Doug Lemov's field notes

Reflections on teaching, literacy, coaching, and practice.

02.08.21 An Annotated Forgetting Curve

      All of our recent TLAC books include discussions of a graph that all teachers should know about: the ‘Forgetting Curve.’ It describes how learners forget things over time and how retrieval practice can arrest this process. The original Forgetting Curve was derived in the 1880s by the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus and plotted…


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10.06.17 Using the Do Now for Retrieval Practice–An Update from Alex Laney

  A year or so ago I wrote a post about Alex Laney’s Do Nows at Smith’s Wood Academy in Birmingham, England.  Since then Alex has kept in touch and he recently shared some insights about the school’s new approach to Do Nows or (as they call them) DNAs. Most notably, given the very compelling research…


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