When do students (and their teachers) find out they can’t retrieve or apply grade-level content? In many instances, teachers and students are left wondering if they truly know key content right until they sit an assessment. At this point there is so little time to address any gaps and move students forward in their learning. It is exactly this kind of challenge that longer cadence reviews can address.

Barak Rosenshine’s ’Principles of Instruction’ not only states that we should ‘begin a lesson with a short review of previous learning’, but that we should also ‘engage students in weekly and monthly review’. We know from the research that providing students with spaced, retrieval practice is vital for ensuring strong encoding into long-term memory. We also know that some teachers will decide on a different cadence for their reviews, (fortnightly or bi-termly instead of weekly or monthly) so at Teach Well, we refer to these as Longer Cadence Reviews.

In September this year, Teach Well was excited to host a joint webinar with Elastik, to explore Longer Cadence Reviews in more detail. The webinar covered how to best use Elastik to create Longer Cadence Reviews, saving teachers’ time, whilst providing instant feedback to students.

From the research, we know that effective Longer Cadence Reviews take the form of a low-stakes (or no-stakes) quiz, consisting of grade-level retrieval and application questions, and can help students to develop their own metacognition. They should also include a full teacher debrief, ideally within the same lesson as the review itself. Whilst some teachers might select questions from textbooks or practice exam papers, and others may put together a selection of hinge-point questions, any ability to help reduce teacher workload is worth investigating further.

Dahmen Higgs from Elastik demonstrated how to create different types of reviews, including Daily Reviews informed by PAT/NAPLAN testing data, and also Longer Cadence Reviews. By manually selecting questions from a bank of multiple-choice questions organised by year level, subject and strand, teachers can build short assessments to assign to their students, saving them time in creation and printing, and providing them with an overview of which questions students struggled with to give feedback on within the same lesson. Instant feedback is also provided to students on which questions they answered correctly and/or incorrectly.

A secondary Mathematics teacher who attended the webinar said “As someone brand new to ELASTIK, this was very informative. I think the most useful part was the walkthrough on how to create custom reviews and the fact that it can support teachers to better use data to inform teaching. I really loved Teach Well’s recap of spaced practice and longer cadence review!”

We hope those of you who attended the webinar found it useful and informative, and if you would like more information on using Elastik in your schools, you can find it here. We will endeavour to hold another alumni webinar with Elastik next year, so if you missed out this time, keep checking back.

 

Four years ago, the Director of Catholic Education Canberra Goulburn, Ross Fox, decided to retrain his teaching workforce of 1500 staff in the Science of Learning. This educational reform emphasised the importance of all teachers being able to confidently deliver evidence-based high-impact teaching practices, with a shared focus on how students learn and understand new ideas. As part of the Catalyst program, Teach Well’s flagship Masterclass Series has been delivered under the name HITP in Action – Secondary & Central Series. The professional learning course, anchored to Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction has been delivered to over 400 teachers and leaders across 3 years, with more than 160 participants in 2023 alone.

The Series is a five-day spaced professional learning experience, with two rounds of video coaching with personalised feedback from the expert Teach Well coaching team. Each workshop day brings the latest research on the Science of Learning to teachers and leaders, translating it into effective practice for the classroom. As Cheryl Daniel from St Patrick’s Parish School Cooma, NSW said “…[I] just wanted to extend a heartfelt thanks for taking the time to watch my film cycles and provide specific and valuable feedback. It has been so encouraging for me as an early career teacher to hear this feedback on my practice and it has motivated me to keep refining it to be even better. I am enjoying the HITP in Action program immensely and thank you for your efforts in making it happen.”

The Catalyst project has certainly paid off, with an independent review using NAPLAN data finding that the quantity of students performing below expected standards in reading dramatically reduced between 2019 and 2022, from 42 percent to only 4 percent. Teachers trained as part of the Series create a baseline of student academic data at the start of the course and track outcomes again at the end of the course. In 2022, 82% of teachers reported improved student academic progress, and 84% noted improvements in student participation. 99% of teachers reported they changed their practice and 97% said they would recommend the high-impact instructional strategies covered in the HITP in Action Series to other teachers.

This bold yet successful approach to reforming teacher practice at scale has been highlighted by a panel of experts advising the federal government on teaching degrees. The panel recommended a major review of teaching courses, led by Education Department Secretary and Sydney University vice-chancellor, Professor Mark Scott. Following a national meeting of education ministers, universities have been given two years to overhaul their teaching degrees, to ensure more teachers feel prepared for the classroom when they finish university. The proposal includes content such as an understanding of how the brain stores and retrieves information, effective methods for teaching reading and writing, classroom management and responsive teaching. Many of these areas of focus are covered in the HITP in Action Series and Teach Well’s flagship program, the Masterclass Series.

Federal Education Minister Jason Clare said that many teachers felt unprepared for the classroom when they finished university, and the aim was to make teachers feel more confident when they start the job. The move to align university courses to evidence-based practices, such as those delivered in the HITP in Action Series and the Masterclass Series, is part of a national push to fix Australia’s teacher shortages, and to prevent an estimated one in five new teachers leaving the profession within the first three years of their teaching careers. High-quality professional development can play a role in helping retain teachers in the profession. The World Bank (2019) considers “providing continuous support and motivation, in the form of high-quality in-service training and strong school leadership,” to be a key principle when considering teacher retention. Retention is one thing, but having highly effective teaching in every classroom, for every student, is another. The impact that an effective teacher has on student learning was highlighted by Sanders and Rivers (1996), amongst other researchers, who found that “the effects of teacher quality on student achievement are additive and cumulative.” Through the Catalyst program and the Masterclass Series, our hope is for all teachers, including our graduate teachers, to be confident and well-prepared for the complex demands of teaching. Teach Well is proud to be a part of the Catalyst program and congratulates all involved in its success to date.

Sources:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-07/review-of-university-teacher-degrees-at-ministers-meeting/102564402

https://catalyst.cg.catholic.edu.au/news/cecg-recognised-at-national-level/

Seebruck, R. (2015). Teacher Quality and Student Achievement: A Multilevel Analysis of Teacher Credentialization and Student Test Scores in California High Schools. McGill Sociological Review, Vol 5: 1-18.