Danielle McMaster: All right, we’re gonna go ahead and get started. Welcome, everyone, and thank you for being here today. We know how valuable your time is, and we really, truly appreciate you taking time away from your students in your classrooms to join us today.

​Like Whitney stated, today’s session is “Learning That Lasts! Literacy Instructional Strategies for Long-Term Learning.” Our focus today will really be on how to structure practice in the classroom so that you are supporting retrieval and long-term learning. 

Most importantly, we really want to equip you today with some practical strategies that you can use right away, strategies that will help to engage students with content in ways that promote that lasting understanding and application of knowledge.

​My name is Danielle McMaster, and I am a Literacy Content Coordinator with the Lastinger Center. I spent a little over 10 years as a secondary teacher and coach in Florida public schools, and I’ve been with the Lastinger Center for about four years now.

​I really value working with teachers, and I’m excited to be here with you today to support you, knowing that you’re going to go back to your classroom and support students.

​I’m joined today by my colleague and co-presenter, Whitney Augustine, and so I’m going to turn it over to her for just a moment to introduce herself.

​Whitney Augustine: Hello, everybody. I’m a Literacy Implementation Specialist with the Lastinger Center. I spent about 30 years working in Brevard Public Schools before this position.

​I worked in both elementary and middle schools, and as a classroom teacher, interventionist, literacy coach, and then spent a little bit of time at the district level, working with secondary reading intervention, and our teachers, curriculum and our literacy coaches there.

​I spent two years as a State Regional Literacy Director, and now I’ve had the privilege of being part of Lastinger Center for almost three years.

​So, as Danielle said, we’re very excited to work with you guys today.

​Danielle McMaster: Like we’ve both said, and just to tell you a little bit more about who we are, we are here from the University of Florida Lastinger Center, which really is a home for educational innovation that’s focused on improving the quality of teaching, learning and childcare. Our work at the Lastinger Center is grounded in research and data, and we really focus on designing solutions that support all learners from birth through 12th grade. We partner with educators across the state to deliver practical, research-based approaches that help all students grow.

​And our professional learning really focuses on strengthening educator knowledge and skills, particularly in early learning, literacy and mathematics.

​So to get us started today, I just want to take a minute and ground us in our goals. We have a couple, but by the end of today, we hope that you’ll have a better understanding of how to structure practice opportunities within your classroom to really support that long-term learning, retention and transfer of knowledge.

​Together, we will explore some evidence-based strategies that are going to strengthen student learning through intentional practice.

​Now, some of these strategies may be new to you today, but, I think a lot of them are going to feel familiar, which is a good thing. So we hope that after today, though, you have a deeper understanding of why these strategies work and how to use them effectively in your classrooms.

​We’re also going to learn about the impact of instructional routines and how they support literacy learning across all content areas and not just ELA. And you’re going to engage and experience some low-stakes retrieval activities that engage all learners and allow a quick check for understanding. Everything that we do today is practical and will provide you with ready-to-use strategies that you can take back to your classroom right away.

​So, now that I’ve laid the foundation and the groundwork for our time together, let’s take a moment to ground ourselves back in our classrooms and with our students.

​So, take a few moments to think about a time when you’ve worked with students, and they demonstrated success on a test or a task, and you’re thinking to yourself, yes, they got it, they did so great. But then, at another time, those same students were unable to retain or apply that same skill or concept later.

​So think about a time when you may have experienced this with your students.

​Hopefully you were able to think of this, probably a couple instances where you’ve encountered this over the years. This is a normal, completely common experience in classrooms.

​Too many times we see students performing well in the moment, but then quickly realize that learning doesn’t last or stick over time. 

So today, we really want to focus on how can we structure practice opportunities in our classroom that are going to support our students in retrieving that information, retaining that information, and so they have it in their long-term memory, and so that they can try and transfer it to other content areas, or even in the real world when they need that information.

​Whitney is gonna take us over on the next slide.

​Whitney Augustine: Thank you, Danielle. Let’s start by thinking about this quote. Classroom performance can create illusions of learning that mask what’s really happening beneath the surface.

​That’s essentially what we are seeing when we think about students having it. We think they have it, we circle back around and they don’t have it.

​Or at least they don’t have it yet, right? And so, in their article, The Illusion of Performance Cognitive Sciences, Kirshner, Hendrick and Heal discuss the difference between performance and true learning.

​When students are first acquiring new information, they often seem to understand it; they can get the answers on their lessons, on their homework or after cramming for a test all night. But the reality is that this classroom performance often reflects that short-term learning that may be surface level, but easily forgotten.

