My Diminishing Returns

There has been much more understanding around the importance of retrieval practice to strengthen the durability of knowledge in pupils long term memory but whilst a lot of books and blogs have discussed how to ember retrieval practice (be it   allow stakes quiz, self quizzing, flashcards etc) what I have found the most interesting as I’ve tried to embed this into my practice is considering what to retrieve. In a sense there is no bad knowledge to retrieve. In a well-designed curriculum, everything we teach should have significance and we want pupils to remember all of it but some knowledge is more equal than others when it comes to retrieval. Like many teachers (and a la Rosenshine) I start every lesson with 5 or 6 questions about prior learning that pupils complete with no notes. Initially, the topics these questions would be based on would be random but following some trial and error I now consider 3 areas when deciding what topics to base my retrieval on: 1. Prereq...