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10 Techniques for Retrieval Practice – teacherhead

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I've written about retrieval practice several times in other posts but here I just want to make it easy to lay out various alternative methods for the process of reviewing your students' knowledge and understanding. Before doing that, I would suggest that there are some key principles:

1. Involve everyone: Good techniques involve all students checking their knowledge, not just a few and not just one at a time as you might do when questioning.

2. Make checking accurate and easy: it should be possible for all students to find out what they got right and wrong, what they know well and where they have gaps. Every technique involves students testing their knowledge and then checking their work for accuracy and completeness. (This is not the same as giving students extended mark schemes to mark longer assessments which, for me goes beyond a simple retrieval practice activity)

3. Specify the knowledge: Where appropriate, it's better if students know the set of knowledge any retrieval will be based on, so they can study, prepare and self-check. It must be possible for students to check their own answers which has implications for the way the knowledge requirements are laid out.

4. Keep it generative: students need to explore their memory to check what they know and understand; this means removing cue-cards, prompts, scaffolds and cheat-sheets; it means closing the books and thinking for themselves.

5. Make it time efficient: The idea of each technique is that they can be used repeatedly in an efficient manner without dominating whole lessons.

6. Make it workload efficient: None of these methods involve the teacher checking the students' answers, creating unsustainable workload. A teacher might choose to check the occasional test but that's no use for routine practice.

1. Quick Fire Quiz
Everyone know this one but it can still be done well or badly: Teacher reads out the question or presents them via slides or an audio tape (eg in MFL). The questions can be spontaneously generated or prepared. Questions can be simple factual recall, mental maths or multiple choice;

All students write down their answers. Teacher reveals the answers, one by one or all at once. Students check which they got right. Swapping answers to check is an option but it can be a faff and takes away from the message that students need to be evaluating the depth of their own learning. If you've prepared this in advance, it is much more time efficient if students can see the answers all at once to check rather than wait for each to be read out.

It's important that the teacher discusses common wrong answers - which is one of the main functions. If you can do lots of confidence-building questions quickly (rather than deliberately hard ones) - you can get a great buzz of enjoyment. Knowing things is fun!
2. Paper Quiz
Everyone gets a copy of the questions and writes down answers at their own pace within a time limit. This is much less teacher-directed. It frees the teacher up to circulate and spot common errors as they emerge. It allows for a wider range of question types and makes it easier to engage in with worded questions that can be hard to read from a slide.

The checking process is much better done with pre-prepared answers rather than reading out answers one by one. Why? Because it is quicker, allows for more detail in the answers, it allows students to focus on things they got wrong and helps to build their capacity for self-assessment.
3. Silent Self-Quiz
Try this. Which ones do you know? (Answer provided)

How well can you learn these labels? (Test and then check)

In a test like this, students can generate answers and then check if they were right, silently and privately. They can repeat this multiple times. Any number of resources can be used - blanked diagrams, cue cards with answers on the back, maths questions with answers kept separately. This process keeps the outcome of the assessment with the student - the most important place! They learn what they know and don't know. You can then discuss common errors and problems. It saves a lot of time with asking questions and marking them - all of that is done mentally by the students.
4. Paired Quiz.
Here, we start using Dylan Wiliam's excellent strategy: Activating students as resources for one another. In order to maximise the extent of retrieval practice that goes on, it is fantastic to get students to quiz each other in pairs. One student has the material - questions, answers, cue cards, knowledge organiser, text - and asks the other student questions. "Test me" - it's a well-used technique and can be harnessed in lessons. Give a time limit and then get them to swap around. You get a room full of students checking their knowledge. I've seen this done in superbly well in languages where the teacher circulated to check for accent issues and common errors listening in to the multiple paired quizzing dialogues.
5. Self-Explanation
Beyond simple recall, ask students to explain something to themselves. You simply give students a few silent moments to complete a mental task. They have to generate a version of what they understand that they can either then self-check or write down or use to respond to further question. However the process of mental rehearsal is important.. making this explicit helps to train those who don't do it spontaneously.

What is the story of Henry VIII's Six Wives? Run through it... then check.
6. Demonstration and Performance
Of course LOTS of knowledge isn't simply quiz-able declarative knowledge. You can ask students to show what they know: a procedure; a technique; a routine. Have you learned it? Show me... Of course as a student shows what they can do to a teacher, they are showing themselves what they can do. This is important. Again, the intensity and frequency can be amplified by getting students to show each other in pairs rather than one-by-one with the teacher, as long as they have the tools to evaluate success. This is common in practical areas and performance areas - sport, music, art - but it also has a role in science, maths, English where the modelling process could be framed as 'teaching'. eg teaching the class how to answer a maths problem.
7. Paired or individual elaborative-interrogation
A form of quizzing that can be done in pairs or as a silent private process, is elaborative interrogation. This is where students explore their schema by answering How and Why questions.

Why does this happen? How does it work? Why does it work? Why did she say that? Why do you use that structure? Why is that the most important reason? How do you know?

If you train students to use some of these question stems and give them resources that help them to verify the answers, this makes for a deep retrieval practice exercise
8: Tell the story; rehearse the explanation
Lots of knowledge forms a narrative structure - a series of events, a process, cause and effect. So, the retrieval practice can be formed as 'telling the story' to someone else who can play the role of verifier. Any explanation can then be improved and rehearsed. You can get better at telling a story in more detail.

