This is hopefully the first in a series of posts that accompany my recent talk, “Atomic Classroom Habits”, that I gave at Innovate ELT. Follow this link to access the slides from my talk.
One of the ideas I talked about was a using a retrieval placemat that students find on their desks when they enter the class. The aim is to stimulate retrieval of content from the previous class. They should work in pairs to answer the various questions on the mat without looking at their notes. The idea is to push them to retrieve the information from their long-term memory.
I got the idea from Kate Jones’s wonderful book “Retrieval Practice”, which you can find by following this link. Most of her retrieval activities are aimed at teachers of other subjects such as history or politics, so I’ve tweaked her idea for the ESL classroom.
You can download the mat by right-clicking on the image in the post, or by following this link. If you want to edit the placemat, I made it using a simple template on Canva. Follow this link to use my version as an editable template.
Simply print out the placemat in nice bright colours and put it on your students’ desks for when they arrive. Alternatively, you could just project it onto the board at the beginning of each class. Let me know how you get on!
