Autumn week 4

Mentor materials

Consolidation of learning

Learning intentions

Your ECT will learn how to:

Increase likelihood of material being retained, by:

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

Support pupils to build increasingly complex mental models, by:

• Discussing curriculum design with experienced colleagues and balancing exposition, repetition, practice of critical skills and knowledge.

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

Topic introduction

The learning outcomes from their self-directed study were to learn that:

2.5 Long-term memory can be considered as a store of knowledge that changes as pupils learn by integrating new ideas with existing knowledge.

2.7 Regular purposeful practice of what has previously been taught can help consolidate material and help pupils remember what they have learned

2.8 Requiring pupils toretrieve information from memory, and spacing practice so that pupils revisit ideas after a gap are also likely to strengthen recall

2.9 Worked examples that take pupils through each step of a new process are also likely to support pupils to learn

3.3 Ensuring pupils masterfoundational concepts and knowledge before moving on is likely to build pupils’ confidence and help them succeed.

In this session you will help your mentee build on this previous activity, focusing in more detail on its practical implications. You will assist them in refining activities and approaches to be tried in the classroom, starting with their planned activity for promoting consolidation, and how to test its effectiveness (2h, 2j). Key goals include helping them to understand a) why retrieval and spaced practice help consolidate new information and facilitate recall (2k, 3j); b) why strategies that involve recall, review and the use of additional or interleaved information support the learning of new facts and concepts (2i); and c) how to use a balanced mixture of these techniques to build a foundation of knowledge in long-term memory that will boost pupils’ confidence and help them succeed in future learning as direct support is reduced (3f, 3i).

Meeting activities

Mentor Meeting Activities

Throughout the session, try to refer explicitly to the Learning Intentions, and encourage your mentee to record key points in their Learning Log. Tailor your use of the Theory to Practice activities below in response to the review and plan sections of this session.

Review and Plan 5 mins

1. Start this session by briefly following up the actions that the mentee set at the end of last week’s session, which was to do some planning around consolidation, retrieval and spaced practice (inspired by Bob’s science lesson). Ask your mentee to summarise: a. what they did b. the impact of this on pupil learning (including how they are evaluating this) c. what they will do going forward to build on these actions
2. Clarify the Learning Intentions for this session with your mentee. At the start of this module, you looked at all of the learn how to statements for Standards 2 and 3 and conducted a module audit with your mentee: in some areas they will already be confident and skilled; in others they will want more practice, and support from you and others. Look back at this audit now and use it to help decide how you and your mentee will make the most productive use of the suggested Theory to Practice activities below.

Theory to Practice 40 mins

1. Discuss with Mentor Based on their reading of the research and practice summary in this week’s ECT materials, discuss with your mentee their understanding of:
   • how consolidation of memory takes place through repeated experiences of events such as related problem-solving exercises
   • how this process is supported by regular review/retrieval, external coding, and spaced practice They may also want to discuss with you other questions that arose from their reading. To support this discussion, it might be helpful to remember that consolidation of memory is an important part of learning, whether the pupil is building their fact-based knowledge or they are honing their practical or artistic skills. The more they recall their memory, the more they can habituate the skill or call the concepts to mind with ease. This applies to a wide range of learning types, including: setting your body to catch a ball; multiplication rules; neat handwriting; common everyday phrases in a foreign language.

2. Collaborative planning and sharing of practice Jointly work through your mentee’s lesson plan from their last self-directed session incorporating consolidation strategies, and how this might be refined to provide a balanced mix of support over a sequence of lessons. To support this collaboration, you might:

   1. Consider the specific range and sequence of strategies to support consolidation (review/ retrieval, worked examples, external cueing, spaced practice) that they have mapped out for their lesson plan, and how these might fit together. Here are some useful prompts:
      • Is the balance right, or are they trying to do too much or too little?
      • If they intend to use spacing between targeted practice, have they thought about what they will teach in the intervals?
      • Have they thought about how their strategies will affect pupils in their class with differing prior attainment? (They may be able to withdraw scaffolded support for some pupils more quickly than others.)
   2. Map out a more extended sequence of strategies to be applied across a series of lessons. Here are some prompt questions that you can use:
      • Should some strategies be used earlier and others later? E.g. repeating or changing the cues.
      • If so, what should be introduced when, and why?
      • When should scaffolds be reduced, and for whom?
      • How might the mentee tell when their pupils are ready for this?
      • What will your mentee teach in the intervals between any spaces they decide to introduce between practice?
      • How would your mentee know that their pupils have secured their learning?

c) As part of the discussion, share and reflect on examples from your own or another teacher’s planning and activity. Explain to your mentee the key decisions you made about sequencing teaching over a number of lessons, and the most important factors influencing these decisions. For example, if you are teaching practical or physical skills, you might talk about how you get your pupils to learn, remember and practise these skills over time. By modelling your reasoning process, you are helping your mentee to shape their own thought processes around planning. 3. Reflection Ask your mentee to reflect on their learning in this session and how they will apply this to their practice going forward. Encourage them to consolidate this learning into a series of prompts or ‘key learning points’ which they can use to help improve their lesson planning and teaching as they continue to develop.

Next Steps 5 mins

Agree with your mentee how they will now put their learning from this week’s session(s) into practice in their teaching. Help your mentee to clarify:

1. the action(s) they will take and how these action(s) are expected to contribute to improving their workload and wellbeing
2. what success will ‘look like’ in relation to these action(s)
3. how they will evaluate their success in taking these action(s)

Note the date of your next mentor meeting, when you will check on your mentee’s progress.