Here are some examples. Tell the story of a water molecule as if follows the water cycle: (with or without key words provided)

Why does the sun rise in the East?.... How good was your friend's answer? Now you have a go...

Of course this material can be used for self-explanation in the first instance.
9: Summarising
This is a useful recall process although it is less precise in terms of checking - because every summary can be different. A retrieval process can be something like:

Last week we looked at renewable energy. Summarise the main advantages and disadvantages of a wind farm: Go! .

Then show your definitive response for checking:
10. Map and Compare
This method is where you want to check students' capacity to make links. Ask them to make a memory map of the key aspects of a topic... eg: Reactions of Metals OR Themes in Hamlet OR Generating Electricity. These things can be much tighter sections of knowledge too: Types of radiation; the key events and figures in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Students then make mind-maps in a quick, memory -dump style before checking against a good resource - their knowledge organiser, exercise book or a teacher-completed version: What did you get right? What did you miss out completely?

Trial by Ordeal? What can you remember? Go.....

Further reading: Check out these documents. The summaries by @olicav are superb but also read the original papers they relate to.

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Image Credit: https://emptechgroup.com/the-internet-of-things/ I've written about retrieval practice several times in other posts but here I just want to make it easy to lay out various alternative methods for the process of reviewing your students' knowledge and understanding. Before doing that, I would suggest that there are some key principles: Involve everyone: Good techniques involve...

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Retrieval Practice: The myths versus reality – Love To Teach (lovetoteach87.com)

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In recent years retrieval practice (combined with spaced practice) has completely changed my teaching practice - for the better. I have seen many of the benefits of Retrieval Practice first hand, which go far beyond the ability to recall information from long term memory. I have fully embraced the research and this evidence-informed strategy, as have many others around the world. However, there are still some classroom teachers and students that are quite sceptical and wary about the hype surrounding retrieval practice.

Later this week my second book will be published with John Catt Education, Retrieval Practice: Research and Resources for every classroom. I am really excited for teachers to read it and I hope they find it very informative and useful. Through conversations with educators, both online and offline, it has been interesting to find out different perspectives and opinions when it comes to retrieval practice. Generally, the attitude is very positive (although I'm aware that the fact I've authored a book about retrieval practice may influence the conversations I have with other teachers!).

Despite the enthusiasm around retrieval practice we need to be mindful that although it is a very important and essential classroom practice, it is only one strategy that needs to be used in combination with other approaches and in the correct context too. There are some common assumptions or myths that I thought I would address and explore when it comes to retrieval practice.

Myth number 1: "We've always done retrieval practice, it is nothing new ..."

Retrieval practice has been a regular feature of many teachers' classroom practice, it isn't radically new. T he evidence and research linked to retrieval practice has also been around a while (the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve dating back to 1885!) but this research has only become mainstream and accessible to teachers in recent years. There is a vast amount of research available to us and it can be overwhelming but it is very insightful and helpful for teachers, we shouldn't ignore it or disregard it because we assume it is 'nothing new'.

There have been various forms of retrieval practice used in classrooms for many years ranging from a paper-based quiz, mini-whiteboards and as technology has evolved teachers are able to use different online tools for quizzing. However, quizzing and testing have also been used a lot in the past to record data, as an assessment tool rather than as a tool to enhance and support teaching and learning.

Something I was very guilty of during the early years of my career was ploughing through content and perhaps starting a lesson asking about material from the last lesson or recent lessons but never really delving further back. Months later I would expect my students to be able to recall information in a high stakes situation that they haven't had the opportunity to practice retrieving. When people say we have always used retrieval practice I can say that I didn't and I know I am not alone.

There is a temptation to say that retrieval practice is common sense but I don't think it is. If it was simply common sense I and many other teachers would have used this strategy much sooner and students would be using it to revise instead of resorting to less effective and time-consuming methods such as re-reading and highlighting.

Tom Sherrington writes and presents a lot about Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction and some teachers have said the same thing about Rosenshine's principles - 'we've always been doing this and it's just common sense'. Sherrington has addressed this in an excellent post you can read here. In response to the argument that Rosenshine is nothing new Sherrington writes, " No, of course, it's not. Rosenshine was researching in the 1970s and published an early paper 'Teaching Functions' that was first drafted in 1982. To me, the value in Rosenshine's principles is not they are new - it's that they stand the test of time." I think that can also be applied to retrieval practice, that it will stand the test of time because it is effective and I also think there is much more for us to learn about this technique.

Myth number 2: "Every single lesson should start with retrieval practice ..."

In my first book " and I did write about using retrieval practice as part of a classroom routine to begin lessons. I stand by this as I do think it is generally the best way to start a lesson but I didn't state that Love To Teach, the first chapter was entitled " The best way to start a lesson ... "Although, I will be recommending starting lessons with regular retrieval, research does not explicitly state this is the most appropriate time in the lesson to carry out retrieval practice. It is an effective strategy that can be used at any point during a lesson". every lesson should start that way. I also added that

Previously (what feels like many years ago but perhaps it is still happening in some classrooms) the focus of the starter task was to 'hook' the students into learning. The aim of the starter activity was to entice students with engagement even if the link to the lesson and content was weak ( I trained in 2009-2010 so perhaps my experiences reflect this time). This was clearly not a good use of time.

