval questions all the time,” say.
• It requires at least a short delay after something has been learned because once you’ve started to forget you have to work harder to remember and this creates a stronger neural pathway

 

Thoughts about the video:

Some of them are using ‘oral drill’ a form of the technique Pepper where students are asked to stand up, but the standing is irrelevant.  The key is that the teachers are asking students to recall facts and skills that they know.

Teachers are bringing retrieval practice to different parts of their lessons: Eric Snider begins his reading lesson with retrieval practice about the story. Annette Riffle uses retrieval practice as a high value activity for the class to do while one student is working at the board. Barry Smith builds large blocks of his lesson around it. Steve Chiger makes it a fast review at the beginning of class to get the energy level up.  Art Worrell uses it to review before a test.

The teachers use different approaches:  Rachael Taylor starts it as pair work in a Turn and Talk.  Jesse Rector and Art Worrell Cold Call.  Barry Smith uses a combination of taking hands, Call and Response and Cold Call.

Art asks students to build off each other’s ideas.  Barry goes back and forth French to English and English to French. Jesse asks two step problems.

But over and over we see learners recall and apply multiple examples of previously learned knowledge or skills after a period of forgetting.  The big misreading of the video would be to assume (or argue speciously) that what it implies is that these teachers’ classes look like this all the time.  What you are seeing is the moments when they stress retrieval practice and those moments look different from the other activities they do that rely on and benefit from the knowledge retrieval practice encodes.

Hope you find it helpful and look forward to hearing your thoughts.

 

retrieval practice