​When we learn a new concept, skill or strategy, then we move on and don’t revisit that knowledge over longer periods of time, that short-term learning often does not transfer to the long-term learning that we want to see.

​That brings us back to that scenario Danielle just brought up, where we see too many students forgetting what we know has already been taught.

​So that brings us to the question, what can we do to ensure that students are truly learning the concepts we’re teaching them? First, we need a common understanding of what learning is.

​Learning is that ability to retrieve information when needed–that mastery of new skills, strategies or concepts.

​Learning is evident to us when knowledge can be applied in both familiar situations and can be transferred to new situations. And that deep learning that we want to see requires intentional and active engagement, and it’s a process that takes a lot of time.

​We often think that this learning process is linear, right? We focus on getting that information into the student’s brain. We teach new information, the student practices, recalls it on a quiz or a test a few days later, and they do okay. Now they know it, and we feel like they’ve learned it and so we move on.

​What the research actually shows us is that we also need to focus on helping students get that information back out of their brain once they’ve initially been instructed in it.

​In order to truly learn and retain that new information, we must first forget it, then retrieve that information from our memory several different times.

​What instruction should actually look like is we teach that new information, the student practices it a little bit, we ask some questions, we have them revisit with a different activity that asks them to retrieve what they’ve remembered and reconnect with the information they might have forgotten or not remember every piece of.

​And then we repeat that with additional retrieval opportunities over time, where students are able to put more and more of the pieces of that new knowledge together, eventually building the ability to accurately pull all of that newly learned information, take it out of the brain automatically.

​This is true for students of all ages, as well as students with exceptionalities. The content being delivered and the student needs will determine how often this retrieval process needs to occur, because it’s not a one-stop shop. It differs for each group of students and for the content.

​This actually is not new information in the field of the science of learning. German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus conducted research back in the late 1800s describing something he called the forgetting curve. He showed that the typical learner will forget 50% of all new information they’ve learned within one day and 90% of all new information within a week. And this research has been replicated repeatedly over the past century with other researchers, and they’ve found similar results as well.

​Researchers in cognitive science, Robert and Elizabeth Bjork, explain that forgetting actually creates that condition that our brain needs for learning and relearning information.

​It makes it a natural part of that learning process. So, knowing this, how can we plan instruction to optimize the needs of our brain in that long-term learning and transfer for students?

​Long-term learning of new content actually begins with that initial explicit instruction using evidence-based instructional routines to introduce that new content.

​The instructional routine chosen to deliver information to students should align with those learning goals. For example, if my learning goal is to be able to apply vocabulary knowledge to determine meaning of unknown words and phrases in a text, an instructional routine that focuses on how to summarize text probably is not the ideal choice of what we want to do. So we want to make sure that we’re aligning those instructional routines to our learning goals, and making that evident to students.

​The next several slides will refer to some considerations we want to keep in mind for instructional routines that are used to deliver new content, and then we’re going to come back around to discuss routines used for retrieval practice.

​Instruction that supports long-term learning and transfer is grounded in that consistency of instructional routines. Instructional routines are structured and predictable ways to guide student learning and practice.

​They provide consistency and clarity, helping students know what to expect. When routines are consistent, they support students in building that transfer of new knowledge over time.

​Instructional routines also support intentional practices aligned to those learning goals. This ensures that the practice is purposeful and directly connects to what students are expected to learn and be able to do.

​Another key feature is that routines are reusable. We want them to be able to be pulled back out for a variety of purposes. A strong instructional routine can be used across different lessons and different contexts, building efficacy and familiarity for both teachers and students.

​We can use these instructional routines to introduce new content, engage students in new ideas in a structured way, review and practice things that we’ve previously taught, and we’re wanting them to pull back out to continue strengthening that retention. And it can also be used as formative assessment to provide ongoing insight into student understanding.

​Together, these features make instructional routines a powerful way to structure practice so that learning is more likely to last and transfer beyond the moment of initial instruction.

​So, we want to keep in mind that instructional routines definitely are very supportive of students who have exceptionalities or have learning gaps, but they’re also really beneficial for students across all grade levels and across all content areas.

​Effective instructional routines are grounded in two key ideas: explicit instruction and the gradual release of responsibility.

​Together, these support students in learning new content and building independence over time.

​This is a progression from teacher support to student independence, because remember, everything we’re doing, particularly with our secondary students, is trying to move them towards having something that they can use independently when they are working with text, or trying to understand a new concept.

​So, building routines that they can eventually put into practice and apply on their own.

​We’re going to start with that explicit instruction that I do. This is where we clearly explain the model, the new learning, make our thinking visible and provide clear examples so students understand what success looks like. They also understand why they’re using this particular tool or routine in the process.