I remember reading a blog post entitled, by " The kids absolutely love it!" The phrase that launched a thousand gimmicks David Didau where Didau describes a history lesson he observed and the focus of the lesson was to understand what life was like for Irish peasants during the potato famine. To start the lesson the teacher decided to hide potatoes around the classroom for children to find and hence the potato hunt was the exciting link to the lesson. The 'kids absolutely loved it' but when it came to writing, unsurprisingly, their responses lacked knowledge and depth because they had spent (or wasted) precious lesson time searching in cupboards and under tables for hidden potatoes. That teacher was well-intentioned, wanting to inspire and motivate their students, trying to make the topic more fun but obviously this is a classic example of engagement taken too far at the cost of learning.

Whilst I still believe the start of a lesson can be a time to complete an interesting, stimulating and engaging task (I really do want my students to enjoy lessons and enjoy learning - I think every teacher does) it should be beneficial to learning. The task should enhance learning not distract from it. I can recall many starter activity tasks I delivered that at the time seemed like excellent practice but on reflection, I fail to see how those tasks supported the teaching and learning taking place in my classroom. There was a culture of snazzy starters and we have moved away from that now.

The problem we now have is some schools (not my school and certainly not all schools) are adopting a different and perhaps extreme type of culture that has an inflexible approach to classroom planning and taking the autonomy away from teachers. This can be seen here in this tweet below:

Our whole school has been told to teach in exactly the same way:
10 mins "low stakes quiz" (10 questions)
20 mins "instructional phase"
20 mins "application of instructions"
10 min plenary
parents received this in writing, governors did learning walks to check we are complying

- Laura Schofield 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 (@lorralou) November 5, 2019

Context is key. Retrieval practice in action in a lesson can look different with different age groups and across different subjects too. Yes, retrieval practice is a great way to start the lesson and it should become embedded as part of structured classroom practice and a carefully constructed curriculum. Retrieval practice should not promote or be part of a regimented, rigid and restricted classroom routine. It doesn't have to be that way.

Myth number 3: "Retrieval Practice just involves knowledge tests ..."

A knowledge/fact test can work well at clearly identifying areas of strength and areas of weakness or development for students. This knowledge, for both the teacher and student, about what students can and can't recall is very powerful and useful. However, knowledge or fact tests repeated continuously can become boring, mundane and that then supports the idea that retrieval practice is simply about regurgitating isolated facts when that is also another myth - not true.

My new book explores the research I have read about retrieval practice and the science of learning but the book also contains a wide range of classroom activities and ideas that can be adapted for different subjects and ages. There are quizzes and games that focus on knowledge but also vocabulary and making links and connections between different factors too. Teachers on Twitter and Instagram are regularly sharing innovative and creative retrieval strategies that they have tried and tested in their classrooms. There is a place for knowledge tests but something else I really like about retrieval practice is its flexibility for the classroom. You can read about my retrieval grids and about the popular retrieval roulette by Adam Boxer .

Myth number 4: "We don't have time for retrieval practice in lessons ..."

I have heard this a lot and I do understand the concern. Teachers often have so much content to get through, especially with exam classes, that little time can be spent revisiting prior learning and subject content previously covered - as mentioned I was certainly guilty of this. Previously, I lacked knowledge and understanding of forgetting and memory therefore there was an expectation students would remember information and if they didn't it would be very disappointing. It seems obvious now (easy to say with hindsight and increased knowledge and understanding) that revisiting a topic 12 months later (or longer!) in the classroom just before the exam won't be as effective as regular recall and retrieval.

If teachers feel they do not have time for retrieval practice in their lessons I would encourage them to think very carefully about the structure of their lessons. Is there anything that could be removed and replaced with retrieval practice? For example, the plenary task was often used at the end of a lesson to find out what students had learned in that lesson but now we have a greater awareness of the difference between performance and learning. Learning takes time. An option would be to take the plenary task from one lesson and use it in the future as a retrieval task once forgetting has taken place. It might seem difficult fitting retrieval practice into lessons and a tightly planned curriculum but it is certainly worth it.

Myth number 5: "Why do students need to be able to recall information when we have Google?"

This debate continuously rages on via social media and in real life, no doubt it will continue for a long time too. Yes, Google is wonderful. We have a wealth of information at our fingertips and we would be naive to not recognise this but I find it hard to believe that some people would suggest that knowledge is now redundant to Google. To search for and find information on Google and then understand that information actually requires background knowledge to do so. Also, do we want future generations to lack the knowledge and confidence to navigate through life without being able to Google everything? Do we want to create a Google dependent culture and society? Perhaps, some might argue there already is one. I do use Google a lot, possibly every day but has Google crushed my desire to read and learn more? No. Is it just me that feels that way? No.

Much has been written about this topic. Here are some interesting posts and articles;
https://www.educationandskillsforum.org/es/news-blogs/is-i-can-just-google-it-making-us-stupid https://3starlearningexperiences.wordpress.com/2017/04/04/why-google-cant-replace-individual-human-knowledge/ https://www.aft.org/periodical/american-educator/spring-2006/how-knowledge-helps
I decided not to write about the Google debate in my new book because I felt the argument that students don't need knowledge, understanding, and skills because we have Google and that the teaching profession is potentially at risk because of Google, robots and other technologies shows a lack of understanding about the importance and role of education.

