What does this mean?
Teachers create opportunities for students to practice new material in a way that is careful and deliberate, through a combination of verbal work, short tasks and extended tasks.
Teachers provide opportunity to ‘practice for fluency’ (to embed knowledge and procedures through retrieval practice and drill), as well as ‘joint practice’ which draws on teacher modelling, before students move towards independent ‘deliberate practice’.
Consideration is given to the spacing and interleaving of practice over time to support long term memory.
What might this look like in practice?
Teachers use and promote a range of retrieval practice strategies, including low-stakes quizzing, to encourage practice for fluency (strengthening long-term memory)
Teachers scaffold and sequence practice to support students to move from joint/ guided practice towards independent practice (see more on Masterful Modelling HERE).
Teachers curate activities in such a way as to promote the practice of constituent steps in a process, rather than focussing solely on the end product.
Teachers identify and exploit the opportunity to interleave and space practice to strengthen student recall of knowledge/ processes.
Who has been working on this at Richard Challoner?
Inquiry Questions/ Themes from the Learning Communities...
PL/RJ - Embedding short, sharp and effective revision techniques into lessons to support what they do outside of lessons (2018-19)
TCH - Essays that (almost) write themselves - scaffolding essays to help focus on what rather than how to write (2018-19)
LMC - the use of writing frames to support low prior attainers (2017-18)
VB - Foregoing the traditional starter: using interleaving to support retrieval (2017-18)
OB - Low stakes testing to support surface-level learning (2017-18)
SGR - The generation effect: getting pupils to write their own retrieval questions (2017-18)