Learning recycling

Over Easter I've spent a bit more time tweaking the knowledge organisers. I've now added a box names 'Learning Recycling' (using the green recycling symbol) which makes a link to prior learning. This could be to the last part of the same unit, for example referring back to learning within the same year groups - spring term's science lessons on canines and molars and making the link to the new learning on food chains -  or referring back to a different year group's learning, eg. food chains now that we're learning about life cycles in Year 5. 

The examples I've made so far link to individual topics or themes, but you could include reviewing light on a Year 5 KO even though this topic doesn't come up in Year 5. Maybe there could be a pit stop for all the science that is taught in Year 4 and 6, but not specified in year 5? A mini review in between when it is explicitly taught so that it isn't forgotten. Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve shows that relearning something just before it's forgotten is more powerful than recalling closer to the initial learning moment - how far though? This is the idea of interleaving as well, that it's better to drip feed learning throughout a longer period of time rather than block learn it in one go without returning to it. I like the idea of recycling learning, you need several exposures to something before you have learned it successfully. 

Why is learning recycling important?

I often think back to what I learned as a language teacher and what I know from being a mum, that you need to hear a word or phrase repeatedly before you can use it properly. The first time you hear it you are trying to define it, the next few times you will be refining the definition even more, understanding in which contexts the word works best and when it is most appropriate. You have to keep doing the practice before it is automated, you have to test knowledge several times before you can be entirely sure of it and feel like an expert. 

Why is explicit vocabulary teaching so important? 

As a former language teacher I know that students never learned new vocabulary from one lesson. In fact, they realistically couldn't learn more than about 5 words per lesson and they tended to learn the words they were explicitly told to learn. My masters dissertation compared memory retention of vocabulary from either incidental moments of learning or explicit learning. My thinking was that students would pay the most attention to words which they took an interest in during lessons, the words they questioned the meaning of or asked for definitions of; that somehow these words would be more memorable than the ones from a list given out in lessons. My - albeit - pretty shaky research showed that if students had only listened to a vocabulary exchange (ie the teacher talking to a different student) then they didn't pay any attention to the incidental words at all, and only few students who had showed interest in an incidental word actually recalled it at the end of the week (or was it second week - I can't remember).  I remember feeling quite annoyed at all the definitions I was asked for in class but how little learning they actually led to (I wonder if this is the same for spelling at primary?) I wonder whether when testing students they only wrote down the words they had been explicitly taught because that's what they thought I wanted - not the ones they had learned incidentally and weren't a focus for the lesson - oh well, maybe I said this in my conclusion? But...what I'm getting round to is that when foreign students were shown ' look - these are the words we want you to learn', they learned those words, especially at lower levels.