Retrieval Practice: How Do I Remember Something I Didn’t Learn?

It’s been a while.

I’m currently working on refining retrieval practices in my school. Students need to remember what they were taught, right? Instead of leaving that up to chance, one area that I’ve designated for that happening is through the ‘Do Now’ activities that take place at the start of every lesson.

Most of us know what a ‘Do Now’ is. Students come in, there’s five questions on the board based on them retrieving things from previous lessons and topics and their task is to try and remember the answers. Well, what if a student was absent when that content was taught? Or (and I know that this doesn’t happen in your classroom) they just weren’t paying attention then and have no idea what you’re talking about now? In those instances, we’re asking them to remember something that is just not there. And for those students, those 10 minutes that everyone’s working on the ‘Do Now’ questions turns into them sitting there and staring blankly. That’s hardly effective.

If retrieval is going to include everyone, it needs to be tied to something that every student can hold in their hand or see on a screen. E.g. A knowledge organiser, a glossary, a formula sheet, case study grid. These are all examples of things that capture the core content and skills you want them to embed into long-term memory. If they have that, it removes the “I don’t have anything to retrieve from” problem. If a pupil missed a lesson, they still have access to the core content and can take part.

So my first prescription is to give your students something to retrieve from in advance.

My next prescription is to actually think. Our job as teachers, is to get better at teaching and to help our students get better at learning. This core purpose, for me, sits at the heart of everything that should be happening from SLT level to classroom level. In essence, it should be one of the key checkboxes to any initiative happening in the school.

Talking of checkboxes, retrieval has a big danger of becoming a checkbox exercise – it’s anything but. It’s a thinking routine that embeds learning. The purpose of the ‘Do Now’ routine that I’ve introduced in my school is quite specific: to embed key content and skills into long-term memory. That’s what it’s designed to do, therefore everything from how the five questions are structured, to the active ingredients is geared to fulfilling that purpose. So for teachers, the purpose isn’t to fulfil the requirement of having five questions on the board, it’s to actually think about the key content and skills that they really want students to embed into their long-term memory and then systematically go about testing for that and ingraining it through the Do Now routine.

I would argue, one of the best ways to get that done is to have something that clearly lays out what it is you want students to know.

They obviously won’t remember every single thing from every single lesson, but what’s the core bit(s) you do want them to remember? Where have you laid them out? How can students access them? In my faculty, for example, I have knowledge organisers and revision booklets that I’ve created, which sets out exactly that. My Do Now questions are all focused on the content within those resources. Creating them was a big task, but for many subjects, especially the core ones (English, Maths and Science), many much more intelligent people than me have worked on creating those resources that we can all buy/download and use, especially at KS4 where the expected content and skills are much more uniform.

How does this look in practice?

One of the simplest ways of putting this into practice if you have a knowledge organiser, glossary, revision booklet, formula sheet, etc, is to do the following:

1. Plan out your five Do Now questions. Here is where I use the knowledge organiser and revision booklet, and I pick out the different parts I want to test. The structure that I introduced for how it looks in my school is below.

2. You obviously then know what topics you’re testing, so when students come in, get them to take out (for example) the knowledge organiser and give them 1-2 minutes to scan it. Perhaps scan certain sections. Then they put those away and start the Do Now from memory.

3. Give them feedback with the correct answers, where they will self-assess in green pen. In this way, they know exactly what they were expected to remember and removes any scope for errors or confusion.

4. Address common wrong answers by then re-testing for those in the coming weeks (maybe it becomes Question 2 after a week has passed, or Question 3 if it’s been longer). In doing so, you’re not just forgetting the fact that they got this wrong – they’ll revisit it and you can get them to scan over that part again.

5. Follow up by setting homework on the sections you want students to memorise again or for the future. They have something tangible to revise from/ learn from.

As I said, this all depends on solid curriculum thinking from every teacher.

We began with the problem of students not knowing what they don’t know. My solution? To give them things that explicitly lay out the things they need to know. That way, no one sits idle, not knowing. Then, through the retrieval routines in your school (e.g. the Do Now), test them on it. If they don’t get it the first time, put things in place to ensure they remember next time, and close those gaps. Therefore, everyone knows what mastery of a topic and subject domain looks like, and you’ve built routines to help students get there.