Research How can we develop a culture of independent practice in Year 10 maths?

HOW CAN WE DEVELOP A CULTURE OF INDEPENDENT PRACTICE IN YEAR 10

'Don’t practise until you get it right’, says Danielle Lewis, Lead Practitioner Mathematics, ‘practise until you can’t get it wrong’.

Rationale

In our experience, pupils only revise in the run-up to tests. We are trying to embed a culture of regular retrieval practice throughout the year and to encourage pupils to be proactive and independent in their learning. We have observed that in music and sport (both practical activities) it seems natural to practise a skill until it is mastered. In academic pursuits, pupils seem to rely on their teacher to explain a task until they just ‘get it’ without putting in the effort to consolidate new ideas. Perhaps they don’t know how to practise independently and/or they don’t believe that practice will improve fluency. An important maxim for them to keep in mind is: Don't practise until you get it right; practise until you can't get it wrong.

Implementation

Two Year 10 Maths teachers designed a practice diary to be used throughout the Lent term. One homework per week was designated as a ‘practice homework’. We wanted to emphasise the word ‘practice’ – perhaps repeated use of the word would help to embed the idea. In music/sport, we typically use the words practice or training, but in academic subjects, it’s called homework or revision.

Initially, we suggested topics for revision with a selection of tasks from which to choose. It was then up to the pupil to choose a task, record it, rate their confidence, and then reschedule the topic so that they would revisit it using a different task in a timescale that reflected their confidence in that topic. If they had very low confidence, they were encouraged to seek help from their teacher.

Ideas from research

Graham Nuthall says in The Hidden Lives of Learners: 'To learn a new concept securely, a student must revisit it in its entirety at least three times over a few days or weeks.' Dunlosky et al. (2013) note in Improving students' learning with effective learning techniques: 'Memory retrieval is most useful at the point of forgetting.'

Practice for fluency: Knowledge and procedures become so well consolidated that they can be effortlessly recalled.

Deliberate practice: When pupils struggle at the outer reaches of their ability to learn something intrinsically difficult and stretching (Shaun Allison and Andy Thraby, Making Every Lesson Count).

Use of technology

This project coincided with the issuing of iPads to Year 10, so we implemented the practice diary in the Class Notebook within Teams. In this way, we could populate the teacher copy with suggested tasks from which the pupils would then copy and paste a chosen task into their area. The teacher could then monitor their use of the diary.

The practice diary

For your practice homework each week: • Write the topic title, followed by the activity you choose. • In the 'fluency' column, write a number from one to 10 (where 10 is the most confident and one is the least). • Schedule your next practice session of that topic in that number of weeks' time. Write it down against that date with the task you're going to do. • If it's a very low number, seek help from your teacher or at Maths Clinic during that week, before your next practice session.

The comments are very strongly in favour of a paper system and can be summarised as follows:

Conclusion and next steps

It is clear from the feedback that the pupils overwhelmingly preferred using paper to record their work rather than doing so online. They valued the opportunity to practise but have yet to develop the independence to choose their own tasks. We shall continue to set aside specific homeworks to be practice sessions. We shall aim to provide a paper diary with suggested tasks, as well as doing a starter activity relating to the practice task on the day the practice homework is set. In this way, we can begin to embed a culture of regular practice leading to proactive and independent practice as the pupils progress through the School and beyond.

Evaluation

At the end of the Lent term, pupils completed a questionnaire about their attitudes to the practice diary.

I did a revision activity and recorded it in my practice diary

I did a revision activity and did not record it in my practice diary

I did not do a revision activity but recorded something in my practice diary

I did not do the activity or record it in my practice diary

The practice diary was a useful way to

organise my revision scored 2.36 out of 4, showing a favourable but not overwhelmingly positive response

References

Introduction to thematic analysis of qualitative data. Available at: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=i7uLQvS7Zwc. Focus Group Data Analysis. Available at: www. youtube.com/watch?v=VIYBEE-1GbA. Bree, R. and Gallagher, G., 2016. Using Microsoft Excel to code and thematically analyse qualitative data: a simple, cost-effective approach. AISHE-J: The All Ireland Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 8 (2).