Mentor materials
Strengthening pupils’ subject knowledge
Intended outcomes
The intended outcomes of this topic are for Early Career Teachers to:
Learn how to develop fluency, by:
- Providing tasks that support pupils to learn key ideas securely (e.g. quizzing pupils so they develop fluency with times tables).
- Using retrieval and spaced practice to build automatic recall of key knowledge.
Activities
Reviewing lesson observation (5 minutes)
Discuss the lesson observation agreed in the last topic. What was successful? What could be better? What will the ECT do next?
Reflecting on prior learning (10 minutes)
Recap the learning from the previous topic.
How would you define a ‘big idea’ of a subject?
- The big ideas are the key ideas in a subject: the ones that provide the foundation upon which everything else builds.
Why is it important to identify these?
- To ensure you explicitly cover them with your pupils
- To help you plan in when you will revisit these key ideas to ensure pupils master them
- To help build a foundation knowledge of your subject.<
How do you use the ‘big ideas’ in your planning?
- As key concepts on which to build knowledge
- As key concepts which need to be reinforced and revisited.
Why is it important to link new content to existing knowledge?
- Help pupils store new content in their long term memory
- Helps manage cognitive load
- Helps develop schema.
Can you name three specific ways that you do this in your lessons?
- Review prior learning – ask questions, recap or begin the lesson with an activity that makes pupils think about related content.
- Ask questions explicitly about how the work links to the big ideas of the subject.
- Preview material – tell pupils what they are going to learn about and how it links to what they already know/big ideas of the subject.
Develop pupils’ fluency (35 minutes)
Guidance to mentors:
The mentor should read Handout 10.1 in advance to ensure they are secure on the terms: retrieval practice, interleaving and spaced practice. The mentor may want to revisit the content from module 2 on memory to remind themselves of how working memory and long-term memory interact.
Explain to the ECT that the purpose of this section is to explore the question: once pupils have learned a new concept, how do we ensure that they actually remember it in the long-term?
Task:
Read Handout 10.1 together.
Pose the question: What do you understand by the idea of ‘building automatic recall of key knowledge?’
The mentor may want to extend the discussion by asking the ECT to consider an example where they needed pupils to have automatic recall of key knowledge to access new learning. What was the knowledge they needed? Did all pupils have the automatic recall? How did they check this?
Pose the question: What type of tasks have you used to support pupils to learn key ideas securely (i.e. be able to retrieve them from long-term memory)?
Can you show me examples?
Retrieval practice ideas:
- Answering questions, i.e. a quiz, multiple choice
- Writing down what is known
- Drawing or sketching processes
- Using graphic organisers to organise knowledge
- Gimme 5: list/tell 5 things you remember about…
- Who? What? Where? When? Why?
- 3, 2, 1 (e.g. 3 facts..., 2 features…, 1 example)
- 10 for 10 (e.g. order 10 events in chronological order..., list 10 features of…, rank 10 pivotal moments…)
- Timed brain dump.
Planning for action
Ask the ECT what they will do next as result of today’s topic? When will they do this by?
In the next topic, ECTs will need to bring to the topic a writing task that they plan on doing with pupils soon. Discuss and agree with the ECT what writing task is going to be brought to the topic.