Research to the Classroom: Daily Review Part 3 - Teacher Talk

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Jocelyn: 0:38

Hi there, welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast. It's Jocelyn coming to you from Pataway Burnie, here in the absolutely gorgeous Tasmania. I am joined today by Jo Griffin, who is here for our Teacher Talk episode all about retrieval and daily review. Hi Jo, how are you going?

Jo: 0:58

Hi Jocelyn, I'm great. Excited to talk to you today.

Jocelyn: 1:01

Thank you so much for joining us, or, joining me here after school in the evening. So, everyone, if you're a bit jealous, thinking that Jo is just able to take time out of her school day, nope, this is occurring and the sun has gone down. Jo, why don't you start us off by telling us a little bit about your school context?

Jo : 1:22

Yeah, sure. So my school is based in Hobart. Newtown Primary School is a school that I work at. There's around 300 students from kinder to grade six, inner- city school, range of socioeconomic backgrounds and quite a diverse range of backgrounds too, with components components i n our school. We've got quite a high percentage of EAL students. So our school has been on a bit of a journey for about four years into structured literacy and we've been a bit of a pioneer in that space during a time when structured literacy wasn't really spoken of. Inquiry-based learning has been the big big thing in Tasmania for a very long time and we sort of went against the grain there for a little while. But thankfully Tassie's caught up and they're now promoting structured literacy across the board, which is really exciting.

What did Instruction Look Like Before Rigorous Daily Review?

Jocelyn: 2:03

Yeah, fantastic, and you've been kicking some real goals in years, Jo, and I know that in your school, you've made significant changes in the way that you operate, so we're talking today about daily review and retrieval in its capacity to help students to embed learning for the long term and be able to retain it so that they can use it later. What did your teaching look like and what was happening in the school before retrieval and daily review came to you?

Jo : 2:36

So about myself I've been teaching for 20 odd years now and I'm currently in a position at Newtown where I teach and lead the Prep to Choose space and work as part of the leadership team in supporting the implementation of new practices. So for me personally as a teacher I think instinctively I always knew that we needed to repeat a certain amount of information and you know I did that. I integrated some of that into my pedagogy, just instinctively, but it didn't have the rigour that I now know we need for that to be effective. But as a school, I guess you know, before we started doing this, we were very much coming from a background where structured literacy wasn't used. It was more the three queuing system that used back then. You would see things like guided reading as a cornerstone of practice there and there wasn't any sort of rigour in the exposure and repetition of learning materials. So yeah, that's kind of where we were.

Jocelyn : 3:29

And I'm guessing that for so many of us and it's not just in the past, but still so many of us, we had this expectation that a one and done would achieve the goals. And so for those children with great memories who just learned everything, that okay worked okay but for many children they didn't have the opportunity to rehearse and practice, and so they would almost go through their school life with just a series of lessons that didn't perhaps lead to the learning that we knew that they were capable of.

Jo : 4:04

Yeah, absolutely, so I think, and I'll talk more about this as we go through our conversation, but once we started to realise that there was another way of doing things and that there was research that told us about how students learn, we started to recognise that things needed to change.

What Prompted a Change? 

Jocelyn : 4:20

Yes, certainly. And listeners, if you have not listened to the first episode in this mini-series where I've unpacked some of that research, go back a couple of episodes and have a listen to where I'm sharing the findings from a meta-analysis and a couple of other research studies. Interestingly for me, Jo, in my research for this mini-series I found that one of the first large-scale studies on retrieval was from 1917. So we hear daily review as some kind of fad or it's the latest buzzword, but actually we've known about the need for spacing and for repetition for a very long time. So what prompted your school and you to introduce daily review and retrieval? What wasn't working in terms instruction that prompted the change?

Jo : 5:12

So I mean going back a bit, I started at Newtown Primary five years ago as part of the leadership team and one of the first things that I noticed was that there was no consistency in the way phonics was being taught, and that was really alarming to me. I knew that there'd been a few different approaches, that had come and gone and teachers were using a real mixed bag of different things. But we were clearly seeing in our data that our grades three to six children had significant gaps and we knew that something had to change. So we did start with phonics instruction in the early years as a priority.

Jo : 5:45

And obviously when we're looking at phonics instruction, if you're looking at systematic synthetic phonics, a key component of that is the retrieval and review component, and that's when it started to come into our awareness about the rigour that was required for phonics to be taught effectively.