I didn't want to give too much away about my new book but if you are interested to find out more about retrieval practice you can order my new book on Amazon here. I would also highly recommend checking out the work of Dr. Pooja K Agarwal here and the team of Learning Scientists here. Although, I have just written a book about retrieval practice I am keen to learn lots more and continue to develop this strategy with my students and colleagues.

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Retrieval Practice: The myths versus reality

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In recent years retrieval practice (combined with spaced practice) has completely changed my teaching practice - for the better. I have seen many of the benefits of Retrieval Practice first hand, w...

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Five Things You Need to Know About Retrieval Practice

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Five Things You Need to Know About Retrieval Practice

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Retrieval Practice - The Learning Agency Lab (the-learning-agency-lab.com)

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Refining Retrieval - What Does the Evidence Say?

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Refining Retrieval - What Does the Evidence Say?

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Refining Retrieval – What does the evidence say about the testing effect? | Peter Foster (wordpress.com)

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Reflective Class Feedback: Enriching In-Class Quizzes With Discussion — The Learning Scientists

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Incorporating brief reflective prompts that encourage students to think about the answers and justify why some answers are wrong and another is correct, leads to an increase in performance. This approach is not limited to EFL learning but can be adopted in different subjects. In addition, it is possible to shift the elaborative interrogation activity from a teacher-led to a more student-led task as the students gain practice in using this in a self-regulated way.

One limiting factor of Reflective Class Feedback may be the time it takes to complete it during regular class time: A 10-item quiz with 3 minutes for discussion after each question takes 30 minutes of classroom time. Adding approximately 30 seconds to answer each question in the first place would result in 35 minutes spent in class for this activity. In many cases, teachers will not have the time to integrate this in each of their lessons. So, what could be potential solutions to this?

1. Instead of integrating a Reflective Class Feedback activity in each class, dedicate one lesson to it mid-way through the course and incorporate spaced practice, too, by sampling questions from all past lessons.

2. Reduce the number of multiple-choice questions in the activity by strategically picking questions that cover material students struggle with most.

3. Integrate this kind of reflective feedback as part of homework assignments that requires students to write a brief blurb after answering a question using the prompts. Note that in this case, the social component of classroom discussion will be missing. However, the teacher could use the student reflections as a starting point for a follow-up in-class discussion around content that is yet not well understood.

Taken together, the Reflective Class Feedback seems to be an effective approach to engage students and increase their understanding of the material. While it is relatively straightforward to integrate into current teaching practice, it may require some tweaking to fit into the available teaching schedule.

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One way to engage students and foster their learning is through in-class quizzes. In-class quizzes have gained in popularity due to the open access to polling software that teachers can easily set up and students can engage with via their phones, tablets, or laptops (e.g., Kahoot, Slido, Poll Everywhere).

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When daily quiz regimes become lethal mutations of retrieval practice. – teacherhead

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One of the most common areas of development in schools over the last few years has been in the area of retrieval practice - supporting students to remember what they've been taught, gradually, steadily deepening and extending their schema for the material in hand, building fluency and confidence. However, whilst there has been a lot of superb creative practice in this area, I see problems where a very sound idea about the importance of regular reviews of prior learning is morphed into a rigid, formulaic quizzing regime that, in turn, morphs into a regime of poor performative quizzing where many student are not learning anything. Rather than it being a consolidatory reinforcement of their learning, plugging a few gaps, students feel they are being quizzed on the thin air of vaguely-encountered wisps of disconnected factoids from a dim past.

At its worst, this is what is happening (based on multiple specific examples..):

The school leaders decide 'retrieval practice is a good thing' so let's make it a non-negotiable (kill me now!) that lessons start with a quiz. That means every teacher, every subject, every lesson - because this makes it happen! Drive that change!

Teachers operating in this regime also believe that retrieval practice is a good thing; also, quizzes are a good form of retrieval practice. They are believers. But, in any case, the MAT/SLT have mandated daily quizzing so quizzing must be done. Let's quiz!

Into the mix we get the idea of spaced practice... let's interrupt the forgetting curve by checking back on stuff that wasn't just learned yesterday - but also last week and the month before. We love a system... so let's systematise the quizzing structure; it makes it easy for everyone: Three questions from yesterday; one from last week and one from last month. Programme that in folks.. Fool proof it!

So, here we have the morphed regime in action. The Do Now Five A Day Quiz is ready. It's science (for example) so the questions today are:

1. Name the organs: (expected answers: trachea, bronchiole, diaphragm)

2. How is the blood leaving lungs different to blood entering lungs?

3. Complete the equation. Glucose plus Oxygen ->

4. In the circuit what would be the current reading on the ammeter?

5. Why is a hypothermia blanket shiny on both sides?

Teacher says - good morning everyone, your DNA is on the board (Do Now Activity). You have five minutes.

James writes DNA and the routine 1 to 5 in his book.

1. a: Windpipe. b. lungs. c. IDK (doesn't know)

2. It is moving faster

3. Energy and carbon dioxide

4. Can't do it

5. ??

Time's up.

Teacher reveals the answers on the next slide. Check your answers guys. Give yourself a mark out of 5. Question 1 you need 2 for half a mark. Ok. Who got them all right... Well done Alice.. anyone else.. Ah well.. now green pen your answers. (Green pen for corrections).

