Rachel Roo, team leader at Roundhay School has embedded retrieval practice in her lessons and found huge success with it.
Here she shares the successes she’s had and why she thinks all teachers should be using it.
In starting my new role as Director of Science at Benton Park School, I felt it was important to introduce something that could clearly have a positive impact for the students. At Benton Park we use Doddle as the main platform for homework setting, using the pre-made quizzes as low-stakes testing to help improve knowledge retrieval and retention.
Doddle’s Spanish resources have been integral in supporting the learning of our students at St Paul’s.
Embedding Doddle into our Spanish department has given me the chance to monitor students’ homework, as well as their learning outside the classroom. I can also continually check their progress and engagement during the term. It is also useful when revising or preparing for exams.
Within the Geography Department, we started using Doddle as the basis of our KS3 homework. It provides an extensive range of resources, including self-marking quizzes which we felt was a real time saver and reduced our workload. What’s more, the quizzes linked in well with our curriculum and not only challenged students but also supported what they had learnt within class.
This year Baxter College set its sights on improving attainment by promoting independent learning.
The results have been remarkable and they have observed a real growth in proactive, motivated learners as a result.
Whilst there have been many successes in closing the gap between the attainment of Pupil Premium students and their peers over recent years, as educators we still have a long way to go.
Teacher Helen Smith explains how she has used Doddle to engage, raise aspirations and improve attitudes to learning – key barriers standing in the way of PP attainment in her classes.
In their recent Ofsted inspection Tunmarsh School and New Directions, of Newham Pupil Referral Units, got ‘outstanding’ feedback thanks, in part, to their excellent use of Doddle for monitoring and driving pupil progress.
We interviewed Deputy Head Elgan Prosser, and Assistant Head Patricia Andrews, about how they met the new, stricter Ofsted requirements, while engaging students with their learning and supporting their transfer back into mainstream.
Doddle has made setting homework easier, we have made a financial saving by using it and it has meant that we can focus more on teaching and learning in the classroom. It is a very user-friendly system for setting homework and the quality of resources on Doddle are really, really good.
In August 2017, we waited with bated breath to receive the first bout of 1-9 grades from the new English Language and Literature GCSEs. We’d been promised only a handful of Grade 9s across the entire country, but in the end over 2000 pupils achieved straight Grade 9s. The crème de la crème of GCSE attainment suddenly seemed obtainable and sights are now firmly on this summer’s exams.
In their recent report on the new national curriculum, the Policy Exchange think tank concluded frankly that “the workload demand on teachers creating almost all of their resources themselves is intolerable”.
It is no wonder, then, that both the Policy Exchange and the Independent Teacher Workload Group have called for schools to invest in teaching resources.
