The Structured Literacy Podcast
Hi there, I'm Jocelyn Seamer. Teacher, former school leader, author, and all around cheerleader for teachers everywhere. Learning to read and write is a matter of social justice. Every child deserves to learn through evidence informed practices, and every teacher deserves to be fully supported to make that happen.The Structured Literacy Podcast goes beyond the program to get to the heart of what it's really like to build a structured approach to literacy across the school.
The Structured Literacy Podcast
S5 E13 - Maximising Your Lesson Prime Time
Has something in this episode resonated with you? Get in touch!
For more information about today's episode, visit www.jocelynseamereducation.com
Quick Links
Jocelyn Seamer Education Homepage
The Resource Room
Youtube channel
Facebook Page
#jocelynseamereducation #literacy #bestpractice #earlyprimaryyears #primaryschool #primaryschools #primaryschoolteacher #earlyyearseducation #earlyyearseducator #structuredliteracy #scienceofreading #classroom #learning #learningisfun #studentsuccess #studentsupport #teacherlife #theresourceroom #theevergreenteacher #upperprimary #upperprimaryteacher #thestructuredliteracypodcast #phoneme #grapheme #phonics #syntheticphonics
Hello there, welcome to this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast. My name is Jocelyn and I'm bringing you this episode from Tasmania, the lands of the Palawa people. It's really important that we, as teachers and leaders, understand the why of what we're doing in our lessons. Learning about human brain architecture and how it works is an integral part of that. While understanding literacy and its different features and structures is important, it's also critical to understand how we can maximise every moment we have with students in the classroom, regardless of the lessons we're teaching. Today, I'm going to share a concept with you that will help you reflect on your lesson structure and how you're designing instruction to enable students to get maximum benefit.
Jocelyn:The concept we're exploring today is called primacy and recency. This concept has been around since the 1880s, when it was first described by German researcher Hermann Ebbinghaus. Ebbinghaus's study resulted in the development of concepts and understandings we still use today, such as the forgetting curve and the importance of spacing during practice. It's always amazing to me when I hear these dates, 1880s! So for over 140 years this research has been in existence and we are just coming to learn about it now. Well, I suppose it's better late than never, but it does highlight how long change takes. So what is primacy and recency? Well, primacy and recency is something that every teacher should know about. When students walk out of the classroom, what do they remember after your lessons? To answer this question, cognitive science offers some really fascinating insights, and here's one of them: that students are most likely to recall what you taught at the beginning and the end of the lesson, and this knowledge has powerful implications for how we structure our teaching.
Jocelyn:The primacy effect is about remembering what happened at the start of the lesson, and this occurs because information presented first receives full attention and is processed deeply into long-term memory. Think about it as the first impression, and we hear all the time first impressions last. The information presented at the start of your lesson gets prime mental real estate because it arrives when attention is fresh and there isn't competition from other content. The recency effect is about information being presented last having the second rung on the prime time ladder. This happens because it's still sitting in our working memory and is easily retrievable. It hasn't had time to fade yet and it hasn't been pushed aside by subsequent learning. Still top of mind when students leave the classroom.
Jocelyn:What goes on in the middle? I hear you asking. Well, that's where information often gets lost, in what cognitive scientists call the serial position effect, which is a tendency to remember the things that happened first and the things that happened last much better than things that happened in the middle. So what does this mean for us as teachers? Well, primarily, it means that the beginning and the end of your lesson are prime time or optimal moments for introducing crucial concepts, summarising key points or setting important learning tasks. We can then save the middle portion of our lesson for practice, application and exploration of concepts that we introduced during the first lot of prime time minutes, which is at the start of the lesson.
Jocelyn:By deliberately structuring lessons with primacy and recency in mind, we can significantly enhance what students remember. One of the ways we can do this is by breaking longer lessons into shorter segments of about 20 to 30 minutes in length, and that's a very general number, but we need numbers to work with, so let's go with that. Each one of these shorter segments then has its own beginning and ending, and we can signal transitions between them with some visual anchors, some particular questions or some transition tasks. If you break your lesson into smaller chunks, each with their specific first and last parts, that transition time between them only needs to be between 30 and 60 seconds, where we can have students stand up, sit down, change their perspective or have a specific way to switch from one task to another. We don't need a 40-minute brain break between these learning episodes. Frankly, I think sometimes brain breaks are just a waste of instructional time. We just really need something that signals to the brain that we're changing activities. And, of course, there are decisions around this that are specific to age group and context and cohort, so I don't want to be making sweeping statements that apply to everybody. But the goal here is to maximise learning time. So by working with students in the way that their brains actually work, we can make sure that we're spending the most time possible on instruction, rather than stretching them out until they're exhausted and they then need the 40-minute brain break. So let's work smarter here, not harder.
Jocelyn:Now, why am I sharing these ideas of primacy and recency with you? Well, it's because it's really easy to misuse them. We can get in our own way and our students' way, when it comes to learning outcomes. When we ask students to discover something for themselves, when we pose questions about things we haven't taught them yet and we ask them what they think it could mean and, let's be honest, we're doing this all the time, we are getting in our own way and their own way, because we're misusing the prime time. So, for example, we might be teaching a new lesson on ratio in maths. We could be teaching about photosynthesis in science, or similes in English, it doesn't matter. But instead of explicitly teaching the concepts, we say "I wonder what simile could mean? Talk to your partner and see if you can come up with an idea. Now, the students will come up with all sorts of ideas, and the things they think about first in this lesson are the things they're most likely to remember. So when we ask students to just come up with ideas and search for answers, we increase the chance that the thing they will remember will be wrong.
