The book Powerful Teaching by Bain and Agarwal has taught me a lot about how the human brain works and how we learn. As someone who admittedly never taken a psychology class, this book felt like the best way to learn about how our students learn. In prior posts, I've talked about their ideas in relation to Retrieval Practice and how to use those different strategies to help students retrieve information that has already been stored. This post continues on that idea but instead talks about two other ideas- spaced practice and interleaving. Spaced Practice: The image above is one that I think we can all relate to. We study so much the night before a test and in a week or so we forget almost everything. Spaced practice is something we can use as language teachers to help that. When we engage in retrieval practice, we are always focusing on bringing forward the words, structures or cultural information that we learned in the past. If we only do that one time during a unit or with a particular set of information, we are lessening the chances that it will be stored in our students' long term memories. So how do we fix that? The easiest solution from Powerful Teaching is to space out your retrieval activities- hence the name, spaced practice. So instead of practicing something one time in the beginning of the year/semester, we plan out some strategic times in the curriculum when kids will need to retrieve information. For example, let's say that in September we are working with vocabulary related to food. By the end of the unit, we've had lots of input with the food vocabulary, we've maybe looked over/practiced for vocabulary quizzes and have outputted the words in speaking and writing. In October, we move on to the next unit which might be something like technology. By the end of that unit, we have done the same thing but with technology words instead of food words. What happened to the food words? There's a strong likelihood that a lot of these words have been forgotten. So what can a teacher do to fix that? It could be as simple as creating a warm up asking students to list all of the fruits and vegetables that they remember or giving them a homework assignment that involves food vocabulary or finding resources that combine the topics of food and technology so students need both sets of words. The answer is this- just because we finish a unit doesn't mean that students will remember everything a month or two down the road. Let's try another example but with grammar. I have a feeling that we've all been in a similar situation. In October we worked really hard on how to use the two past tenses to narrate about past events. We focused on form, we used different strategies like PACE, structured input and some potential explicit practice. When they did the assessment, it seemed like they really got it. Fast forward to March when we've already done a few more grammar points and I'm now asking them to narrate in the past. They learned it in October, so they've got it, right? When you see their performance, you realize that they seem almost at the same point there were in September before you even started the unit. What happened and what do we do? It's become clear to me over the years that just because I taught something, doesn't mean that they will remember it. So with the past tenses example, I learned that I need to be intentional about asking them to use it and retrieve those forms as frequently as possible. This could mean asking for a brain dump of all past tense verbs in the yo form they remember and then asking them to use them in sentences, creating retrieval guide activities where questions about past tenses come up, or designing tasks throughout my other units that require past tense as well. The more deliberate I am about spacing out when they practice these concepts, the more likely they will be to retrieve them and use them with more ease. Interleaving: Interleaving is a very similar concept to spaced practice and has a lot of similarities. The difference in interleaving and spaced practice is the idea of mixing up concepts throughout the curriculum vs finding times to retrieve information at different points in the curriculum. Take, for example, the image above. You have two kinds of practice- blocking and interleaving. With blocked practice, you cover the 4 topics extensively but you never revisit them throughout the year. With interleaving, you see that you cover less of each topic but you see the spiraling of how the topics are always returning to the forefront of the curriculum. In a world language classroom, the best way to think about this is from the grammar lens. Let's take a typical year 3 course and choose the 4 most common grammar points that are taught- the present tense, the past tenses, the subjunctive and the future tense. In a blocked pattern, you would spend unit 1 working on present tense, unit 2 working on past tenses (with no mention of present), unit 3 working on subjunctive (with no mention of present or past tenses) and unit 4 working on future tense (with no mention of present, past or subjunctive). This is how I taught for many, many years and how I wrote curriculum. My honest thought was that it would be too much for students to handle if I kept revisiting grammar points throughout the year. I now see that revisiting grammar throughout the year is actually what's going to help keep the information in their working memory which enables them to use it. in most circumstances, it would be hard to teach all 4 tenses in one unit all at once and not have students leave confused. Take a look at this example from a presentation I did with Stephanie Carbonneau at the annual FLAME Conference. Notice how there is a progression where unit 1 focuses on one grammar point (the present tense) but unit 2 starts to add a little more. In unit 2 we introduce the subjunctive but then we also revisit the present tense within the context of that unit. In unit 3 we do the same and add the past tenses while also revisiting the present tense. The subjunctive is avoided purposefully because I want them to express opinions in the present tense for a while before introducing past subjunctive. In unit 4, we see how all four major grammar points from the year come to play a role. The students learn a new set of structures (the future tense) and combine those with present, past and subjunctive.
The key to interleaving is the intentionality behind our curriculum planning. Textbooks are not accustomed to recycling previously learned vocabulary, grammar or cultural knowledge so we have to take it into our own hands and do that ourselves when we plan units. It doesn't necessarily mean that I have to reinvent a lot of what I'm teaching. Sometimes it could be as simple as an activity you do in class or a warm up but it could be as complex as creating a series of learning targets in your unit where you address prior knowledge. It's all about being intentional in our planning. If we want students remembering what we taught, we have to help them remember and not just expect that they will.
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