James gets out his trusty green pen and tries to write all the answers down: Trahea; Brociolli daiphram; oxygenated; deoxgynated; glucose; 1.7Amps ; Bad emitter; good reflector. It's a struggle to write all this down in the time permitted so it's a bit of a scrawl. But he tried.

And then we're onto today's lesson on.... Homeostatis. More Knowledge. Yay.

In the teacher's mind they have followed the cogsci; they have followed the MAT protocol. They have quizzed. Quizzing was done exactly as per the Non Negotiables Check List.

And what about James? He had a go. He self-marked and green penned. He's been entirely compliant with expectations. Job done.

But wait......what has James actually learned? Does he now know any more than he did before....? I'm going to suggest that he has learned next to nothing at all - except to confirm that there's a ton of stuff he doesn't know. To him, it's not stuff he can't remember; it's stuff he never ever knew. At best there's a shadowy sketchy trace of these words; a flick of familiarity when the answers came up on the board. But he still can't explain what an alveolus does, or say what V= IR means or what 'emitter' means or say 'trachea' out loud with any confidence. But hey... green pen! He's been quizzed. He's green penned. Robert BjorkhausEnShine something something would be proud.

You see the problem.. and believe me, this is not even much of an exaggeration.

Green Penning a Quiz is not learning. And yet.. every lesson, every subject, every day, every week... there it is. The roots of the issues here, to my mind, are a lack of understanding of what constitutes good retrieval practice - in theory and in practice. To anyone who is basing their equivalent regime on Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction, let's see what he actually says. Scroll through.. I pasted it in for you.

Rosenshine talks about 'review' and then shares various examples, only one of which is a quiz. However the emphasis is very much on the need to activate students' prior knowledge that will be useful for subsequent learning. That is what a daily review is for. As discussed in the post below, students' knowledge can be extremely tenuous at first. They need time to rehearse and consolidate, making connections to what they already know, before we can start talking about a generative process that requires more solid recall.

The diagram below, by Efrat Furst as featured in Walkthrus Vol 3, explains this really well.

When I see quizzing regimes going wrong, students are being asked questions as if they are at stage 4 or 5 when actually they're barely at stage 2. Each question, for them, would need extensive exploration, rehearsal, repetition. They are miles from the path-strengthening phase; the paths are barely formed.

The weekly and monthly reviews Rosenshine (and others) promote are where we might scan a wider domain but even here he isn't suggesting we spring random questions on students like it's a pub quiz. In my view, it's really important to use quizzing to build students' confidence and their agency - ie students with the capacity to study independently. This means they need the quizzing regime to allow them to study and succeed - rather than develop the learned helplessness I see so often; that sense that knowing things is all rather out of your control, a matter of chance - sometimes you do, sometimes you don't. Done well, students have a fair idea of the material they will be quizzed on and are then expected to prepare, using the self-study techniques they learn at school.

As I say in this post, an important feature of successful retrieval practice is to specify the knowledge so students know what they are meant to know and can check whether they do, studying further where they have gaps. You can even go so far as giving questions in advance, making it all very transparent.

Then we need mechanisms for dealing with wrong answers. It's simply not remotely enough to say a correct answer out loud and then hope and assume that students now know that answer. The simple act of writing something down doesn't mean you've connected it to your prior knowledge, integrating it into your schema. Green penning is only really going to work where the student needs a bit of reinforcement in an area they largely understand. It's not going to teach anyone anything. So, if you set a very wide range of questions, and students turn out not to know the answers, you have a big task to go over all the key ideas. Typically teachers don't have time to re-teach it all so the weakest students with the worst quiz outcomes only get a speed-teach whizz-through of ideas they don't really understand all over again.

Done well, a quiz is anticipated, within a topic range that is small enough to prepare for and to re-teach if needed. Students are expected to study (make some effort!) so that they have a chance to perform well. This then allows the checking and feedback process to focus on a few gaps and key ideas. It's largely consolidatory. And, crucially, it is just one of many routines for checking that might also include explaining, telling the story etc - as per this Five Ways post.

So, to conclude... I suggest people undertake a proper evaluation of their retrieval regimes and evaluate whether the least confident students are actually learning. Focus less on whether the routine has been followed and more on what students know and don't know. Be prepared to flex the regime so that teachers can adapt and create checking processes appropriate for their subject within a varied diet of daily review activities. Tool students up so they can study really hard and aim to do well rather than trying to catch them out. And, most importantly, do more real-time rehearsal and checking for understanding involving all students at the early stages so that learning is build on firmer ground and retrieval practice is actually 'practice'.

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When daily quiz regimes become lethal mutations of retrieval practice.

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One of the most common areas of development in schools over the last few years has been in the area of retrieval practice - supporting students to remember what they've been taught, gradually, steadily deepening and extending their schema for the material in hand, building fluency and confidence.

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Mini whiteboards- the essential classroom tool | The Goldfish Bowl (edublogs.org)

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I have not always seen eye to eye with mini whiteboards. I hated handing them out, storing them, pens running out, pens going missing, not having enough, doodles, scribbles, drawings of inappropriate things, drawings of me, inappropriate drawings of me. In the past I would trot them out every so often before inevitably dismissing them as just too much of a hassle. Yet now I use mini whiteboards in every lesson and I can't imagine teaching without them. Perhaps these are not the most fashionable tools in the education world, but here are the reasons why I find them indispensable.

