Since starting this outreach project, we’ve come out of our ivory towers and discovered that there are teachers out there already doing incredible implementation of cognitive principles into their curricula. This week, we have chosen to focus on implementation of interleaving throughout a semester, year, or even longer period of study.

Most of these blog posts come from teachers in the UK. Part of the reason for this could be that the UK secondary school system requires students to retain information for 2-3 years for a set of final exams (known as GCSEs) across all the subjects that they have been studying. Typically – and certainly when I took GCSEs back in the 1990s – the information would be taught sequentially, with little to no interleaving; and then a serious multi-week “revision” (= studying; or, less generously – cramming) period would precede the exams.

Here we’ve collected 5 blog posts by teachers across a variety of disciplines. (Actually, that’s not true. Three of them are about teaching English – but I interleaved those with the other two on physical and religious education – see what I did there?). In these blog posts, the teachers explore models that challenge the status quo by introducing opportunities for restudy and/or practice quizzing of previous weeks’ topics. In each case, the blog post provides a mocked-up schedule for interleaving.

1) One scientific insight for curriculum design by Joe Kirby, @joe__kirby

Joe Kirby is Deputy Headteacher at the rather incredible Michaela School where students take quizzes every day for 2 years (if you think I’m exaggerating, I’m really not), so it’s no surprise that he is thinking about interleaving so carefully. Aside from providing the clear model below, this blog post also very convincingly and appealingly presents the evidence behind frequent quizzing – not that we need any more convincing!

Here is his before and after model for a Year 7 (6th grade) curriculum, using English topics as an example: