Dear colleague,
One year I made an off-handed comment to my students about the importance of retrieval practice: RP so you don't RIP. I didn't think much of it until the end of the school year when my student Ellie said it was the most important thing she learned in my class. I even made a poster of it in Ellie's honor.
Retrieval practice is a well-known method in education these days, thanks in large part to the popularity of Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel's 2014 book Make It Stick. (If you entered education after this book came out or missed it during the 2010s, I'd put it at the top of the reading list.)
The gist is, we remember what we practice remembering, and we can do this through class activities like low-stake quizzes. I use these a lot during my lessons, and one of my goals in doing so is to teach my students to learn how to quiz themselves.
I like to tell my students there are two levels of retrieval practice you want to work through in order to feel super confident coming into an assessment.
- Level 1 = the surface level. What do the words in this unit mean? What do they look like? Can you give an example of the concept?
- Level 2 = the elaborative level. This is where you talk out load to yourself while you're studying or you write out for yourself in a notebook how the words you've memorized at Level 1 connect to each other. How are they related? If you had to rank them in terms of importance, how would you do so?
Level 2 is called elaborative rehearsal in the research, and it makes the learner much more capable of handling an unfamiliar question with aplomb. This is because when you master Level 2, you know both what the words and concepts of the unit mean and how they connect to one another.
All of which is an effort to share with you how I try to teach these fundamental learning principles to my students (basically, I'm Woodenizing how to study).
Teaching right beside you,
DSJR
P.S. I can't imagine teaching without a solid grasp of how learning works. It's so important to me, in fact, that I created an in-depth course about it called Principles of Learning.
- Individual licenses are $199 and can be purchased here.
- Group license are available by request — just reach out.
P.P.S. I'm hosting a live session for school leaders on April 20 called “The Will to Teach.” It's about the Five Key Beliefs applied to teachers — and what leaders can do when the will to teach starts to erode. $29 for individuals or $99 for teams. [Details and registration here.]
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