- Mini whiteboards for effective drills
- Think Pair Share gets students to explain their thinking
- Wait time and Random Name Generators to get all students thinking
- You are not ready for the new learning
- You lose some of the learning from the day before.
"Practice makes permanent" is a phrase that springs to mind from the first half of this week. The importance of practise in consolidating new learning should not be underestimated. However, practise does not have to be doing endless problems of the same type. In fact it is better if practise causes students to think, as this will enable them to make more connections within the brain, and hence make retrieval easier. This links nicely to the ideas of variation theory, or intelligent practice as Mr Barton likes to call it, where each question links to the next in some and thinking about these connections helps students create a larger, deeper understanding of the new knowledge.