​The next step is guided practice, or the we do. This is the step that most frequently tends to be skipped, or maybe shortened in time, because we think students already have it. Or, we’ve provided the instruction, let’s give them a lot of independent practice. So we need to make sure that we’re incorporating this we do step.

​During this step, students are going to begin applying the learning with support. We are going to be able to guide their thinking, monitor their understanding and provide immediate feedback to reinforce or correct their learning as needed.

​It’s important to know that students will need varying levels of support at this stage. Some may move very quickly towards independence, and others will need multiple opportunities to practice over time. They might need additional modeling opportunities, or they might need extended support before they’re ready to move on to that independent practice, or that you do piece.

​This is where students apply their own learning, strengthening, understanding, building accuracy, and this step is really important because it helps them be confident to transfer that learning to new situations.

​When instructional routines follow this progression, they provide structured, supportive practice that helps students build better understanding and move toward independence and mastery of that new knowledge.

​So why do they work? Why is it important to make sure that we’re utilizing instructional routines? It’s because they reduce that cognitive load in our students, because they’re predictable, it frees up that working memory so that that cognitive energy is going towards the learning of the content and not the process.

​It also increases efficiency. Because of the structure, we need to spend less time in directions and transitions and reminding students what to do. They can spend more of that time actively engaged in the learning of the content.

​Teachers can also use the same routine to introduce new content or previously reduced concepts so we don’t have to teach something new for every piece.

​And then another important benefit is how these routines support peer practice.

​Once students are familiar with a routine, they can take on more active roles, such as working with partners, practicing skills and supporting each other’s learning through structured dialogue. This repeated practice is what really, truly helps us make learning stick.

​Now that we’ve moved from understanding what learning is, and we’ve talked about that forgetting curve and instructional routines, we’re going to build on that foundation by looking at how students actively process that new information.

​For students to learn in a way that lasts, they really need more than just exposure to content, they need ways to actively practice and make sense of the new content. And that’s where generative learning strategies come in.

​Generative learning strategies are approaches that require students to actively process and make meaning of information, rather than just passively taking it in.

​They involve transforming information, connecting it to prior knowledge and building understanding through that act of thinking.

​Instead of simply taking in the information, the students are actually doing that cognitive work of learning, they’re selecting what matters, they’re organizing their ideas and they’re making connections.

​Researchers have identified eight key generative learning strategies. You’ll see those on the screen: summarizing, generating questions, mapping, drawing, self-explanation, teaching others, imagining and enacting.

​Across all of these strategies, students are required to process information deeply by organizing, connecting or transforming what they are learning. This kind of effortful thinking moves students beyond that surface-level exposure and leads to that stronger, more durable learning over time.

​It also strengthens their ability to retrieve and apply information later. In other words, these generative learning strategies help build that foundation that makes later instructional routines and retrieval practices more effective.

​Research indicates that of these eight strategies, summarizing and generating questions have the greatest impact on comprehension.

​So, let’s connect what we know about instructional routines and generative learning strategies to what that actually could look like in the classroom as we support students. So, an example of this might be an instructional routine called paragraph shrinking.

​It gives students a clear, consistent framework for engaging with content when they are working to understand and summarize what they read.

​Paragraph shrinking is a summarizing routine that students would use while they’re reading and after they’re reading to identify the central idea of a paragraph or a selection of text. It has three clear steps:

​First, identify who or what the paragraph is mostly about, determine the most important detail about that topic, and then shrink it into a one-sentence central idea statement in 10 words or less.

​So that routine provides structure and support for distilling important information. You may also be familiar with one that’s very similar in summarizing, called Get the Gist. So, it’s very similar. Notice how predictability, if you’re familiar with that, or looking at this routine, you’ll notice how the predictability and structure of these two routines helps students identify and organize the most important ideas in a text, step by step.

​This is more effective than merely highlighting that text, because it requires students to engage in deeper thinking as they process what they have read because then they have to condense those ideas into a statement.

​Research has shown that combining routines like this for summarizing, such as paragraph shrinking or Get the Gist, with retrieval practice strengthens our long-term learning.

​Now, Danielle is going to help us dig deeper into what those retrieval practices look like.

​Danielle McMaster: Thank you, Whitney, so much for taking us through instructional routines. We kind of just learned that instructional routines really provide the structure that is needed for teachers to create the opportunities for students to engage in retrieval practice.

​When we have structure in what we’re teaching, we can intentionally plan for more opportunities for students to practice.

