Our Journey with Retrieval Practice: a school leader's perspective

Increasingly, direction in my school has been shaped by educational research. That journey started when we read Daniel Willingham's seminal book  'Why don't Students like School?'. It was a game changer which led us onto other great educational literature such as Daisy Christodoulou's 'Making Good Progress' and Peps McCrea's 'Memorable Teaching'. A staff training day in August 2019 focused on some of this literature, and as a result the decision was taken to embed the following three maxims as the crux of our learning and teaching principles in our new School Development Plan:

1: Subject-Specific Knowledge must precede domain-specific skill;

2: Memory is the residue of thought;

3: Assessment is the bridge between learning and teaching.

At Carrickfergus Grammar School we are absolutely convinced of the following: the one thing which underpins the above maxims is highly effective retrieval practice. Why?

1.     Low-stakes, formative quizzing and testing in our classrooms helps to ensure that powerful knowledge transfers from working memory to long-term memory. As our students journey from novice to expert in a subject discipline, robust retrieval practice will also afford our students high-level opportunities to develop their understanding of the application of that knowledge;

2.     When combined with ‘desirable difficulties’ such as spacing and interleaving, effective retrieval practice ensures that our students are thinking hard, are operating outside of their comfort zones and inside the challenge zone, and are thus strengthening the schema in their long-term memory;

3.     We know that there is a difference between performance and real learning. Students may perform well on an end-of-unit test after the content has just been taught, but may underperform significantly when assessed on the same content in an exam four months later. This may well be because the content has not embedded in long-term memory. If real learning involves a change in the ‘mental map’ in our long-term memory, then effective retrieval practice is most certainly a solid, steady and secure bridge between our teaching of content and that end goal.

For us at Carrickfergus Grammar School, the development of effective retrieval practice strategies holds such importance that it is now our key, core CPD priority. Too often in schools, there is a danger that CPD can become a ‘tick-box’-exercise, particularly when schools are at the mercy of the whims of LEAs, curriculum or exam advisory bodies. I’m reminded of an anecdote I heard of a school where the Principal stood up and said “We’ve done Assessment for Learning in our CPD, it’s now concluded, and next year we move on to something else”. 

When I say that effective retrieval practice is a key and core CPD priority at our school, I mean that it will remain our key and core priority – year after year – because the evidence regarding the impact of retrieval practice is so consistent and robust. This isn’t an ‘educational fad’ like many other things schools are often ‘coerced’ into doing. Retrieval practice has impact. Retrieval practice makes a difference. It makes a difference to our students’ outcomes, it makes a difference as regards cultural capital, and it can help give our students the edge in later life.

When I reflect on my own journey as a teacher, like many others I think I always was aware sub-consciously of the importance of retrieval. In 2014 the Sutton Trust Report entitled ‘What makes great teaching[1]?’ concluded that the (pedagogical) content knowledge of the teacher has one of the strongest impacts on student outcomes. I was not surprised that the report also came to the conclusion that ‘pedagogical content knowledge’ did not just include teachers’ own subject knowledge, but also  their ability to plan for and identify potential misconceptions on the part of students in their learning and respond accordingly.

However, it was only upon reading Kate Jones’ excellent book on retrieval practice when it was published in 2019 that I started to think explicitly about retrieval strategies, and about the hugely powerful role they have in affording teachers opportunities to identify misconceptions (just think as a very simple example about the feedback we receive when 30 children are holding up mini-whiteboard responses in front of us), and the vital role retrieval strategies can play in our responsive teaching.

Kate’s book was an eye-opener, and as a result at Carrickfergus Grammar School we secured a copy of the book for each member of staff – we now affectionately refer to it as ‘Kate’s pink book’!

And thus began our explicit journey at school with retrieval practice.

Step 1:

The first question we asked was ‘why retrieval? ‘. As teachers we instinctively know what works and what doesn’t, and we incline towards ‘common sense’. I would argue that, sub-consciously at least, many teachers know that low-stakes, formative quizzing and testing in lessons is impactful. Therefore, the rationale for retrieval is made easier in this regard. However, the section in Kate’s ‘pink book’ about the rational for retrieval and associated research was our starting point.

Step 2:

The leadership team in school decided to allocate a staff development day purely and simply to allow staff to read research – from home, from Costa Coffee, from the top of a mountain, from wherever they wanted to be. And we didn’t care where they read, just as long as they read. To aid this process, we put together a folder of research and articles based on retrieval, as well as directing staff to Kate’s book. This was light-touch. There was no big ‘checking-up’ by leadership afterwards as to what staff had read and what they had ‘learned’. In my experience, just allowing staff to ‘step back’ from their very busy teaching schedules for a day and focus on research is enough of a gain. Whilst staff won’t have time to read everything, they will take away from the experience little ‘nuggets’ of thinking, particularly about how it may translate into their own subject areas. That, too, is a sizeable gain.