Jocelyn:Another way we misuse prime time is by just not getting to the point of the lesson. We might begin by saying today we're going to learn about similes, but then we remember we haven't marked the role, so we stop and do that. And then we remember oh, we have to collect the homework. Oh, and don't forget, we've got an excursion coming up, so we've got dates for that. Oh, and if you've got your permission note, bring it to me now.
Jocelyn:And by the time we get around to explaining the concept we want to teach, we've used up the entire prime time window on things that we don't need the children to remember about that day's learning. So they won't remember what we wanted them to, because by the time we start to actually unpack the concept, we're now in the middle of the lesson, or what could be called the downtime. So when we start teaching, we need to continue teaching, which means we need to be well organised so that we have students' focus at the start of the lesson and ensure that they get the most value from that part of instruction. I can hear people asking oh, but how many minutes is the prime time? And there are some suggestions of how long each section of a lesson this primacy, downtime and recency could last. But it's important to note that these recommendations are more expert suggestions rather than being based on explicit empirical evidence. So here we're being evidence informed, not necessarily evidence based, and there are times when that's just going to happen.
Jocelyn:David Sousa, in his book How the Brain Learns, which is now in its sixth edition, suggests a breakdown of lesson percentages of 20% primacy, 60% practice and 20% recency, and I cannot stress enough that this is a suggestion, not an example validated by controlled experimental research. So please remember that this is a knowledgeable expert offering guidance, not a hard and fast rule. But what research does support is the importance of allocating dedicated time at the beginning and end of learning segments for critical information. Research does support the value of practice time between these segments, so connecting to information processing theory and the importance of rehearsal in encoding new information into short-term and then long-term memory. So we've got the primacy, the introduction, the practice and then the summing up bit at the end. That practice is critical. Research also supports the benefit of breaking down longer sessions into smaller segments, each with its own beginning, practice and ending. So if you have a 90 minute block of time, that is a very long time for students to focus on just one thing. However, if you break it down into three 30 minute segments, each one then has its own primacy, practice, recency structure and we're not requiring students to concentrate for longer than they're actually able to. So that self-regulation stamina is a thing and yes, it can be increased, but let's work with students where they're up to right now.
Jocelyn:Different learning contexts might benefit from different time allocations based on factors like student age and their developmental stage, just in general, as children. It'll also depend on how complex the subject matter is, how familiar the students already are with the content, the time of day and the overall lesson length. No two classrooms or schools are exactly the same because no two students are exactly the same, and this is why it's important for us to understand the principles that make learning effective, not try and find fixed rules that we apply in every single circumstance. So let's think about some practical reflection questions that you can use to evaluate how you're using the prime time windows in your lessons. Question number one are we reserving the first part of lessons for the most critical concepts, vocabulary and skills and teaching them explicitly, or are we asking students to think about things we haven't taught them yet or discover something through some sort of exploration? This prime time learning window is when students will most effectively encode information into short-term memory, which we then practice to get it into long-term memory. We really don't want to waste it.
Jocelyn:The second question is how are we deliberately creating transitions that signal shifts between lesson segments? Are we using brief activity changes, short movement opportunities of no more than a minute long and clear verbal cues, or are we using valuable instructional time for unnecessary activities like running around the oval or having a 25-minute fruit break? Strategic transitions create multiple beginnings and endings within a lesson, allowing us to take advantage of primacy and recency over a longer period. Question three are we holding space to provide summaries at the end of the lesson? So this one is one that I always struggled with in the classroom myself because I didn't manage time well enough. When you work to the clock and you know how many minutes you have for each part of the lesson, then you can hold the valuable space at the end for consolidation activities like retrieval practice, concept mapping or student summarising. This recency period is our second high retention opportunity and often our own inability to manage time means we don't get to it. So let's be intentional about how we're allocating time and using time effectively.
Jocelyn:Question four are we getting straight to the point of instruction when a lesson begins? How are we intentionally moving housekeeping tasks like taking attendance or distributing materials or making announcements to other times? We need to keep these things out of the prime time windows. And the last reflection question is what is the maximum time our students can meaningfully engage in learning? Are we structuring our lessons accordingly? If you know that your students can focus effectively for about 30 minutes, then create beginning, middle, end segments that add up to that length of time. If you've got a 90-minute block, then you now have the opportunity for three learning segments, each with their own primacy, practice and recency structure, rather than stretching a single structure across the entire period and watching the children drop off one after another throughout that time because they simply can't maintain the cognitive stamina for all of that time.
Jocelyn:I really hope that these straightforward strategies help you implement cognitive science principles without feeling like you need to completely overhaul instruction. I'm not asking you to take the literacy block and tip it all out and rework it. Simply evaluate where you could make tweaks that will make a big difference to your students. What is the smallest change you can make that's going to get you the biggest outcomes? When you can identify that, you're going to support your own cognitive load and that of your team. Sometimes we do need to tip it all out and start again, but if we don't have to, why do it? Implementing strong, explicit teaching, whether we're talking literacy or any other curriculum area, is not about one gigantic thing done. It's about a number of small things done consistently well. And, on that note, happy teaching everyone. I'll see you in the next episode.