​So, like Whitney noted earlier, instruction often stops after that initial teaching of new content. However, we just learned that that initial instruction alone is not enough, right? It’s not going to promote long-term learning.

​So, once students are introduced to new information, they have to have multiple opportunities to retrieve or get that information back out of their memory again and again and again, just like our image shows here. They’re gonna forget, and then they’re gonna retrieve, that’s that relearning, they’re gonna forget, they’re gonna relearn and retrieve, and each time they’re retrieving, they’re thinking deeply about it. They’re applying it across context.

​And so all of this is going to be really important to support that long-term, deep learning, and that we use these routines and strategies to support that learning.

​So, I’m gonna take a moment to model a strategy that you could use for retrieval practice.

​And then we’re gonna dig deeper, a little bit deeper into retrieval practice. So I’m gonna model what’s considered an interactive, low-stakes retrieval activity using ABCD cards. You might also know these as response cards, or something similar like that.

​But basically, this is a really easy strategy that can engage all students in your classroom and allow you to do a quick check for understanding while giving students a chance to practice retrieving information in a really stress-free environment. 

In a classroom setting, this could look several different ways. You might have clickers, or some sort of piece of technology that you could use to do an interactive quiz. Maybe you have whiteboards available for all students, and they’re using the whiteboards to have this kind of interactive activity that I’m going to model.

​Myself, however, I’m going to share with you something that I did. I used a sheet of paper, really low cost, and I would put ABCD on it, and then they would fold it, and then this sheet of paper would become their response card. They could keep it in a folder, sometimes I’d collect them and keep them in a basket. It also would allow us to kind of close our Chromebooks for a minute, but then I could very easily pose a question to the class multiple times in a very short amount of time, and have all students engage with an answer. I can check their understanding, see if we’re good to move forward or if we need to revisit some information.

​In a face-to-face session, I would have these for you to use, but since we are on Zoom today, you are going to engage with me using the interactive poll feature. And so as we go through the next couple questions, you will have an opportunity to respond using ABCD.

​Alright, here we go. Our first question. This is retrieval practice, remember? So, here’s your first question.

​What does the forgetting curve suggest about how students retain new information?

​Is it A. students retain most information permanently after one lesson? 

B. students forget little when instruction is clear. 

C. students rapidly forget new information unless it is revisited through retrieval, or 

D. forgetting only happens when students are not paying attention.

​Alright, I think most people have participated, so we’re gonna go ahead and move on. And most of us were right, yay! We’re doing a good job! You’re retrieving the right information, and the answer is, C.

​Oh, share results. Sorry, I’ve never done the poll before. Can you see the results? 

So, anyways, the answer was C, and essentially we learned a little while ago that the forgetting curve, as described by Ebbinghaus, shows that learners lose a significant amount of newly learned information over a short period of time, right? Unless they actively retrieve and use that information.

​The good part about this, especially for me, was that research tells us that that’s okay, that forgetting is a natural part of the learning process.

​So we can’t expect our students to remember everything after that one initial time period. They need multiple opportunities to relearn that information, by retrieving it and retaining it and revisiting it over time.

​Now you’re going to do an application question, so we’re going to apply this a little bit deeper. I’m going to share a scenario with you, and I want you to think about instructional routines. I want you to think about the structure of this routine, the consistency of this routine and are there opportunities to practice?

​Afterwards, you’re going to answer true or false to this question. This approach reflects the use of instructional routines to strengthen memory and understanding.

​Alright, so here is your scenario: We are in a 7th grade middle school classroom, and we’re talking about vocabulary. So Ms. Lopez teaches 7th grade science and notices students struggling with decoding and understanding multisyllabic words like photosynthesis and evaporation.

​Ms. Lopez breaks down each word’s prefixes, suffixes, and roots, explains its meaning and connects it to known word parts. Students will then practice making meaning as they read the words in context. She continues this routine with all new or unfamiliar multisyllabic words.

​Does this approach reflect the use of an instructional routine to strengthen memory and understanding? True, A or B, False.

​What do we think? You can drop it in the chat.

​Oh, there’s a poll. Just kidding, it was on the other screen. I apologize. I moved it to the other screen and I forgot about it. Okay, yeah, so, absolutely right. It is true. This is a great use of an instructional routine. This is a consistent routine that is structured and repeated. It models, she scaffolds practice, provides feedback and it really just aligns with the definition of what a good instructional routine is.

​All right, so let’s think now that you’ve had an opportunity to engage a little bit in some interactive practice, and thank you so much. This was our first time doing interactive polls in a webinar, so we are also learning as we are going, and we appreciate your participation. 