Step 3:

In school, I then asked two of my teachers who had already been ‘ploughing a bit of a furrow’ with retrieval in their own respective classrooms to prepare a presentation to staff about retrieval, focusing on the rationale and giving some initial thoughts about strategies which could be employed within classrooms. This was delivered in a 45-minute session during a follow-up training day. Having two practising teachers who were both internal to the school deliver this training heightened its validity and appeal, I believe, helped even more so by the high-quality of delivery. Interest in the presentation was such that the question and answer session afterwards lasted about 20 minutes, with teachers sharing their own experiences and pondering further questions such as how to break the misconception that retrieval is reductive and focused solely on factual knowledge, but rather how it can be used to get pupils to think deeper, to think analytically, to apply knowledge. The consequent presentation prepared by the two teachers was then shared with staff.

Step 4:

As a school leader, I believe that CPD is at its best when it is somewhat ‘organic’, ie when a general steer from the top is married by organic approaches being developed within subject departments. In an excellent recent article by Tom Sherrington[2], called ‘Autonomy with accountability. Implementing change from the ground up’, he concluded that ‘whole-school teaching and learning programmes need to combine general principles with strong ground-up implementation’. At Carrickfergus Grammar School, our general principal was the development of effective retrieval practice strategies within lessons, and Step 4 involved departments in school deciding upon and trialling low-stakes retrieval techniques within their lessons from the ‘ground-up’, based on a perception about what might work best for that subject. Examples are as follows:

·       Chemistry decided to trial Adam Boxer’s retrieval roulette, placing ten questions on the board at the start of each lesson, most linked to the current topic, others from topics undertaken weeks or months ago;

·       Physics were trialling knowledge organisers, and developed their knowledge organisers for the purposes of student self-quizzing, with questions on one side of the page and answers on the other, and with templates which included only questions and no answer. Students self-quizzed regularly both at home and in class;

·       Maths trailed the use of mini-whiteboards in lessons for the purposes of retrieval linked to consolidating strong mental maths;

·       Modern Languages used techniques such as:

o   A ‘do-now’ challenge, which requires students to retrieve vocabulary,

conjugate from memory, fond the odd-one-out and translate;

o   A ‘5-a-day’ challenge in which students must conjugate, list (eg

adjectives on a topic), spot the odd-one-out, correct a mistake and

translate a sentence;

o   A ‘boggle activity’ whereby students are required to retrieve and spell as many words as possible on a theme based on 16 or so given letters;

o   A ‘Connect 4’ theme in which students must translate 4 words in

separate discs of the same colour;

o   A knowledge retrieval challenge whereby they get 1 point for retrieval of a word from the last lesson, 2 points for last week’s lesson, 3 points for last month’s lesson and 4 points for last year’s lesson. An example from one of my own lessons recently is below.

·       History explored online approaches such as Quizlet Live and Quizizz.

Step 5:

To develop our evidence-base framework further, the school designed and launched a CPD portal for staff, in which we brought together and collated useful online articles, some from researchers and authors, others from practising teachers writing practice in their classrooms. Linked to this, we subscribed to Oliver Caviglioli and Tom Sherrington’s ‘Walkthru’ packages and made this an online resource for staff, including further guidance on retrieval.

Step 6:

As we developed our explicit thinking and understanding of retrieval within school, we realised that there were common questions we were grappling with between departments, such as how we ensure that retrieval is integral throughout our lessons, and not just something which ‘is done’ for 5-10 minutes at the start, and how we ensure that we are using it effectively to develop higher-order thinking, and how we construct our questions in order to deepen thinking.

And at this stage, we ‘asked the expert’. We were delighted to be able to hold a 1-hour Zoom session with Kate herself. Kate understood that the school had at this stage moved far beyond the ‘why retrieval’ stage and that we were at the stage of ‘honing’ strategies, and therefore her presentation to us focused on the misconceptions about retrieval, such as limiting it to one small part of the lesson, and the mistakes which are often made in the construction of retrieval questions. It was an excellent session, which inspired staff, and which has helped to develop and deepen our own understanding of retrieval in action. Comments from staff afterwards included:

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If you were to come to visit Carrickfergus Grammar School now, I would be fairly confident that you would see retrieval in action just by talking a short walk around the school, and if you were to ask any of our students, they would be able to tell you explicitly about retrieval in their respective classrooms, about how teachers adopt spacing and interleaving strategies, and how it impacts positively on their learning.

Like teachers, students too have an in-built radar for ‘what works’. And our students know well that ‘retrieval works’. They are seeing the outworkings of it in their test and exam results, but also on a day-to-day basis in their classroom answers.

For me, one of the biggest wins came in a recent school survey to parents, in which we asked them if their child had ever discussed retrieval with them at home, and how retrieval strategies were being implemented in classrooms. Over 75% of parents said that their child had indeed done so. For me as a school leader, that was the icing on the cake, and a clear sign that retrieval really is now at the heart of everything we are doing with learning and teaching at Carrickfergus Grammar School.

 

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[1] https://www.suttontrust.com/our-research/great-teaching/

[2] https://teacherhead.com/2020/10/26/autonomy-with-accountability-implementing-change-from-the-ground-up/