Focusing Attention With a Student-Led Recall Activity

Hopping from subject to subject, navigating hallway chaos, chattering with friends—high school can be a frenzy of activity. So in classrooms where lessons span multiple days, students often benefit from a quick opportunity to reconnect with previous learning before moving forward. At Delta High School in Delta, Colorado, ninth-grade teacher Alicia Bechard begins class with a collaborative routine designed to help students recall key ideas from the day before and focus their attention in preparation for the lesson ahead.

At the start of class, each student grabs a marker and a small whiteboard. Bechard asks them to write down what they remember from the previous day’s reading. “It could be names, places, things that happened, vocabulary,” she explains. Because her students are reading a novel across several class periods, she wants them to actively revisit what they’ve already learned rather than passively receive a recap from the teacher. 

After the students have worked independently on their brain dump for a few minutes, they start to collaborate with classmates, walking around the room reading one another’s responses, placing check marks beside ideas they also remembered and stars next to details they had forgotten. The activity naturally leads into a quick class discussion before students begin the day’s reading.

For Bechard, the goal is to shift more of the cognitive work onto students. “It’s them doing the work,” she says, “so then I don't have to stand up there trying to pull and pull to get them to answer something.” 

The strategy also ensures that every student participates in the process of remembering. Meg Lee, cofounder of Learning Science Partners, explains why this matters. “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?’” Lee explains. “In either case, not every student would have an opportunity to do that reflection and thinking themselves.” By asking students to recall information on their own and then compare ideas with classmates, Bechard creates opportunities for each of them to engage with the content.

The process has the added benefit of strengthening retention: “When we remember something we had initially forgotten,” Lee says, “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.”

By building in a brief, intentional routine at the start of class, Bechard helps students reactivate prior learning, reconnect with the text, and begin each lesson with their attention focused, ready to learn.

This video is part of our How Learning Happens: Instructional Shifts series, which explores teaching practices grounded in the science of learning.