But now that you’ve experienced a little bit of retrieval practice, let’s kind of think back to the why. Why would I use this low-stakes interactive activity with simple A, B, C, D or true-false type questions. 

Well, we can think about why in three buckets. First, participation. This allowed every single student to be actively involved and to show their thinking, rather than just a few volunteers. It was also a really great way to do a quick check for understanding while quickly keeping students engaged and moving through while we’re maximizing that instructional time.

​Another bucket, and reason why, is thinking. When we pose questions like this to our students, you noticed my two questions were more of a recall and then an application. If we do the same things in our classrooms, then we are giving them multiple ways in which to engage and retrieve that information, through different complexity of questions, and that will promote their thinking and their ability to connect with their learning across different ideas and content areas. 

And, last but not least is practice. This strategy is low-stakes and stress-free because it’s not graded, right? So when you use something like this frequently, you’re engaging in that practice in a way that builds students’ fluency with the content, it promotes that confidence to be honest with their thinking because they know they’re not being graded. They know that it’s this safe place to practice what they are learning.

​So, when you combine participation, thinking and practice, ABCD cards or interactive quizzes make a really great way to engage students in retrieval practice, and it’s accessible for all students.

​This is also a really good example of what we call a desirable difficulty. So let’s take a little bit of a closer look at what that means.

​So, Bjork and Bjork describe desirable difficulties as learning conditions that require increased effort and thinking. This is where we as teachers are creating those practice opportunities that allow students to engage in that productive struggle and really grapple with the information that they are learning. 

Now, I know this can feel a little counterintuitive at first because we’re asking students to put in more effort, which could increase their frustration, especially if we’re working with struggling readers. However, what research has shown is that when students understand why effort matters, and we explicitly teach them how to work through the difficult routines and strategies, then students are more likely to engage, be persistent and invest effort in what it is that we’re trying to teach them. They know it’s low stakes and it’s not graded, so it’s just another opportunity for them to learn. So, Bjork and Bjork identified 5 different desirable difficulties.

​At this point, we’ve talked about retrieval practice a little bit, so next we’re gonna build on that, as we talk about interleaved practice and spaced practice.

​There are two others, which are reduced feedback and contextual interference, but for today’s purposes, we are not going to get into them.

​All right, so let’s think about practice. So we’ve been talking about retrieval practice through the use of instructional routines and strategies.

​But why? Why are we spending so much time talking about practice? Well, we know that it supports learning, but it has to be intentional and meaningful, okay? These are going to be similar to what Whitney said, because she was talking about them in terms of routines.

​And I’m thinking a little bit more granular when I’m thinking about what are some of the strategies that we’re going to use, but both the routines and the strategies serve similar purposes, one of them being that they free up that cognitive capacity to think deeply.

​When students have a routine, when they have a strategy that they can go off of, it frees up their ability to spend their time thinking more deeply about the content, and not just trying to read through the information. We also know that this builds their memory and automaticity.

​We know that effective practice requires effort so that productive struggle is important. But we also know that effective practice needs to be relevant.

​And that students need to connect to what they are practicing, to what they are learning. And without that relevance, practice can often feel like busy work. So it’s really important to engage them in the why and the how. Just like us as adult learners, if you want me to do something, most of the time I need to know why, and I need to know how, right?

​And then I can do it. And so it’s the same with our students. We also want to use different types of practice. Spaced, interleaved and retrieval, and we want to use them together, and I’m going to talk about that more in just a moment. 

But most importantly when you’re thinking about how you structure these retrieval practice opportunities, it’s about intentional planning. It all goes back to us thinking deeply about how and when we want students to have these practice opportunities.

​So, now that we’ve identified these three types of practice, you may already be starting to connect them to what you know, and refine your own understanding of how they work together.

​But let’s take a quick moment to review each one on the screen and focus on the type of practice and how they’re slightly different.

​So, when we’re looking at distributed practice, which is practice over time, we’re really looking at the frequency of practice. So, how often are we doing it? When are we doing it? How long are we doing it for?

​When we look at interleaved or mixed practice, we’re looking more at the content. How am I stacking those skills and layering those skills together that they need to know in order for them to demonstrate mastery of that content?

​Through those repeated practice opportunities.

​And then, when I’m thinking about a retrieval practice, we’re thinking about those routines and those strategies that they are using to dig deep in that brain of theirs, and pull that information back out and then apply it to something else.

​So, let’s talk about distributed practice for just a second. Distributed or spaced practice over time does a few key things for students.

​Really, it exercises their brain, because they’re constantly having to go back in, retrieve, and then reconstruct and rebuild that information to make sense of it in a new way, on a new day and in a new context.

