3-Read Friday #111
Practice, belonging, and anticipating misconceptions.
Here are three blog posts I found interesting this week:
1. How Much Practice Do Students Need? by Dylan Kane
As much as I love research into retrieval practise, nothing beats reading about how an actual teacher is using it day to day with their students. Dylan argues that procedural skills in maths should be practised in short, spaced chunks across multiple days — guided by daily checks for understanding — until students can reliably retrieve them, because durable learning depends on building storage strength, not just performance within a single lesson.
2. The Origins of Belonging by Jon Hutchinson
Powerful stuff from Jon here. He argues that belonging is best understood not as a soft moral goal but as a cognitive one — pupils who are uncertain whether they belong spend working memory on social vigilance that should be available for learning, so building belonging directly expands the cognitive bandwidth available for the content we teach.
3. Predicting the unpredictable: Can mathematics teachers learn to anticipate student errors? by Colin Foster and Aidan Stannard
Okay, a bit of a self-indulgent selection to end this week, as it involves my Diagnostic Questions website, but I hope you’ll forgive me because it’s fascinating. Colin and Aidan show that secondary maths teachers can rapidly sharpen their ability to predict which errors students will make — and in what proportions — through short, repeated cycles of prediction against diagnostic question data, making this a promising, low-cost route to developing a critical strand of Pedagogical Content Knowledge.
Have a great weekend!
Craig
🏃🏻♂️Before you go, have you… 🏃🏻♂️
… checked out my brand-new book series: The Tips for Teachers guides to…
And checked out my all-new, ad-free, Mr Barton Maths website, including my new Topics page.