Jo : 5:59

So initially we sort of started with the letters and sounds sequence and then we realised after a little bit of time that we needed a little bit more structure to our phonics approach and we picked up the Reading Success approach that you promote there, Joc, and we ran with that and we've sort of evolved and developed that over time. But one of the things we really like is that built-in, cumulative, systematic approach to the review and retrieval. Each lesson has those components. You're constantly reviewing and revisiting previously taught material and you can very quickly see, with check for understandings, whether the children are retaining that information. So that's sort of where we began with understanding that review and retrieval was important and it sort of expanded from there as we've unpacked the big six. So it started to expand into other areas of what we're doing across our literacy instruction at Newtown.

What Are Your Next Steps? 

Jocelyn : 6:48

Yeah, great. It's almost like the retrieval came in, not via the backdoor necessarily, but as a component of the phonics, and I think that a really good program or tool helps you build capacity and so you can look at an element of instruction and say, "well, hang on a second. What if we use that technique in this way for this other thing? We may get results. So from the phonics, what were the next steps for your school in going a little wider with the retrieval and review?

Jo : 7:21

Yeah, it's been a marathon, not a sprint. So we're still refining and reviewing what we're doing in that space. But as we started to unpack the big six and learn about the reading rope and one of the key things that we really needed to learn about was the cognitive load theory and the science behind that so we did that retrospectively once we realised that, well, yes, we're doing these things, but the teachers don't necessarily understand the biological functions that are taking place, that are necessary for children and why they're so important. So when we started to unpack the cognitive load theory side of things a bit more, teachers started to have a deeper understanding of the importance of the review and retrieval practice and understanding how to move things from short-term to long-term memory. It involves multiple processes.

Jocelyn : 8:09

Yeah, I was going to say I don't think it's a bad thing actually that you started your journey in the phonics instruction and then really went deep into cognitive load theory. We can talk about theory, but unless we know what it looks like, it's hard to build a mental image of why we're talking about what we're talking about. So it's good to have some initial knowledge, but I think at times, and I've certainly seen this in other schools, coming back and revisiting knowledge and really going deep in the knowledge component when we have something practical that we can hang our hats on and say, "oh okay, I know what that looks like in practice now, was that the case for your teachers?

Jo : 8:51

Yeah, I don't regret that we did it the way we did it. It sort of evolved naturally in a sense and it was kind of leading into us introducing a more explicit instruction model across the school too. But we didn't jump straight into introducing an explicit instruction model as a school. We started with some small components. We started with phonics and we looked at vocabulary, we looked at fluency, we looked at what those components look like across the school and then we sort of went back a little bit and we're like right, well, this cognitive load load theory, you need to understand this. This is really critical in you understanding the processes that we're using and why we're using them. And you know it also helped us to understand that for some children the repetitions needed are far greater than other children. So there was a lot of reflection there on what that meant for us in our practice. Yeah, let's have a talk about what retrieval and review looks like now.

Jo : 9:46

Sure. So we've got phonics instruction embedded across the prep to two. At this point in time we have six groups that we differentiate practice with across the prep to two each morning for 30 minutes, and a core component of that is the retrieval and review component. So at the moment what we do is we introduce at least three GPCs per week, (and that's phoneme grapheme correspondence.)

Jo : 10:12

Yes, yeah, sorry. So we introduce at least three per week because we're sort of finding that, you know, we need to pause at that point and do a good, solid review and retrieval practice with those new GPCs, so practicing recognising those GPCs and applying, using those for reading and writing, and then we've also to support that in the classroom when they're going back to their classrooms, we've got partner practice which also includes that GPC focus. So there's more opportunity for retrieval and review in the classroom in the early years, particularly around phonics, but it's much broader than that across our school. So we also have opportunities with vocabulary. So we have a fairly rigorous tier two instructional model with vocab, as in. I'm talking about tier two vocabularies, where we're regularly revisiting the vocabulary that's previously been taught and applying and using that vocabulary and it's also spreading to into other areas of the curriculum such as maths as well.

What Does Retrieval Look Like in Practice? 

Jocelyn : 11:10

Now yeah, great. If I was to come for a visit to school and a teacher was conducting some retrieval or review, what would I see?

Jo : 11:20

So usually what you would see is children usually have whiteboards and that's a core part of what we do with the instruction, particularly for the retrieval component, particularly in a phonics group If I'm describing what a phonics group looks like the teacher would be reviewing some sounds that have previously been taught with the children to start with. They'd be responding really quickly. It's a quick pace, so what sound, what sound, what sound, what sound? And going through really quickly. You would then check for understanding. We're trying to write some words applying those previously taught graphene phoneme correspondences on the little whiteboards and you'd be chinning it. So chin it, we say, and they're holding it up to show us and we do a quick scan and we can see. That's a good opportunity to check for understanding and there's some of the practices that we see in the phonics practice, but in the classrooms too. There's other opportunities as well outside of that.

