The Teachers’ Corner:

When do most teachers take the time to review, with their students, in preparation for some form of summative assessment like a final examination?  The answer:  A week before the scheduled examination!  The question is:  Is it too late?  Of course, the answer is a bit equivocal.  The best that can be said is that reviewing past learning anytime with students is a great idea.

But there is an additional way to do it – and it stems back to Jerome Bruner’s notion of the spiral curriculum – with a little help from Madeline Hunter!  Whether you want to call it the spiral curriculum (Bruner) or distributed practice (Hunter) it accomplishes the same thing.  It gives student the opportunity to recall past learning long after the unit on a given subject is finished.

It can take several configurations.

• After a unit is finished and before the next one starts, why not take a “review day” to go over some past learning that you know was difficult for students at the time? You could have several questions or activities that individuals or teams can work through under the guidance of the teacher who reviews the answers at the end of the period.  If a difficult unit was covered in February, it certainly would help students to review it in March rather than in June, the week before the final examination, when their anxiety level is high.
• In the middle of a unit, the teacher can use the time devoted to the anticipatory set exercise. Hunter has always said that the anticipatory set exercise had three purposes:  to generate excitement about the coming lesson, to assess the level of learning before a unit starts or – and this is where we are going here –to practise and recall earlier learning in what she has called distributed practice
• A third possibility exists with the context of student assessment. In virtually all cases, a unit test is based upon the material that has been covered in the current.  But there is no hard and fast rule that suggests that it must be limited to that.  A teacher could include (albeit with prior notice to the students) that the test on regular conjugation French verbs (-er, -re, -ir) will also include a question or two on the “etre” verbs or a unit test in Mathematics on mean, median and mode could also include questions on multiplying and dividing fractions.

All of these are made easier if the teacher has used marking folders with her/his students that allow them to go back into their folders and re-read the test on fractions or “etre” verbs from a few weeks or months back.   This will both help refresh their memories and cause them to look at past errors to be avoided in the future test.  If you are not sure about marking folders, look at the February 19th blog entitled “Using Your Evaluation Time Productively” for an idea of what they entail.

So perhaps it is time for “a blast from the past” in the form of past learning and past research on effective teaching to infuse present instructional methods and assessment practices with some “old learning” – both for the students, and for the teachers!

Dr. Dan