PEDAGOGY We might do this as simply as asking students to jot down from memory ideas about a given text, scaffolded around what, how and why questions. This might be in bullet point form, given it’s the retrieval of ideas that matters most, or indeed as a more extended written activity. It might you supply several possible ‘what’ or ‘why’ options and then ask students to offer possible ideas as to ‘how’ the writer achieves this or even ask students to debate which of the ‘what’ or
‘why’ options seem to them most compelling. You could also, in the fashion of the elaborative-interrogate, use these prompts as a way in which to scaffold peer discussion where students ask each other questions about a given text or image based around a series of ‘how’ or ‘why’ questions. All of this could then lead into more extended writing opportunities, again using the prompts to cue student thinking,
but in and of itself it offers lots of opportunity for a more generative kind of retrieval, embedding the language of what, how and why into classroom discourse. In all of these examples, and there are of course many, many other examples we might have explored, retrieval is being thought of as an activity that not only activates previously studied information, but does so in such a way as to prioritise and promote connective and generative thinking both across and within texts.
...gather four or five favourite images and then ask everyone to write a short analysis that explains the ways in which they connect. This is a great way to maximise what Doug Lemov labels ratio (the number of students thinking hard at any given time)
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