How Does Retrieval Support Teacher Decision Making? 

Jocelyn : 12:07

So how does the retrieval and the review support teachers in their decision making?

Jo : 12:13

So with our phonics, when we use our data to decide the grouping. That data informs our initial decisions. But one of the things that we're also looking for constantly is are the children retaining that information? And if they're not, what are we doing about that? Sometimes that might indicate they're a tier two candidate. They need extra repetitions outside of our regular core routine, or it might mean that perhaps our pace has been fast; we need to slow down and review a few things. So we're constantly responding and adapting according to what we're sort of observing with that retrieval practice.

Jocelyn : 12:48

Yeah, that's really great, I think, Jo, for people to hear, because it's not just about having it and then not using it. So what we notice with our students during the retrieval whether that be for maths or for phonics or any other subject area is if the students don't have it, we have to do something about that. It's not enough for us to simply ask questions and then move on.

Jocelyn : 13:14

So it's great that for your school there's that responsiveness to student need going on and as you say, it helps you identify students who might need tier two intervention, which is that extra dose of what they've received in the main classroom lesson. And just to be clear for people listening when Jo's talking about groups, the data is completed and then children are grouped across classrooms for a short period of time a day so that each child is receiving the exact instruction they need for their phonics instruction. And I've seen that in many, many schools, and I've never known a school to go back once they've started down that road and been able to see the impact on students. And so all of your decisions are about being responsive to student need here.

Jo : 14:00

Absolutely. So yeah, you've hit the nail on the head there, Joc, with not going back once we sort of moved to this model. So initially what we did start with with phonics instruction was that it was just classroom based, with the classroom teacher trying to pitch the phonics instruction as best they could to suit the majority. But unfortunately that meant that, for some children, that content was just too far ahead of where they're at, or perhaps for the more advanced student that was pitched too low and they weren't really making gains.

Jocelyn : 14:27

I'm just so excited by what I'm hearing around the responsiveness of instruction and, I think, everyone, if there's a key message you can take away from listening to this episode, it's that this work s. Yes, it is about improving student outcomes. It also enables you, as the teacher, to make great decisions. If the learning, the initial learning, is pitched too high and the children can't access it, when it comes time to do the review, you're actually not doing a review because retrieval is drawing out of your brain, but if it's not in there in the first place, you're not retrieving. You're just asking children to do things that they don't know how to do.

Jo : 15:03

Exactly, yeah, I think, like you said, once we sort of moved to this model of teaching for phonics, we saw our results catapult. They've grown exponentially and we're seeing a majority of our students going through the end of grade two now with a really great, solid knowledge of the code.

What Were Some of the Road Blocks Along the Way? 

Jocelyn : 15:21

What were some of the roadblocks and difficulties that teachers experienced in really embedding retrieval and review into regular practice?

Jo : 15:31

So I think, coming from older practices with teaching, where we sort of planned a certain amount of content and we planned to get through that content and didn't necessarily go back through it. So there would be blocks of time, right this week I'm doing A, B and C, as my letter sounds, and next week I'm doing da-da-da-da-da, and that was how it was. We didn't go back, we didn't review, we just thought, oh well, I've taught that, and so that was changing that understanding of how children learn was a big part of it and building the understanding, as I mentioned, of cognitive load theory and developing a clear instructional model. You know there's been lots of other challenges, I guess in a broader sense, with introducing an explicit instruction model, because essentially the review and retrieval practices are a part of explicit instruction.

Jo : 16:16

So moving away from inquiry-based learning was a huge learning curve for a lot of people, because in Tasmania we had even inquiry-based approaches to spelling in some instances and they were really celebrated and for a lot of children they worked. And so there were questions say, well, why can't we do this now? And you know we only have to look at the rates of illiteracy in Tasmania to go well, it's not working for enough.

Jocelyn : 16:40

So yeah, absolutely yeah. And the mode of delivery for teachers. What were they expecting versus what you thought maybe they could be doing?

