assess and feedback

After every lesson where learners completed a warm up assignment,

1. Create a P&P (planning and preparation) session for the date of the lesson when timely practice pre assess will happen (usually the next lesson)

2. Open that P&P session and go to the Assess t.p. section and select a learners name

3. Assess each question of the learners' completed/partially completed assignment using

   • tick = fully correct

   • bell (best learned later) = almost any other attempt e.g. partially correct, incorrect, missed out, written a ? etc

   • reset = learner ran out of time, you think the learner didn’t see the question (e.g, small question sandwiched between larger questions, you just can’t read the learners handwriting e.g. they orginally wrote 5 they’ve overwritten with 3, or was it the other way around?)

   • once all the questions in a learners assignment are assessed, tap the floppy disk symbol and assess the next learner’s assignment

4. Once all completed/partially completed assignments have been assessed, make a note of who has an outstanding assignment (and check you have the paper copy) and tap the Continue button

5. Change any learners Pace for Practice, if you need to (this will ensure most students complete their assignment within a minute or two of each other)

6. Change the nominal number of questions if you want a longer or shorter assignment, and tap to un tick the names of the learners who have an existing assignment.

7. Leave both retrieval practice and pre assess assignments ticked (this is good practice for 2 reasons which are explained later)

8. Tap the Create button, tap Continue

9. Select the type of Download you prefer: duplex concatenated (all learners assignments printed double sided with additional blank pages to easily separate them), simplex (single sided) or each learner separately. Click the appropriate green arrow(s).

10. The assignments will be found in your downloads folder.

When the teacher finds each learners firm learning foundations on a topic and uses that data to decide where to start teaching that topic, the teacher can be confident that the learners will retain new teaching because

• the teacher is teaching on firm learning foundations,

• the app schedules a retrieval practice programme for each bite (layer) of new learning and

• that when feedback needs to be given, it has the best chance of success, because the teacher and learner are entering into a feedback-dialogue and the app adjusts (reduces) the interval between asks of the similar questions from a layer in the retrieval practice schedule, so that the learner is most likely to remember and be able to apply the recent feedback.

It’s easy to teach too much and/or too hard and if we do

• the learners will forget the new teaching and will inevitably become progressively more despondent about their ability to learn,

• the retrieval practice system that timely practice uses would require more feedback capacity than the teacher has available and so only learning that the learner requires no feedback for would be retained 😢

The pre assess process is set up so that the teacher can create and set

• an assessment assignment for one whole lesson or

• shorter assessment assignments to be completed in say 10 to 15 minutes of a fortnight of consecutive lessons,

After this, the timely practice app can show the teacher firm foundations for the first few topics.

The app is intended to hold the teacher back from teaching too much and/or too hard, meaning

• the learners generally retain their learning until the next lesson, and when this happens regularly learners become progressively more motivated,

• very little feedback is required to ensure the retrieval practice system that timely practice uses ensures learners retain new learning for the long term

Of course teacher’s don’t need to use timely practice to plan teaching, but if the teacher wants to use the power of the timely practice app to

• ensure they only ever teach on firm learning foundations and

• automatically schedule personalised retrieval practice on the learning of the lesson and

• have the app adjust the schedule of retrieval practice when a learner has made an error and had feedback;

then the teacher must wait until the app has finished pre assessing the topic. (There is nothing stopping a teacher teaching a layer to a learner whose pre assess on the topic is incomplete, but the app won’t schedule retrieval practice and the teacher may not be teaching on firm learning foundations.)

A learner’s column in the Plan Teaching topic dashboard

• which has some mid grey and darker blue-grey squares - indicates that pre assess is not complete;

• which only shows light grey squares - indicates that the app does not intend to pre assess the topic (judging all the layers either too easy or too hard);

• which shows a mix of white and light grey squares - indicates the app thinks the learner could learn layers from the topic, but has not learned any yet;

• the (often fuzzy) line between the shades of blue (perhaps mixed with light grey) in the lower part of the column and the white (usually mixed in with light grey) in the upper part of the column is the (often fuzzy) “goldilocks” point where teaching should begin.