Rooted in morphology
Last year, I had one period per week with four Year 8 pupils to support their English lessons. I did not have any prior experience of teaching Year 8 English at the school. So what did we do? I reviewed …
Teaching
Applying teaching strategied, techniques and ideas.
Macro curriculum and Vocabulous
From micro to macro I am still thinking deeply about our curriculum. Having previously thought a great deal about micro curriculum planning, this thinking is more macro thinking. I have thought hard and consulted on the principles and purpose of …
Retrieval beyond words
Kornell and Bjork (2008) famously presented learners with impressionist landscape artwork in blocked or interleaved formats and then tested their ability to identify the artist who had painted novel example paintings. There were two key findings: first, interleaving was superior …
Curriculum grain size, retrieval and the fragile and mysterious effects on memory
Teaching Holes to Year 7 pupils we quiz every lesson. We pre-test chapter target vocabulary via matched diagnostic and target cues (word-definitions). We then post-test (spacing within the lesson). As we progress through the text, we continue with matched quizzes …
Test-enhanced learning: Successive Relearning (part IV)
Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not information. They are distinctly different and should be taught distinctly differently. Even knowing this, we won’t travel far at all without pupils’ attention and the borders of the hinterland will remain at a …
Test-enhanced learning: knowledge is not information (part III)
Edperiment 1a down, 1b to go. You are familiar with the methodology. Uncommon word or diagnostic cue. You produce the target cue or definition. ‘Papist’ was an uncommon word, do you remember it’s meaning? According to research and the Twitter …
Test-enhanced learning: Information is not knowledge (Part II)
We have already covered a lot of ground. So to gain a firmer footing… and ‘walking-the-walk,’ in promoting a ‘successive relearning’ approach to teaching, here goes with a review of Part I with a smattering of testing. Little is ever …
Test-enhanced learning: On my terms (Part I)
For the past three years, I have been reading, researching and thinking specifically about the process of learning and test-enhanced learning within the parameters of Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) multi-store model of memory, which assumes there are three logically and …