Teachers, how can you improve your review game?
If you ask a teacher virtually anywhere in the world to describe their go to structure for a 40 minute lesson, many will say that they begin with a few minutes of review.
But is that actually a good idea?
In Barak Rosenshine’s guide to research based strategies all teachers should know, strategies #1 and #10 suggest that a week’s worth of instruction for a single subject should look like this:
This is definitely better than no review.
Rosenshine provides robust evidence from three types of sources — in support of devoting 30% of instructional time to review. Rosenshine’s principles are a synthesis of decades of research on “how the mind acquires and uses information, the instructional procedures that are used by the most successful teachers, and the procedures invented by researchers to help students learn difficult tasks.”
So, what’s the next step for a teacher to improve their approach to review?
It’s possible that devoting even more time to review would help, but this isn’t necessarily feasible for a typical teacher.
What is within reach? Interleaving.
No matter what age or subject you teach, the research on interleaving suggests that optimising for long term retention involves having question types and exercises mixed up in an unpredictable way.
Why does interleaving help retention? Because it requires students to look at an item or task and really think about what they are supposed to do — as opposed to being on autopilot and following the same procedure to solve 10 problems in a row.
How can you improve your approach to review?
Find ways to insert the review items you’ve already planned into unexpected places — like in the middle of a problem set practicing new material — instead of always blocking it off as a separate segment of the lesson.
By Sara Merlo, Manager of Learning Innovation at Bridge International Academies.