Whiteboards are a way of getting immediate feedback about student understanding, with an effective sequence always starting with a well-designed task or question. Rather than just waiting as students write, this time can be used to seek the most useful responses. Do most students get it or not? Where are the great examples that can be used as models? Where are the examples of common errors that students can learn from? Which students are making the same errors?

Depending in what our checking tells us, there are many options:

Stop the task and reteach something immediately.

Give a simple piece of corrective advice to address a common problem e.g. 'remember to mention the writer'.

Choose a range of responses (usually three) for students to compare.

Pick one example that is 'nearly there' and ask the class to improve it.

Sequence the responses shared so that they become increasingly more sophisticated.

Find answers with a common thread and ask students to connect them (really useful for language analysis).

Find three errors and ask students to connect them.

Teach the students who don't understand in a small group. See in-class interventions.

If the first board I checked was this one, I would be thinking about spelling, particularly character names. Is this student the only one getting these wrong? I know that in this lesson I shared a model paragraph on the board and the phrase 'ultimately lead to' has been lifted from that and used incorrectly, so I need to know if others have made the same error. I could choose this board to look at the spelling of 'ultimately'. We could use it as a fairly decent first attempt at an opening paragraph and ask students to rework it to make it better. I could seek out another contrasting set of adjectives used to describe Sheila and ask students to compare. Or I might not use this board at all-there are plenty of others to choose from! The main thing is, I don't want to leave it to a randomly selected student response and hope it tells me something. By getting every student to write a response to a clear and unambiguous question (not 'hands up if you don't understand'), I can be reasonably sure of the class picture and do something about it.

There are other benefits of using whiteboards too. One of the issues that we have, as I am sure many schools do, is the use of unnecessary fillers in spoken responses. Part of the reason for this is, I feel, is students' lack of confidence in what they are saying. Or that they don't know what they are going to say before they start saying it. The few seconds it takes to write a couple of ideas down on a whiteboard can help to eliminate both of these. Add in grammar issues, not answering in sentences and the ubiquitous 'innit', and we have a number of elements that a quickly prepared written response can help to eliminate.

I want my students to develop excellent habits of editing, proofreading and redrafting. Whiteboards help me to create a culture where this is expected. It starts with making sure the first thing they write is high quality, and there's an increased accountability when students write on whiteboards. When they know it will be held up and discussed, there is an incentive for it to be their best work. It's easy to edit work quickly on a whiteboard and far less messy. With a constant focus on the quality of these short responses, students start to self edit, even as they are reading out their answers. They can spot the errors in other students' answers and then fix their own. It's easy for the teacher to correct the spelling of the word 'beginning' on a board and then instruct others in the class to fix it if they made that mistake. It's great for adding commas or colons in the right place. Even as students write in their exercise books, they can make notes on whiteboards.

Every lesson at our school starts with a Do Now which is completed on the whiteboards. It means that lessons start in a calm and prompt manner and it is efficient when we don't have to wait for books to be handed out. The ability to immediately write something down on whiteboards can also help to eliminate the ridiculous amount of time it takes for some students to write the title and date.

Some argue that teachers might only do work on whiteboards in order to avoid marking books. Well, of course! And there's nothing wrong with that. The fact is, I'm not going to mark everything students write in their book and I can't mark it if it is only in their head. If it is written on a whiteboard, I am giving immediate feedback and in a fraction of the time it takes to mark books- in many ways it is more beneficial than marking books.

But what about the problems that I listed before? Surely these won't go away. Much of what we try and do at Dixons Kings is to make it easy for teachers to teach and students to learn, so behaviour systems and classroom routines are crucial to ensure students don't often exhibit those off-task behaviours. As for the equipment issues, every classroom has a set of whiteboards on desks and students must carry a pen with them as part of their essential equipment. Without these systems, I wouldn't use whiteboards, especially as I don't have my own classroom.

We designed a mini whiteboard routine which is used by all teachers in the school. When we want students to hold up their boards, we say, "3-2-1... show me." They hold boards up with two hands then we say "track student x" and that student reads their answer out. We come back to these routines in our practice sessions to ensure they are consistent. There are some who might argue that these routines reduce creativity or lead to 'robotic' teaching. Yet they have allowed me to be the most creative I have ever been as a teacher and I would welcome anyone to come and visit to see just how much this routine and some of the others free teachers up to actually teach. Without these whole school approaches, you can still design a whiteboard routine that works for you. Consider in advance how equipment is stored and handed out and expectations during the sequence.

So, have a rummage in your stock cupboard, find the discarded whiteboards (I guarantee there will be some) and start using them.

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Mini whiteboards- the essential classroom tool

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I have not always seen eye to eye with mini whiteboards. I hated handing them out, storing them, pens running out, pens going missing, not having enough, doodles, scribbles, drawings of inappropriate things, drawings of me, inappropriate drawings of me.

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Using exit tickets to assess and plan: ‘The tuning fork of teaching’ – Improving Teaching

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Jay Altman describes a lesson taught by the maths teacher in Boston whose students achieved the best value-added scores in the state. Students entered, listened, practised, wrote exit tickets and left. Surprised, Altman asked what the teacher was doing differently: the teacher responded that he examined the exit tickets and helped any student who had struggled to master the lessons's content. That afternoon.

