Teach-Secondary-14.1

E veryone knows that repetition is important for learning. Retrieval practice seems to be everywhere in schools at the moment, whether in the ‘Do Nows’ at the start of lessons, via regular formative assessments or built into homework activities. Yet I rarely see repetition treated with the importance it deserves when it comes to teacher explanations. Often, it seems to be assumed that saying something once should be enough – but is it? Speaking, not heard Every teacher knows that they may need to repeat themselves on occasion, especially when students are distracted and not listening. This is a frustrating, but familiar reality of classroom teaching. But what about those times when the students are listening? It might seem pointless to repeat yourself when the students were giving you their full attention first time round. They aren’t having any difficulties hearing you, so why say the same thing to them again?Won’t that just lead to boredom and cause students to switch off? New teachers are often surprised to find that students seemnot to know the very thing that they have just been told. What these new teachers are discovering is how they can have been speaking to their students, yet not have been heard . We can relate this to instructions about what to do next, or to content that the teacher is presenting. The teacher does their explanation – which seems to SAY IT AGAIN! Repetition is a powerful explanation strategy that doesn’t need to be boring, says Colin Foster ... have gone down perfectly well – and then circulates around the room. Then they suddenly discover that the students don’t seem to know the information they’ve been discussing immediately before. “ But...I just told you that! ” the teacher will say, in disbelief. This kind of scenario won’t be unfamiliar to the more experienced teachers among you. We’ll often put it down to a lack of effort or attention on the part of our students – but I don’t believe this is necessarily the case. Once is rarely enough The curse of knowledge means that teachers are always at risk of thinking what they’re teaching is simpler than it actually is. We’ve explained something a hundred times, thus ensuring that it’s very familiar and clear to us . We might even be rather pleased with our explanation, which we’ve carefully honed over the years, to the point where it becomes hard to see how any student could fail to grasp it. And indeed, it may be that there’s nothing wrong with our explanation at all. The issue is rather that our students may need more than one bite at the apple to really take in what we’re saying and properly absorb it. If an explanation is important, then once is rarely enough. I’ve often been surprised at how a student who seems completely confused can appear to instantly sort themselves out after having just one more chance at hearing an explanation. Relative importance I’ve noticed how both less experienced and veteran teachers alike will often give what appear to me to be very good explanations – but that experienced teachers’ explanations will include quite a bit more repetition. One reason for this is that the experienced teacher will be more capable of distinguishing between the most important and least important parts of their explanation. A less experienced teacher will more frequently have a ‘flat profile’ in terms of how they signal importance. They’ll “The experienced teacher knows that smiling,nodding students aren’t necessarily actively listening towhat they’re saying” 66 teachwire.net/secondary