Meg Lee: When you‘re dealing with content that spans over multiple days, it’s really effective to have a quick way to situate the student learning in the context of where you’ve been. Students come to our classes through a day that can be very chaotic, lots of class changes, lots of teacher changes. Taking a few moments close to the beginning of the class to have students recall content from previous day’s learning as a quick baseline can be very helpful.

Alicia Bechard: Let’s get going. Everybody grab a whiteboard and a marker.

We have six other classes during the day that they have to remember a whole bunch of things. So I try to do something where they’re pulling information from the day before so then we can get into the reading and it’s pretty clear in their head.

On your whiteboards, one thing that you remember from chapters one and two.

The novel we’re reading is called Anthem. I asked them to list everything they remembered.

And it could be names, could be places, could be things that happened, could be vocabulary.

They would write on the whiteboard, write what they remembered, and then they could start working together.

Student: Wait, what’s another house?

Meg Lee: The teacher could have summarized the content of the novel they’ve read so far herself, or she could have said to the students, “Can anyone tell me what we read over the last several days?” In either case, not every student would have an opportunity to do that reflection and thinking themselves. And so by using the whiteboards, she’s ensuring that every single student is engaged in that thinking, not just her and not just one or two.

Alicia Bechard: I’m trying to shift that lift onto them so it’s them doing the work so then I don’t have to stand up there and be trying to pull and pull and pull and try and get them to answer something. Then I had them get up and mark other groups’ whiteboards.

Put a check mark if it is what you remembered. Put a star if it’s something that you didn’t remember.

Then we usually have a discussion.

Did you guys feel like you were able to check off quite a bit? Like you guys were all remembering good things? What was something you put a star on? Marilyn, what was something?

Marilyn: Union.

Alicia Bechard: Union. You forgot about union. OK. Allie. Caesar, what’d you guys put?

Allie: One thing that we forgot to put was the black hole.

Alicia Bechard: Yeah, because what was the black hole?

Meg Lee: When we remember something that we had initially forgotten, it is coming back into our working memory. It is having another opportunity to go into long-term memory. And so every time that happens, we are actually creating a stronger memory trace for that information.

Alicia Bechard: And then that’s usually how we get into our reading portion of the day.

Good job, guys. Go ahead and erase your stuff.

Delta High School

.css-1sk4066:hover{background:#d1ecfa;}Focusing Attention With a Student-Led Recall Activity

Focusing Attention With a Student-Led Recall Activity