3 Retrieval Games to Try in Your High School Classroom — from edutopia by Andrew Atherton
These activities make reviewing content fun, so they can really motivate students to cement their learning.
These games can start or end the lesson, and they sometimes function as a transition within the lesson between topics. I don’t need to use them any longer, but I choose to use the following three games simply because they work really well. They can be used in any class and require very little (if any) preparation. These examples are drawn from the English classroom, but they could be adapted to suit most subjects.
Focusing Attention With a Student-Led Recall Activity — from edutopia.org
By providing every student with an opportunity to actively remember yesterday’s lesson, teachers can set the stage for today’s success.
By asking students to recall information on their own and then compare ideas with classmates, Bechard creates opportunities for each of them to engage with the content.
The process has the added benefit of strengthening retention: “When we remember something we had initially forgotten,” Lee says, “it is coming back into our working memory. It is having another opportunity to go into long-term memory. And so every time that happens, we are actually creating a stronger memory trace for that information.”
By building in a brief, intentional routine at the start of class, Bechard helps students reactivate prior learning, reconnect with the text, and begin each lesson with their attention focused, ready to learn.
How Free Play Supports Attention in Elementary School — from edutopia.org by Cynthia Michelini
Taking a short break outside allows students to reconnect with the world and refocus when it’s time to go back to the classroom.
The breaks were only five to 10 minutes long, and my intention was to ensure that the time outside was never structured, apart from a few guiding principles. Rule one: No teacher instruction. I didn’t want to give my students any direction other than how to be safe outside. Rule two: I encouraged them not to organize anything. Rule three: Just simply take a break. The results of this seemingly simple target surprised me.
First of all, my students’ attention span increased significantly. While this wasn’t a formal research project, trust me when I say that after 23 years of experience, I was shocked to realize how taking kids outside for a short period of time frequently can help support their focus in the classroom.
The IKEA Effect: You Built It, You’re Invested in It — from edutopia.org by Cathleen Beachboard, Nick Brousse
People become more invested when they help shape the systems around them, and teachers and school leaders can use that to create a strong school culture.
The difference is rarely the quality of the system itself. It’s whether the people affected by it helped build it. Psychologists call this the IKEA effect: our tendency to place greater value on things we help create. In one fascinating series of studies, researchers found that even young children valued objects they built more highly than identical objects made by someone else.
This sense of value is not explained simply by ownership. Children still value their creations more, even when they cannot keep them. It’s not explained by effort alone, either—more work doesn’t automatically create more attachment.
Instead, the researchers proposed something deeper: People become emotionally connected to what they help create because it begins to feel tied to their sense of identity. That finding may explain far more about school culture than we realize.