​Providing that spaced practice also strengthens memory over time because they’re constantly having to relearn it. It supports transfer by providing opportunities to learn it in new contexts, so every time they have to relearn it, they’re strengthening their memory, they’re exercising their brain and they’re transferring that content.

​We also know that distributed practice is easily differentiated. Meaning, I, as the teacher, can control how often I’m doing this and how much I’m doing this, depending on what my students need, depending on the complexity of what I’m teaching.

​And we also know that this needs to be intentional planning in order for there to be effective implementation.

​So let’s look at distributed practice a little bit further.

​Okay, here we go. Yes, same slide.

​So spaced practice does spread learning over multiple sessions instead of cramming it into one long session. This was a game changer for me, kind of shifting, especially coming from secondary classrooms where we only have 50 minutes. We try to jam-pack so much in those minutes. That’s what we do. That’s how we’ve taught. And so this is another way of looking at how to distribute practice while maximizing the amount of time that we already have and not needing more.

​So, in this study by Bloom and Schuell, high school students learned French vocabulary through three short retrieval-based exercises.

​Some completed all of them in 30 minutes in one day in that mass practice block, while others spread their 30 minutes over 3 days. They distributed it. 

When given an unexpected test later on, the students who spaced their practice outperformed those who completed it all at once, showing that distributed learning over time does lead to stronger retention.

​So now let’s think about interleaved or mixed practice, where you’re mixing several related skills together.

​So, the first thing we know is that interleaved practice builds on initial learning. So, we have to teach something, and students have to learn something first. They have to really get a good, solid understanding of the content.

​Then, we can start to mix it in with other new learning, right? And we can slowly kind of move that away.

​We also know that interleaved or mixed practice has students doing two mental skills at once.

​And so, not only are we retrieving that information, but once we retrieve that information, we’re asking students to do something with that information. We want them to discriminate, distinguish, compare, contrast, analyze and evaluate. So, let’s bring that information back to the forefront of our mind, and then let’s do something with it. Apply it to a problem, apply it to a situation. 

So interleaved practice really gets their brain doing two things, which is exactly what we need, because it really pushes students beyond that surface-level recognition towards that deeper learning and transferable understanding.

​And again, just like with everything else we’ve talked about, we know that in order for this mixed practice to be effective, it has to be intentionally planned, you have to mix the right skills at the right time and when needed.

​Alright, so let’s look at an example of this, cumulative practice, or this interleaved practice. And you can see here, it’s really where you learn something and then you practice that skill while learning a new skill, and then you practice those skills and learn. You’re mixing it over time. This provides repeated opportunities to recall and apply earlier skills.

​This structure of practice is really important for students with learning difficulties. Now, while it will benefit all students, our students who struggle really benefit from these intentional extra opportunities to practice and recall the skills that they have already learned.

​It is important to note that this does not mean you have to review everything all the time, right? So, first, come back to that planning. What skills do they need, and how do we layer them? But then, it’s more about that intentional recycling of content. What are they going to need to know to be successful on this assignment, these activities and to build that long-term learning over time?

​So, let’s take a look at this example of interleaved or mixed practice. Imagine you’re a sixth grade teacher teaching rhetorical appeals. First, let’s look at this non-example using blocked practice. You can see here they teach in isolation and then test at the end of every week.

​Versus this interleaved practice, where they’re building in that practice throughout the week. They teach, and practice, and then add, teach, practice, add, teach and then there’s a test at the end of several weeks of learning, right? This really shifts the way that we’re providing that intentional opportunity practice to support that long-term mastery. 

Here’s another example using science, Newton’s Law of Motion, of what that might look like. Just gonna let you look at it for a second.

​We have thrown a lot of information at you about all types of practice, so let’s take a minute to recap. Retrieval practice starts after initial instruction. Once students have learned something, then we can start to engage them in retrieval practice so that they can actively pull that information from memory and build that metacognition.

​It’s important that we explicitly teach these strategies and plan for well-planned, productive struggle opportunities. And most important, that this practice serves as a tool for learning and not as a tool for assessment.

​A few cautions that we want to have as we move forward, and that is, first, that grading retrieval practice may lead to unintended consequences. When we start to put a grade to practice, we increase anxiety and we reduce willingness to engage.

​And we create what is an unnecessary high-pressure situation. We have to provide opportunities to practice that are not graded.

​We also know that if there’s a misalignment between practice and assessment, it can lead to mixed results. While practice should not be assessed, it should prepare students for those assessments. So they should be aligned and should reflect how we will want students to demonstrate their learning at some point in time.

