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  • Support for early career teachers
  • Education Development Trust
  • Year 2: Second half-term: how pupils learn - making it stick
    • Autumn week 6

    Mentor materials

    Learning from colleagues and reviewing the module

    Intended outcomes

    The intended outcomes of this topic are for Early Career Teachers to:

    Learn that:

    • Regular purposeful practice of what has previously been taught can help consolidate material and help pupils remember what they have learned
    • Requiring pupils to retrieve information from memory, and spacing practice so that pupils revisit ideas after a gap are also likely to strengthen recall

    Learn how to increase likelihood of material being retained, by:

    • Planning regular review and practice of key ideas and concepts over time
    • Designing practice, generation and retrieval tasks that provide just enough support so that pupils experience a high success rate when attempting challenging work
    • Increasing challenge with practice and retrieval as knowledge becomes more secure (e.g. by removing scaffolding, lengthening spacing or introducing interacting elements)

    Activities

    Interviewing/observing a colleague (20 minutes)

    In this Block, the ECT has not had an opportunity to observe any colleagues so the mentor should organise a 15–20 minute slot when they and the ECT will either observe a colleague’s lesson together or interview a more experienced colleague.

    The focus of either the interview or observation is to consider how the more experienced colleague increases the likelihood that material will be retained over time. If an interview is chosen, the following questions could be used:

    1. How do you increase the likelihood that material will be retained over time?
    2. Are there any techniques that you have found particularly effective?
    3. Is there anything I should definitely avoid?

    If an observation is chosen, it should be planned for a time when the teacher is using one of the techniques explored in this Block such as practice, retrieval or repetition activities. This might be at the start, end or middle of the lesson.

    Reflection on interview/observation (15 minutes)

    Pose the following questions:

    • What did you learn?
    • What has it made you think about your own practice?
    • What are you interested to find out more about?

    Feedback from the lesson observation (10 minutes)

    The mentor should feedback on the lesson observation of the ECT that they did since the last topic, looking at challenge:

    • What was successful?
    • What could be better?
    • What will the ECT do next?

    Reviewing this module (15 minutes)

    Using the final self-directed study activity for this module, ask ECTs to share their reflections on learning across the module.

    1. What have you learnt in this module?
    2. What do you need to learn more about?

    It might be useful to identify colleagues that the ECT could speak to and/or observe to support their future learning in relation to this area.