Team-Level Professional Learning | Learning Cycles & SKIP

Instructional Solution: Readiness & retrieval

Before teaching a pupil a new idea, we must determine their readiness. If a pupil does not have a secure grip of the necessary prerequisite ideas, teachers should step back before attempting to bring about new meaning.

Pupils are better able to remember ideas if they have engaged in frequent retrieval practice (practice where they are required to recall previously-covered content).

Instructional Solution: Sequence & exposition

A teacher’s exposition helps to locate new ideas within what is currently known to pupils. This must be carefully sequenced to ensure pupils are learning the right ideas at the right time.

When introducing a new idea, the burden on working memory is particularly high, so exposition must be designed to focus attention on the pertinent details.

Handover to pupils is critical. This should be scaffolded so that all pupils can bridge the gap between what the teacher is doing and what they are expected to do. An effective strategy is 'I do, We do, You do'. The teacher models the exact task, the whole class repeat this all together, then individually, checking for understanding throughout the process.

Instructional Solution: Stages of practice

Practice closes the gap between knowledge and application; it develops automaticity and fluency with an idea. But not all practice yields effective learning. A novice asked to engage in expert-level thinking will benefit little from it, and vice versa. The teacher must stage practice, gradually introducing desirable difficulties, as their pupils become more proficient in their retrieval of connected ideas.

Naive practice might involve repetition, rehearsal or replication to support the acquisition of an idea, whereas deliberate practice introduces difficulties such as transfer across contexts, spacing, or interleaving ideas to improve long-term performance. Effective learning begins with naive practice and becomes more deliberate with the introduction of difficulty and rigour.

Instructional Solution: Exposing thinking

Exposing thinking is how a teacher checks the understanding of their pupils. It necessitates recall, examines understanding, and yields data to better-inform a teacher’s response and design of further instruction.

It is also about holding pupils accountable for thought. If pupils aren't thinking about the right things at the right time, they will not encode into their long term memories.

If teachers don’t know what their pupils understand at any given moment, they can’t know whether to repeat, whether to elaborate, or whether to move on.

Instructional Solution: Responding & adapting

All pupils come to lessons with differing levels of prior knowledge. Some, with needs that impact on the pace at which they can learn. A teacher‘s instruction must adapt and respond to the needs and schemas of their pupils. Following checks for readiness and understanding, a teacher should:

• Use scaffolds, or corrective instruction for those who are missing requisite knowledge or require support

• Provide enrichment opportunities to those whose knowledge surpasses the class majority

• Respond to any misconceptions or errors

Instructional Solution: Feedback & follow-up

Used effectively, feedback can have a significant impact on pupil learning (EEF, 2018). Effective feedback, verbal or written, should aim to move a pupil forwards, helping them to answer at least one of three questions:

• Where am I going? What does success look like?

• How am I doing? Relative to success, where am I?

• Where to next? What steps can I take to close the gap?

It is important that, once feedback is received, pupils have a chance to act on it. This might look like asking a pupil to redraft their work, redo a part of the task, or repeat the task entirely. This is a vital component of ensuring practice is deliberate.