​We also know that successful performance on a quiz or a test can be misleading, kind of like we’ve talked about throughout. Students do really well, and then we’re like, wait a minute, they couldn’t apply it next week to a different scenario. So we as practitioners need to be mindful that, sometimes, our assessment information can be misleading, because we often assess too soon.

​It’s not cumulative, and we can use really low complexity of questioning. And therefore, we’re measuring short-term performance and we’re not measuring that long-term learning because that long-term learning takes a lot longer to assess and to build.

​Here’s a list of some retrieval practice activities. I’m not going to go through them because these are probably familiar to you, but if you’re doing these, great!

​If you’re not sure why you’re doing them, this is why you’re doing them, and this is the purpose that we want them to serve in this classroom. And when do we use these, right? We really want to use things like brain dumps, stop and jots and turn and talks at the end of a lesson to consolidate that learning, or maybe before a new lesson to activate that prior knowledge. And I hope that when you see this list, that’s what you’re thinking, “I do this.”

​Yes, great. Are we doing it intentionally? Are we doing it spaced out and distributed, interleaved? Like, are we doing all of the things that we need to do to make sure it’s intentional?

​Here’s another list of retrieval practice activities that you may be familiar with. Low-stakes quizzes and pre-tests. Where the goal is practice, not evaluation. Games and contests, using a variety of question types. Short answer, multiple choice, elaboration, true, false.

​Retrieval cards, such as flashcards, to engage in repeated practice or self-testing and quizzing.

​Again, all things that we’re familiar with, all things that we’ve done, but making sure that how we’re using them, are we using them in a structured and routine way, and with a clearly identified purpose, so that students know why they’re retrieving this information, and applying it, in different opportunities to practice.

​Alright, so this is my last one, and I just want you to take a minute. We’re gonna do a chat waterfall.

​This is another retrieval practice activity, it’s called retrieve taking, where you have no notes, and you don’t, because you don’t have the slide deck yet, so you don’t have my notes. So I want you to just take a quick moment, and in the chat, write 1, 2 or 3 things that you have learned, or remembered, or connected to about practice.

​So I’m gonna give you just about 30 seconds to go ahead and think, and then go ahead and waterfall the chat things that you have learned about practice today.

​Thank you, Abby. Grading practice can lead to unintended consequences. Forgetting is part of the process. Yes, thank you so much. That is such a big one, right? The forgetting curve indicates a need for practice. We have to forget in order to retrieve and learn.

​It’s so freeing to know it’s okay to forget sometimes, right? We’re gonna go back and relearn 95% of what we learn in a week, right?

​Wow, that’s a startling fact to have.

​Summarizing can help content stick? Yes it can. Summarizing is a great, great strategy.

​Absolutely. Alright, thank you so much for filling up that chat. I’m going to turn it over to Whitney to finish this all for today’s time.

​Whitney Augustine: Thanks, Danielle. So, Danielle gave us a lot of really great ideas, practical examples of things that we can bring back into the classroom. So, what are some tips on how to get started?

​And just like with everything we talked about, it starts with that planning, right? We’ve got to begin with those clear instructional goals to guide those routines, making sure that we’re intentionally aligning the routines and the retrieval practice to those learning goals.

​And after we’ve set those goals, we need to make sure that we are thinking small to start with.

​Small, but consistent. One or two flexible routines can be enough, especially when you’re just starting out, right? You don’t want too many practices out there, because you want students to really understand how to use it, why to use it, why it works and when to use it so that they can apply it on their own.

​Over time, use feedback and reflection, maybe from exit slips, or what you’re seeing in their formative assessments, or their learning or even asking students directly about the practices that you’re putting into place to refine that implementation so that you can build fluency with routine and get the maximum results.

​When goals, modeling, practice and refinement are working all in conjunction, instruction is going to become more consistent and purposeful. Remember that this consistency is what reduces that cognitive load for students that allows them to focus more of that energy on the learning rather than the process.

​And then as everything we do as teachers, that ongoing reflection also helps us strengthen our implementation and ultimately support those improved student outcomes.

​Those instructional routines, remember, should be introduced through explicit instruction and gradual release of responsibility, because it’s not just the content that we need to give them time with, it’s those routines. We need to make sure they fully understand the routine, or else the routine becomes a hindrance and a burden.

So make sure that you are explicitly going through with that “I do,” the teacher’s modeling you’re talking about why we’re using this structure, you’re going to ensure the students have accurate understanding before you move to them working as a group or guide with that guided practice with a little bit more independence.

​This is where that retrieval practice is really taking shape. Students are going to start recalling and applying new learning and support while the teacher monitors, understands and provides that immediate feedback. And then finally, we’ll move to that “You Do.”