Jo : 16:49

I think for teachers initially, the challenge was that they felt like a little bit of their creative license had been taken with what they were doing. You know, I think teachers traditionally used to live in their own little four walls and do what they felt they needed to do at that particular point in time, and they were always well intended and always had in the back of their mind that student outcomes were their priority, absolutely. But moving into this instructional model, which you know has a lot more rigour to it and a certain structure, meant that that challenged a few people and it meant that we needed to upskill teachers to understand why we were going in this direction. But once we had people understanding the research behind it, we were really lucky that our teaching staff had been 100% on board and we've got a great, great team. So we're lucky lucky we haven't had a lot of pushback in that space.

Jo : 17:41

One thing I would say has been a really big challenge, though, which is really interesting, is public perception, though, of explicit instruction models. So we had a little bit of a challenge with some of our community believing that what we were doing was a step back in time to chalk and talk. So we've had to unpack with our community. Well, no, it's not chalk and talk. It's a really engaging, interactive way of teaching. A bit like a tennis match. It's constant back and forth. The children are always responding, engaging in what we're teaching, so it's different.

Jo : 18:10

Yes, it might look for a person walking into a classroom that's set up for explicit instruction that it is a step back in time. The desk might be in rows, there might not be as many pretty things up on the walls, because we now know that we need to minimise distractions in the classroom to optimise cognitive load. That was probably a fairly big challenge, but our community's been really interested to learn. So we've run some parent sessions and tried to help them understand why we're doing what we're doing and what our intention is.

How Do You Feel About Review PowerPoints?

Jocelyn : 18:38

Yeah, great. And I think that perception of the chalk and talk or we hear the term, you know, drill and kill. There is a narrative that says that explicit teaching and, as you rightly said, the retrieval and review is a core characteristic of that approach, that it's somehow disrespectful to children, that somehow they have no agency, that they have no voice, that it's all 'I am doing learning to you.' But actually the reality of explicit teaching is something completely different and if children are feeling like it's something done to them and they don't see the reasoning, then we're probably not doing it right, to be frank. For many teachers, this move to retrieval and daily review, they have the perception that it comes with PowerPoints.

Jo : 19:24

Yeah, so look, powerpoints absolutely are a fantastic tool to support the retrieval and review process and we absolutely use them. But that's not the only way, and I think that's one of the things we've had to unpack and we're still unpacking about other ways of integrating opportunities for retrieval and review across the day, and I think that's one of the things we've had to unpack and we're still unpacking about. You know other ways of integrating opportunities for retrieval and review across the day, so it can be things like exit tickets. You know things that we've talked about. It can be the pop sticks which we have in our classroom, which means that we're doing, you know, the quick check for understandings with children. You know there's lots of other ways that you can integrate the retrieval and review processes across the day. It doesn't have to be a PowerPoint.

Jocelyn : 20:01

No, you can use good, old-fashioned flashcards.

Jocelyn : 20:03

Yes, yes, and that probably allows you to be a little more responsive in the moment to the students rather than the PowerPoint. This is an episode about retrieval and review, and we've heard you speaking about wider elements other than that, and what strikes me in hearing that is that it's not enough simply to say we have daily review, we ask some questions about things that we have previously covered or taught that student outcomes and improving results is a multifaceted approach. You can't do just one bit and say, well, the job is done here.

Jo : 20:45

No, I think the thing is, that once you understand what the purpose of a daily review is, you look at it through a different lens. It's not a tick and flick activity. It's an opportunity for teachers to be constantly seeking feedback from their students about where they're at and what they're understanding. It's almost a form of formative assessment, I guess you would say in a sense, because it's an ongoing check for understanding. That happens on a daily basis. 

The Importance of Strong Tier 1 Instruction

Jocelyn : 21:12

Yes, and you mentioned the students who require more responses than their peers. This is a reality in every school, regardless of socioeconomic status or ICSEA score. So we need to recognise that one of the ways we can support our students is by having lessons include a very large number of repetitions and holding on to the review for longer than maybe we think we need to, that it's not enough to simply say, well, last week we learnt 'm', so this week we'll practise mm and then drop it away. Practice needs to occur for actually quite a long time so that we're making our Tier 1 instruction as strong as humanly possible.

Jo : 22:00

Yeah, yeah, you're 100% right. Yeah, and that was when we started to introduce the multi-tiered systems of support, or response to intervention, as people might refer to it, we knew that we needed to get tier one instruction right as a priority, because that's where you catch 80% of your students in theory, and if we weren't doing our tier one instruction with enough rigour that we were losing more than that, then there was something wrong. So we focused quite heavily on our tier one instruction, but at the same time, we introduced a tier two instructional model as well, which is essentially just a repetition of what was being taught in the tier one space, and that happens systematically across the entire school now.

How Does Review Link to Strong Student Outcomes? 

