We’ve recently had the pleasure of watching a few great videos shared with us by the team at Rivers Primary Academy in Walsall, England. The clips exemplify not just impressive implementation and adaptation of TLAC techniques but–pretty clearly, we think a culture that takes the support and development of teachers seriously. I’m going to share…
You’re probably familiar with Turn and Talk… it’s one of the most popular techniques in Teach Like a Champion and you can delve into some of the details here, here and here. This is a video of a variation on that idea: Turn and Task. Instead of discussing a relevant question students complete a task-say…
A few nights ago I was watching a movie with my family. I was in a chair. My wife and one of my daughters were over on the couch. To my left and mostly behind me as I was looking at the screen. But I noticed a strange behavior in myself: I kept glancing…
Retrieval Practice is the act of recalling previously encountered information into working memory, or conscious thinking. Brief spurts of Retrieval Practice help students solidify information in their long-term memories, and, importantly, understanding is not learning until it is encoded in long-term memory. We recently had the pleasure of watching Steve Kuninsky conduct some Retrieval Practice with…
Watered down instruction is a problem in American classrooms. TNTP’s 2018 white paper, The Opportunity Myth describes the scope of this problem. The average student “spent more than 500 hours per school year on assignments that weren’t appropriate for their grade and with instruction that didn’t ask enough of them—the equivalent of six months of wasted class time…