I see a lot of people teach. Without protesting too much, it is a genuine privilege to be allowed into colleagues’ classrooms. I am ever grateful.
Since I have been watching colleagues grapple with the complexities of helping pupils learn, I have learnt a great deal about how teaching might be improved. There is no universal panacea to cure all teaching & learning ills – just a diligent attention to detail and a willingness to try. In feedback from a training session I delivered recently to subject leaders, a colleague wrote that my input was really helpful in that, “John reminded us of what we know, but don’t do.”
Encouraging pupils to retrieve from their memories what we hope they have learnt from what we taught them in the past is a key element of effective teaching, in that the process of retrieving what we have taught them helps pupils make a “permanent change to their long-term memory” – the best definition I have come across of learning.
So far, nothing new. But I worry that lesson starter retrieval tasks have become so procedural to both teachers and pupils, that they have evolved into pedagogic white noise and don’t advance pupils’ thinking and learning.