Imitating a feedback loop achieved in a Boston charter proved challenging in a British comprehensive. But the fundamental idea - frequent assessment of student understanding and rapid action - is incredibly powerful. Moreover, introducing exit seems to have a transformative effect on teachers, modifying their sense of students' understanding and hence of the best actions they can take. After attending to careful setting of objectives, introducing exit tickets may be the most powerful change a teacher can make.

In discussing mastery learning (a relatively well-evidenced approach promoted by the EEF Toolkit), the authors mention it entails breaking:

"learning content into units with clearly specified objectives which are pursued until they are achieved".

This approach requires some frequent measure of exit tickets, like exit tickets. Key features needed are:

"setting clear objectives and providing feedback... a high level of success, at least 80%, should be required before pupils move on".

As to the transformative nature of exit tickets, in discussing feedback, one of its two highest-rated strategies, the EEF mentions that:

Feedback redirects or refocuses either the teacher's or the learner's actions to achieve a goal, by aligning effort and activity with an outcome.

More fundamentally, exit tickets provide a straight answer to a simple question we should be desperate to answer each lesson: what did students learn?

Having discussed, recommended and trained new teachers to use exit tickets, I felt it was time to write about them. Most recently, having worked on a professional development course with some great English teachers adopting and refining exit tickets, I wanted to summarise the training I provided, share example exit tickets from various subjects, and share some of what we learned.

Simple, simple planning

At simplest, a lesson could be planned by creating:

1. Lesson objectives

2. An exit ticket

3. Teaching to get between 1 and 2.

For example:

The strength of this approach is that we are pushed to plan from objectives, rather than from activities. We shift from asking:

"What will I have students do this lesson?"

to:

"What do I want students to know by the end of this lesson?"

Instead of thinking 'I'll hold a debate', 'students will make posters', or 'we'll write an essay', our choices derive from what we want to achieve and how we will measure it. (This, in turn, rests on having a carefully planned curriculum and scheme of work).

Creating objectives and exit tickets is more important than the body of the lesson: the exit ticket will allow you to check if your approach worked. As Doug Lemov puts it in Teach Like a Champion 2.0:

You'll know how effective your lesson was, as measured by how well they learned it, not how well you thought you taught it."

Understanding these ideas was my way of finally acting upon something I'd heard many times from teacher trainers: 'Give teachers a piece of paper to plan a lesson from. The effective ones will start writing at the bottom.'
A prerequisite for good exit tickets: good objectives

A good exit ticket is tightly aligned to the objectives of the lesson and the curriculum. So a necessary prerequisite is a well-framed lesson objective, which:

Focuses on the curriculum

Uses economy of language

Has a specific, measurable aim

This also forces us to confront the vagueness of our goals. Take the line below from the Swedish national curriculum, which expects pupils to be familiar with 'Numbers in fraction and decimal form, and their use in everyday situations'. In reality, it is a little more complicated:

Carefully choosing objectives therefore includes clearly setting out what level of understanding we expect students to reach.

In training teachers, I advocate a simple set of objectives, based on bronze, silver and gold. You can take your pick how you choose to formulate them though, as long as they are clear and specific. This also entails artificially narrowing fascinating topics into chunks which can be taught in a lesson. For example:

Some teachers protest at this point that a single lesson incorporates many different goals and ideas, and that these can't possibly be reduced to one objective: 'Students will be learning Act I Scene 2 of Romeo and Juliet, debating themes of the play and writing a letter summarising their thoughts'. The implication of this range of aims is that no one assessment can possibly capture everything students are learning in one lesson.

I'd contend that if we want students to get better at any of these three objectives, we should prioritise one. Muddling through - spending ten minutes each on three different aspects of the lesson - and failing to check students' success on any objective limits what students can learn and leaves us ignorant of what they have learned. Better to let students concentrate on understanding the scene this lesson, and focus on the conventions of letter-writing next lesson. Better to maintain simplicity and check our success.
Many teachers I've worked with on this have noted that focusing on exit tickets actually led them to spend much more time formulating lesson objectives - this is one reason why I think focusing on exit tickets can be transformative for teachers.
Designing good exit tickets

With a clear objective - or with the goal of refining objectives over time - we can design exit tickets. An exit ticket will make a simple, 3-5 minute task for the end of the lesson, which will tell us whether students have understood the lesson's objectives. A good exit ticket must:

Include all aspects of the lesson

Differentiate accurately between levels of understanding

Be swift to answer

Be swift to mark

In this light, I try to avoid exit tickets like 'Write 3 things you've learned, 2 things you already knew, 1 thing you'd like to find out'. The looseness of the first question makes it unlikely that you'll find out whether students understood the key aspects of the lesson.

In discussion, our group of English teachers repeatedly debated the extent to which structure is helpful in exit tickets. I think there's merit in offering hints as to the kind of response you expect: 'Include three points from the text in your response'. On the other hand, in my own work using exit tickets in history I've tended to use open questions like 'How did the Tudor kings increase their power?' to help students learn how to approach history questions. So perhaps the answer is to gradually remove structure over time.

