Designing a Curriculum for Learning, not Exams: Episode 3
After refining my Twitter palette (which you can read about in a previous post), I came across some real teaching and learning gems. I am really focusing on using research led practice to improve my teaching, planning and curriculum design at the moment, in line with the new teaching and leadership standards in Wales (and also just because research-led methods make sense: they are tried and tested and are embedded in logical reasoning, proving a strong foundation for adaptation to my context).
One of these gems is Kate Jones. A History teacher, her book and ideas on retrieval practice really stood out as a 'must have' for the collection. I enjoy looking at pedagogy from Humanities, because it aligns so much with the skills and content delivery we are trying to embed in Media. The variation of sources, need to memorise key facts and the development of analytical and critical thinking is definitely evident in both subjects, so it's only natural that the pedagogy has a strong crossover.
As we were returning to in person teaching after lockdown, I felt this was the perfect time to try out some of these methods and to try my new conceptual foundation plan for Y9. Y9 had already done lots of work on representation and media language, so a good point to start was audience. It meant planning from the middle of the year, which means that I will have to go back and add in more retrieval and development once earlier units are written, but it would be a good test to see if the concept worked at all or if it was too ambitious.
At present, we are three lessons in, and I am pleased to say that the conceptual foundation seems to be really effective. Students are approaching all media text forms in the same lesson, allowing for practice of key convention terminology (an historical key weakness), and are thinking more critically about audience because they aren't simply 'downloading' information about set texts. Yay!
Anyway, back to the retrieval. I'll admit, I've always thought of retrieval as important, but my ideas for actually implementing it in class have been limited, and often have not provided an opportunity for students to really think about the information they are recalling. I want to make sure that when I do implement things, I do them properly, so I started slow and selected a couple of different options that I embedded into lessons, in the hope they would become a habit.
The first was the vocabulary 'go for gold' challenge. Terminology is a key weakness in Media, for a variety of reasons, and these methods offer a way of targeting this. As soon as we started this activity, I knew I would use it again. One of my stronger students asked 'So, we don't just write a definition, we actually have to use it?' YES! She had no problem doing so, but it made me really reflect on the times I have requested definitions when that shows a lower level of understanding than application. The slide they used is below, and nearly all students were able to reach gold after only two lessons on audience. I plan on using this method and gradually moving vocabulary down the levels, so gold vocabulary becomes silver, bronze etc. with increased repetition.
The next activity, which is one I have not reached yet in Media but have used in English, is the retrieval quilt challenge. Useful as a checkpoint and a formative assessment opportunity, the quilt allows for auto-differentiated retrieval from a greater number of lessons. It also provides an opportunity for discussion about previous units. An example is the mythical creatures question: students were able to discuss older schemes and bring in knowledge from much earlier in the year, which was a great opportunity for longer term retrieval and re-exploration.
I'm really excited about these techniques and the power they will have when embedded properly into schemes of learning, both in English and Media. They are easy to use, assess from and reflect on as well, and I am looking forward to it becoming a staple in my teaching!