Take Responsibility

In a previous blog post, I wrote about three key learning points. In this blog, we'll look at the third of those...

Key learning point 3: Don't leave revision to pupils, and plan in activities to revisit key information.

I've worked in schools in challenging circumstances in Inner City Leeds for 15 years, and I love it. I love the relationships, I love the challenge and I love teaching. I am, however, a realist, and I wouldn't expect many of my pupils to be able to direct their own ongoing revision so that they were improving. They could definitely revisit ideas, but they'll go for the ones that make them feel good about themselves, or they'll go for the ones that everyone found hard, and this approach to learning and revision isn't one that will maximise the impact.

I'd be willing to bet that less than 10% of pupils I've taught over the last 15 years have had an area set aside for keeping their school work organised, never mind planning out their 'ongoing revision and study'.

With that in mind, I space out their learning for them and provided opportunities for retrieval so that ideas stick and learning occurs. Rome wasn't built in a day, and in a similar way, learning happens over time rather than in time. This means repeated exposure to ideas that pupils have succeeded with is important, so that learning occurs. So important that, following an assessment, we can't just expect pupils to be self-directed to revisit the things that they don't understand and we need to recognise that these areas of need should be revisited regularly.

We should take responsibility and present them with spaced repetition opportunities to improve the likelihood that learning DOES take place following the identification of this idea as an area of need from the assessment and following their first re-exposure in lessons.

To help with this, I use this spreadsheet. Adding topics into the 'Completed Learning' column will map the ideas forward in time by a day, a week, a month and three months (ish...) and provide a reminder to revisit these ideas with your classes.

In the next blog, I'll outline my plan for feeding back Year 10 mocks, taking into account others' responses to the original tweet.