​That independent practice where students are retrieving and applying learning on their own. They’re using it for studying and other content areas.

​And this is where it becomes extremely powerful, strengthening their memory and supporting their ability to transfer that learning to new situations.

​It is always important to remember that the students may need multiple opportunities to practice with your instructional routines and with your retrieval practices, as well as with the content, and that some of your learners are going to be ready faster than others.

​Once you start that retrieval practice, make sure that you plan those scheduled intervals ahead of time. So, not to say that things wouldn’t change based on your observations, but if I’m thinking about a content that I think it’s going to take three or four times for them, they’ve got to be able to bring it back, and I’m thinking about what I want to intentionally interleave it with. I need to plan from the beginning, or else it’s going to be hard to fit in and it’s going to feel like you’re just plopping opportunities for retrieval in, instead of really helping students connect those contents together.

​The practices that we modeled today, retrieval taking, those closed book notes, interactive quizzes or doing an exit slip in the end  are low-stakes opportunities to be able to get students to continuously get that information out of their brain and figure out how to apply it in other situations.

​You may have noticed that the activities we did allowed for optimum engagement with everybody at one time, and that they’ve employed various levels of cognitive complexity, too. Some of them have been recall, some of them have required you to put things into your own words. And so when we follow this progression, we ensure that the retrieval practice is accurate, supported, and effective in building long-term memory.

​So, as we wrap up.

​Just some of our key takeaways is that the natural progress of long-term learning includes forgetting, then retrieving knowledge over time. Retrieval practice provides activities designed to maximize that retrieval process.

​Retrieval practice has been shown to be effective across grade levels and content areas with a wide range of learners.

​And because retrieval practice is spaced out or distributed over time, it’s really essential to have that planning in place to make sure you’ve got that just right spacing.

​And then that combination of distributed, interleave and cumulative practice into instruction strengthens that ability to retain and transfer new knowledge.

​Ensuring that feedback is provided across the board, either immediately or following retrieval practice, helps grow those mental cognitive skills.

​[coughing] Danielle?

​Danielle McMaster: Got it. Okay, I gotcha. All right, so we are going to end today’s time with an exit slip, but before we go, we want you to take a moment and think about how you might apply these strategies in your classroom with another retrieval practice, which is exit slips. 

So, an exit slip is something we’re asked to do all the time, but it has to serve this purpose. So, when you’re deciding your exit slip questions, you really need to find the one that serves your purpose and tells your students why you’re collecting this information, and how you will use it. What is it about this exit slip that’s going to help you better support them tomorrow when they come back to your classroom?

​And it’s not a grade. It’s a way for you to check in with their understanding and inform planning for the upcoming instruction. I love all the responses in the chat.

​So, go ahead and take a moment to think about how you might design or adapt a routine that you’ve seen or that you use in your classroom to incorporate the strategies that we shared in order to strengthen learning outcomes.

​Whitney Augustine: Thank you.

​Danielle McMaster: You can drop them in the chat while Whitney finishes up. Hey, glad you’re back!

​Whitney Augustine: Thank you. And while you’re thinking about that, we’ve also got one of the articles that has a lot of great information about the power of practice. This comes from the Dyslexia Association’s Journal, Perspectives on Language and Literacy.

​It’s called The Power of Practice, Instructional Routines to Maximize Student Learning by Pam Kastner. You can use that QR code or the tiny URL, and we can actually put that into the chat as well for you, if you’re interested in that for more reading. 

And then we do have just a few minutes for any questions. 

And some of you may have put questions in the chat that we may have missed, so if you have a lingering question, feel free to put that back in the chat again.

​Danielle McMaster: I’m gonna drop this link to the Power of Practice article that Whitney was just talking about there in the link. Thank you to those of you who are sharing. Coming in for that exit ticket.

​Whitney Augustine: Hi, Abby!

​Yes, I love the idea of adding that to library books. So, Tara, thank you for that. I love the idea of adding those exit slips to the library book checkout before the students leave the media center.

​Just all sorts of different ways, and I think what that really highlights is these are practices that we can incorporate across the board. These are not just ELA practices, they’re practices that we can incorporate in so many different contexts to help that retrieval.

​And so, if you have questions, feel free to put them in the chat. We’ve also included two pages of references here for you.

​You will be getting this, a link to this video recording within the next week or so, and so you’ll be able to pause it and slow down for those references as well, and then if you have any questions, feel free to contact us at lastinger@coe.ufl.edu email.

​And, on behalf of Danielle and the rest of our team, we thank you so much for joining us today, and please feel free to contact us.