Teachers were unanimous that limiting space for writing helped students respond in a focused way - and would encourage other teachers to use them. In the same spirit, formulating a single question incorporating the whole lesson, or two or three sums or grammar points, makes exit tickets manageable and markable.

Whether an exit ticket is a separate slip of paper, a paragraph or set of answers in an exercise book is a matter of taste and convenience: it certainly shouldn't add more work to the lesson. So a teacher may choose one paragraph of a piece of extended writing, or a particular question students have answered, and treat it as an exit ticket.

Examples of exit tickets

Below are example exit tickets I've used in training in maths, biology, physics, English language and literature. Some of them are in subjects I've never taught, but I found so few examples online, I thought they might prove useful. If you can point me towards better collections, please do. All seek to exemplify the simplicity of an exit ticket and the clear links to objectives.

How best to respond to exit tickets?

In training teachers, I have moved towards fewer techniques, more focus on implementation and more practice. Carefully-designed exit tickets just leave you with 100 or 150 slips of paper. Kate Allam described coming to see exit tickets more as aids to planning the next lesson than assessments of the previous one; Rowan Pearson analogised exit tickets to tuning forks, not the end of one lesson, or the beginning of the next, exit tickets pinch the two together.

So how to pinch the two lessons together. On looking through exit tickets, it may be that:

a) All students got the answer right: recycle the exit tickets - students have 'got it', you can move on, the exit tickets are no longer needed.

b) All students got the answer wrong: recycle the exit tickets - students haven't 'got it', you will need to reteach.

c) Some students got it right, some got it wrong (the most likely outcome): you could

1. Briefly revise key points in a starter.

2. Share a model student answer and discuss what makes it good.

3. Share a partial student answer and improve it together.

4. RAG mark the exit tickets and have students revise or extend their work accordingly.

5. Sit down with those students who've struggled at an appropriate part of the lesson.

6. Group students according to the task which is the most suitable next step.

7. Pair students with answers at different levels and ask them to compare the strengths and weaknesses of each.

Whatever you choose to do, it shouldn't take very long. Of the options above, number 6, grouping students by task, is likely to prove onerous, and I'd be unlikely to do it.

Whatever your preferences, it seems important to be:

Utilitarian - seeking the greatest good for the greatest number

Opportunist - picking up ideas and misconceptions as you find them

Efficient - keeping things simple and brief

Mastery-oriented - seeking to get every student to a key level of understanding

If you choose to RAG mark the exit tickets, you can also use this to track how well students are doing over time - either with a particular aspect of learning, or over time. As Kate Allam noted with enthusiasm, it sounds like extra work, but you're likely to reap the rewards.

The other aspect which I emphasise in training is the importance of being upbeat and positive when returning to the last lesson's content - even if students really struggled. Going back to the previous lesson is not a punishment, for you or for students - it is a chance to improve and to understand fully.

The link with hinge questions

I'm baffled now, belatedly, as to why I started improving my teaching using hinge questions, not exit tickets. Hinge questions are amazing, but they are spectacularly hard to use: you have to respond to what you have learned about student understanding on the spot. Exit tickets give you 24 hours breathing space to work out what students have understood and plan accordingly. I've come to see hinge questions as identical to exit tickets, just pulled earlier in the learning process and shaped even more narrowly around specific misconceptions. I now see exit tickets are 'entry level' assessment and hinge tickets as the next step once exit tickets are working well.

Against exit tickets...

There are two obvious complaints about exit tickets I'd like to head off here:

This can be a lot of marking (although as the options above suggest, it need not be). I was struck by Jo Facer's recent, superb post described loving marking and her learning to stop entirely. It's a compelling approach, but I'd argue that the essence of what Jo is doing is aligned to what I'm trying to describe here: she reads students' books once or twice a week:

As I read, I make notes: spellings lots are getting wrong, things they're all doing well at, and the main issues they need to improve. I note down anyone whose paragraph is amazing to reward with merits or show the class; I note down anyone whose work is messy to give a demerit to."

Examining exit tickets is just the same as what Jo is advocating - the important thing is that, for limited time costs, the teacher know what students are understanding and where they're struggling. I like exit tickets, and I suspect they are more palatable in schools than not marking, but the key thing is the engagement with student work as an aid to planning.

David Didau has repeatedly contended that all forms of Assessment for Learning are invalid, since we can never really know how much students understand. It's quite true that knowing something at the end of a lesson does not mean we will know it for all time: we forget what we learn rapidly, and we must plan for this, as I've discussed here. Far better, however, to know what students understood in the lesson - however fleeting that may be - than not to check at all.

The last word on exit tickets...

Rowan Pearson described half a term working on exit tickets as having converted him, from seeing them as "gimmicky add-ons", "quite faddy and an accountability measure", to something "central to the lesson" that you can "use in your week-to-week planning".

I have discussed the value and importance of exit tickets in much greater detail in Responsive Teaching: Cognitive Science and Formative Assessment in Practice.

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Using exit tickets to assess and plan: 'The tuning fork of teaching'

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Jay Altman describes a lesson taught by the maths teacher in Boston whose students achieved the best value-added scores in the state. Students entered, listened, practised, wrote exit tickets and left. Surprised, Altman asked what the teacher was doing differently: the teacher responded that he examined the exit tickets and helped any student who had struggled to master the lessons's content.