Page 89: A delve into research, implementing spaced practice into my subject leader planning
I am a passionate and aspiring leader so when the potential opportunity arose, I felt settled into my school and class teaching role, therefore ready to take on my next challenge. Last year, I completed a wide range of independant study to start the process of becoming the subject expert in our setting, but also, how to become a successful leader and what underpins this. It is clearly evidently from extensive educational research and classroom based studies that have been carried out that curriculum and assessment drives any area of teaching, adapted to suit the needs of an individual school's composition and community. To read about my journey in becoming and developing in the role of a subject leader, please feel free to revise Page 79: Becoming and subject leader and Page 80: How to plan using a local authority syllabus. When reviewing our subject, there were some adaptations that needed to be made. In support of current educational research and our school teaching and learning policy, myself and my subject leader partner wanted to ensure our learners were able to know more and remember more. This is where spaced learning comes into play.
Spaced learning is a new buzz word but I am sure it is already present in your school. This was the case for us and the priority was to enhance and consolidate learning links and knowledge recall effectively.
So what is spaced learning?
Spaced learning is a cognitive science strategy. In a review by the EEF, it was concluded retrieval practice and spaced learning where the most succesful cognitive science approaches in supporting the children's cognitive load. Children are able to make links on prior learning, strengthen this links and build knowledge upon these further. Adopted spaced learning strategies ensure that the distributions of the learning and retrieval opportunities are present over time.
How is this implemented?
Learning is implemented in cycles. This means that children will revisit subjects are different points over the year. When created medium terms plans, through ensuring all lessons have revised and revisit opportunities strengthen the learners ability to not just recall key knowledge but apply these to a variety of contexts. When deciding upon what these key concept revisits would be, it is important to ensure they are structured recalling previous lesson knowledge, previous terms knowledge and previous years knowledge etc. Learners should be continually building upon their knowledge, expanding ideas and thinking, not just simply recalling and parking it, moving on. By looking at the whole school picture from a child's subject journey from the EYFS-Year 6, it allows for consistency and continuity throughout.
It has been lovely to reflect on some of the work I have done this year and be able to see the success of implementation through carrying out subject leader monitoring.
- Miss Yeoman
Comments
Post a Comment