Takeaways From an Edutopia Jam Session on Retrieval Practice

In February, we helped moderate an Edutopia Jam Session on retrieval. Inspired by posts from teachers during the session and a recent Substack post by Carl Hendrick, we found ourselves continuing to think about retrieval from two different angles: what retrieval can and cannot do in the classroom (which Maureen will discuss), and what the most effective amount of retrieval practice is (which Rob will talk about).    

Retrieval Practice Capability

In my experience teaching students in grades K–12, what strikes me most is both the power of retrieval practice and how much it depends on context: what students are learning, how learning was built, and what they are asked to do with it. This contextual tension pushes educators to think more carefully about what retrieval can and cannot do in the classroom.

Through retrieval, students strengthen recall pathways, deepen familiarity, and move toward fluency with material they have already experienced. Retrieval helps students integrate language, ideas, and skills in ways that support understanding.

Retrieval alone, such as recalling ideas or isolated vocabulary, does not automatically lead to real-world application, implicit knowledge, proficiency, or shared understanding. Fluent performance develops when retrieval is paired with compelling input, support, feedback, and meaningful interaction.

Before students can retrieve, they need something worth retrieving. Teaching, comprehension, and time for encoding must come first. Teachers can support comprehension through gestures, images, cognates, and strategies like Write & Discuss before students are asked to retrieve. Once students engage with the material, retrieval strengthens those pathways and builds greater ease of recall over time.

The beauty of retrieval is its flexibility. Strategies such as Blast from the Past, low-stakes quizzes, stop-and-jot, intentional pauses, explain to a partner, and brain dumps can be adapted across grade levels. Embedded within existing routines, they give students regular opportunities to reactivate prior learning.

Adding Context

Some of my most powerful retrieval moments happen when students relate across subject areas. After reading a story about a character living during the Spanish Civil War, students revisited it through what they knew about World War II from history, using the target language. Similar moments happen in first grade as students apply numbers and calendar terms in Spanish to math.

These moments show how retrieval becomes more context-rich when tied to stories and shared experiences rather than isolated word lists. The question becomes “Can you reconnect with this?” (instead of just “Do you remember this?”).

Retrieval became more impactful when I paired metacognition with ideas from the book Powerful Teaching, about the science of learning. I asked students not only to retrieve the material, but also to reflect on how they were acquiring it. I posed questions like “What is sticking?” and “What helped this idea connect for you?”

These questions position students as active observers of their own learning, while retrieval provides structure. The goal is not simply to remember an idea or vocabulary term, but to use it to communicate, think deeply, problem-solve, empathize, listen, and understand others. Retrieval is one tool in that process—a way of honoring the messy, human work of learning and communication.

Retrieval Practice and ‘Dosage’

In the Substack post mentioned earlier, Hendrick offers advice about “fine-tuning retrieval practice,” highlighting what we can call a “dosage” question: How much retrieval practice is enough as we plan instruction?

During the retrieval practice Jam Session, teachers from across the Edutopia community offered many great examples of embedding retrieval practice. My undergraduate students are also able to come up with retrieval practice examples to integrate into their lesson plans. But we rarely talk about dosage, and this is a crucial aspect that deserves more conversation and attention. As teachers, how many of these great, creative retrieval practice opportunities should we build into a unit? How many should I advise teachers-in-training to include in one lesson? In one class session? Across a unit? Across a year?

Hendrick reviews studies indicating that we should base our dosage decisions on curricular factors such as semantic relatedness and learning target differences (such as remembering something versus using what we remember). Another study indicates that individual differences in cognitive load may influence how much of a retrieval practice dose learners need to develop proficiency.

The unresolved dosage question is familiar to classroom teachers, even though we don’t often frame it that way. I’ve worked with high school and college introductory psychology teachers, and the instructors are often blown away by how amazingly fluent many high school psychology teachers are with that body of knowledge. The teachers are often far more capable of retrieving and using introductory psychology terms and studies than their college colleagues, who tend to specialize in a specific field.

This is a dosage phenomenon—a high school teacher likely gets multiple retrieval practice opportunities every single day for parts of their curriculum, since they teach multiple sections of the same class, whereas college instructors typically see their students once or twice a week.

Continuing the Discussion

We should talk more about retrieval practice and dosage as a community in order to help each other work through the practical implications of retrieval practice research, and I’m excited to add the dosage question to my conversations with undergraduate teachers-in-training. It’s likely that curriculum-based communities of teachers will be able to offer the best practical advice. I’d love to hear from math teachers, for example, about how many retrieval practice sessions they build in for computational fluency skills at different grade levels. Hearing from experienced teachers in specific contexts is an important addition to the ongoing conversation about retrieval practice.