Jocelyn : 22:38

Yeah, great. So what happened to the number of children requiring the additional tier two support and actually failing to learn what they needed to learn at all in their grade, once you introduce this explicit approach that included regular, rigorous, daily review?

Jo : 22:57

So I guess the exciting thing is that once we started to really implement this with integrity and consistency across the board, we started to notice a shift in our data quite quickly. So it's been so exciting for our teaching staff to watch our data so fantastic.

Jo : 23:17

Really reflect the hard work that's gone in the past couple of years.

So one of the things, as you mentioned, that we do use is DIBELS, which we use three times a year. DIBELS is a screening assessment, so it's not diagnostic as such, but it is a screener that indicates risk and what we've been able to witness over time is that for those children who have initially come through as at-risk students so the students who do need that extra repetition, that extra practice with retrieval Joc, once we had those systems in place with the good quality tier one instruction, really great repetition in the tier two three times a week in addition to their tier one, so we made sure that they weren't missing any tier one instruction. That was a really key part of what we did. We wanted to make sure they still had their opportunity to be part of the tier one, and then the tier two was additional outside of the literacy block and it's been really beautiful to see and I think I shared some data with you last year that we're moving children out of that at-risk category well and truly into our core and above.

Jocelyn : 24:18

And I'm guessing that those students are students with individual learning plans and a number of issues, and they're going to be on their own path and the rate of their learning will be different from their peers for a number of reasons. And again, every school has students who fall into that category, but the difference is that your students aren't getting to the end of the school year with the same knowledge and skills they had at the start of the school year. So even those students who may well fit into a tier three category because of complex needs are showing demonstrated growth as a result of what's happening.

Jo : 24:52

It's brilliant, and we've got very, very few students that have gone into year three this year who are showing any evidence of risk, so we're doing all the right things. Yeah, I think one of the things I would say that it's important to point out to people who are starting this journey is that when you start this journey into structured literacy and you're doing all these things, you've got your review and retrieval practice happening. You've got all the great components of the big six in place. Unfortunately, initially for us, we didn't see that translate into improvements in NAPLAN or PAT assessments, and I think that's really important to note. So what we did note, though, was that our DIBELS data and our phonics data, which was regularly taken, was 100% showing growth, so we were confident we were heading in the right direction with what we're doing, but unfortunately, those bigger assessments that are conducted nationwide don't always reflect that, so I think it's just something to be aware of.

Jocelyn : 25:51

But also, it takes time. This is your fourth year, that's right. So the students who are in year three this year, they were your first foundation grade to actually have, I just call it, the good stuff right from the start. So NAPLAN is long term, your DIBELS is your short to medium term and your formative assessment through the phonics check-ins and screenings that you're doing, through the Reading Success in Action that you're using, coupled with the daily retrieval and review and the check-in that all leads up to form a picture, and great results take time. If you weren't seeing the results in your DIBELS then you might worry, but you have the indicators that good things are really happening because you're using really reliable tools that are normed on thousands of children.

Jo : 26:43

Yeah, exactly, and I think if we were doing phonics still but we weren't quite getting those results, I think that would be a reflection back on the retrieval and review practices You'd have to look at, "Okay, yes, we know we're teaching systematic synthetic phonics. Why aren't they retaining it? It's more than likely because there's not enough rigour in the retrieval and review processes in most instances.

Jocelyn: 27:11

Yeah, so retrieval is almost like a lever you can pull. You can increase it as you need to in response to what you're seeing in the data. Yeah, Jo, it has been an absolute pleasure to have you here with me today to talk through your school's journey and particularly around retrieval and review and how that's been embedded within core elements of instruction. It's not a separate thing that you tacked on for the sake of saying, well, we have a daily review. It's actually a core part of instruction, so embedding that is really critical. Thank you so much for your time and I can't wait to hear how your this year's NAPLAN goes, because, of course, NAPLAN starts this week here in Australia and I'm sure that you are going to see that growth over time that you know is certainly possible for your kids.

Jo : 27:57

Yeah, absolutely no. We're on the right track. We've got an amazing team of teachers. So, yeah, excited for what's going to, what's going to eventuate.

Jocelyn : 28:04

Thank you so much, everybody. If you haven't already listened to the previous two episodes about retrieval and review the first one unpacking research and the second one sharing some really practical applications and implications please do so so that you can see what Jo is talking about when she's discussing embedding this practice into core instruction and how this aligns with other elements. Thank you so much for listening, everyone. I'll see you in the next episode. Bye.

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