Retrieval Practice exercise - Sharon MacGregor

At the beginning of every class, it is always advisable to establish students’ prior knowledge on a particular topic via questions. This helps both teacher and learner to focus and engage. It sometimes reveals that the students know little about the topic; at other times, that they indeed have good knowledge of learning intentions for the lesson about to be delivered.

Given the importance of tapping into the knowledge that students have already required, and its importance for establishing that knowledge in long-term memory, Sharon has been looking at retrieval exercises as a tool in class teaching. This is a very useful resource indeed and one worth bookmarking (and I have, on this blog, in the useful weblinks section on the right hand side!):

 

RetrievalPracticeGuide.pdf

 

Sharon's students have just read and discussed the play, Men Should Weep, by Ena Lamont Stewart, for Higher English.

 

Students were given a sheet with character names and themes such as poverty, gender roles, unemployment. They then spent five minutes on each, writing down as much as they could remember about this aspect or character in the play: in terms of character, who the character is and their relationship to others, character traits etc.

 

Once they had completed this exercise, they had then to find techniques (dialogue/stage directions) within the play to back this up.

 

Encouraging students to engage with the topic in this way will develop skills of recall. This is a necessary skill in the final exam when they have to refer to the play and analyse techniques in relation to a given theme.

Although the context in this instance is within the field of English, this technique could easily be adapted for use in any of our classes. 

Thank you for sharing, Sharon, this is a fantastic resource.