Draft a week of retrieval starters in one prompt

Draft a week of retrieval starters in one prompt

Saturday. The five files you meant to open this week were the retrieval starters for Monday to Friday. You did not open any of them, so the first five minutes of every lesson will be whatever the projector was showing on Friday afternoon, and the spacing effect that made those starters worth writing in the first place will be gone.

Retrieval practice is one of the best-evidenced things a teacher can do in the first five minutes of a lesson. Roediger and Karpicke wrote the papers, Robert Bjork explained why it works, Rosenshine put it at the top of the checklist. What no one has fixed is that writing five different retrieval sets on a Sunday, each one properly spaced across last lesson, last week and last term, is a two-hour job. This prompt does it in about ten minutes, provided you feed it the right context.

The prompt

You are helping me draft a set of RETRIEVAL PRACTICE STARTERS for a [YEAR LEVEL] [SUBJECT] class in an Australian school. I need one starter per day for the week ahead, Monday to Friday. Each starter runs in the first five minutes of the lesson, is answered silently in books or on mini-whiteboards, and is marked together in under two minutes.

You are working in the tradition of Roediger and Karpicke on the testing effect, Robert Bjork on desirable difficulty and spacing, and Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction, principle 1: begin the lesson with a short review of previous learning.

CONTEXT I WILL PROVIDE

- Year level and subject: [E.G. Year 8 Maths, VCE Unit 3 Biology, Year 4 Humanities]
- What I taught last lesson: [ONE OR TWO SENTENCES ON THE KEY CONCEPT, PLUS THE ONE THING STUDENTS ROUTINELY GOT WRONG IN THAT LESSON]
- What I taught over the last two weeks: [THREE OR FOUR BULLETS. THE CONCEPT AND THE ROUTINE ERROR ON EACH]
- What I taught earlier this term or last term that students should still know: [TWO OR THREE BULLETS. NAME THE CONCEPT, NAME WHY IT UNDERPINS WHAT I AM TEACHING NOW]
- The ACARA v9.0 code or VCAA study-design dot point I am building towards this week: [OPTIONAL. IF PROVIDED, USE IT TO WEIGHT WHICH RECALL MATTERS MOST]
- Any class-specific notes: [E.G. "Two EAL students, keep sentence stems short", "Class has NAPLAN on Wednesday, keep Tuesday short"]

RETURN, FOR EACH DAY MONDAY TO FRIDAY, IN THIS EXACT FORMAT

DAY: [Monday]
TIME BUDGET: 5 minutes total, 2 minutes for marking
QUESTIONS (six items, in this order):
1. [Last lesson, recent recall] [Question]. Answer: [Answer]. Common wrong answer: [Predictable wrong answer]. Why students give it: [One line]
2. [Last lesson, recent recall] [Question]. Answer: [Answer]. Common wrong answer: [Predictable wrong answer]. Why students give it: [One line]
3. [Last two weeks, medium spacing] [Question]. Answer: [Answer]. Common wrong answer: [Predictable wrong answer]. Why students give it: [One line]
4. [Last two weeks, medium spacing] [Question]. Answer: [Answer]. Common wrong answer: [Predictable wrong answer]. Why students give it: [One line]
5. [Earlier this term or last term, long spacing] [Question]. Answer: [Answer]. Common wrong answer: [Predictable wrong answer]. Why students give it: [One line]
6. [Stretch, connect old to new] [Question that asks the student to use last-term knowledge on this week's new concept]. Answer: [Answer]. Common wrong answer: [Predictable wrong answer]. Why students give it: [One line]

HARD RULES

1. Vary the spacing across the six items on the same day (two recent, two medium, one long, one stretch). Do not put six questions on the same lesson.
2. Vary the format across the week. A retrieval starter that is always six short-answer questions goes stale by Wednesday. Rotate between short answer, mini-whiteboard multiple choice, one-sentence explanation, worked-example completion, and diagram labelling. Name the format at the top of each day where it is not short answer.
3. Question 6 must connect prior learning to this week's new concept. Not a stretch question in general. A stretch question that primes the day's lesson.
4. Do NOT repeat a question across the week. If Monday's question 5 is about equivalent fractions, Wednesday's cannot be the same question with different numbers.
5. Every "common wrong answer" must be plausible and diagnostic. Not "39" when the answer is 40. The wrong answer that tells me a specific thing about what the student is still holding wrong.
6. Australian English throughout. Realise, colour, behaviour, analyse. Year 8, not 8th grade. No em-dashes and no en-dashes anywhere. Commas, full stops, parentheses, semicolons only. Regular hyphens in compound words are fine.
7. Match the reading level of the year I named. Assume students read one to two years below the year unless I say otherwise.

If any of the following are true, STOP and tell me before writing:

- I have given you fewer than two bullets from the last two weeks or fewer than two from earlier in the term. Ask for more before writing, because a retrieval set without spacing depth is just a warm-up.
- The concept I named for last lesson is too broad to write a specific question about ("we did fractions"). Ask me to sharpen it to the sub-skill before writing.
- Two of my last-lesson concepts are the same routine (both about solving one-step equations). Tell me the spacing will be shallow this week, and ask if I want to widen the "last two weeks" pool instead.

What it does well

Two moves do most of the work. Forcing spacing across the six items on any single day (two recent, two medium, one long, one stretch) is the piece almost no self-written starter set achieves, because it takes real design attention a Sunday night does not offer. Naming a plausible "common wrong answer" beside each question then turns the two-minute marking window into a two-minute formative diagnostic: you scan for wrong-answer clusters, not just tick counts, and you know on Monday morning which twenty seconds of the coming lesson to spend on which repair.

Where it falls over

The model does not know your specific class, so a "common wrong answer" may be plausible in general but not the wrong answer your students actually give. Read each set once with your class in mind before you print, and swap any distractor that does not match the errors you have been seeing. The prompt also cannot know whether the concept you named as "last term" is actually still in working memory for these students. If they were away for three weeks, or if it was taught by a different teacher, treat the long-spacing question as diagnostic on Monday and add it to next week's set if the class flunks it.

Try it like this

For Year 8 Maths: paste last lesson (solving two-step equations), last two weeks (one-step equations, the distributive property, integer operations) and last term (equivalent fractions, order of operations). Ask for mini-whiteboard multiple choice on Tuesday and diagram completion on Thursday, so the week has texture instead of five days of the same list.

For VCE Unit 3 Biology: paste last lesson (structure of the cell membrane), last two weeks (passive transport, active transport, protein structure) and last term (biomacromolecules, enzyme specificity). Point the study-design field at your current dot point and let the model weight Friday's stretch there. If Friday's SAC is testing membrane transport, Friday's stretch is where it should be primed.

For a Year 4 humanities class: paste last lesson (First Peoples' seasonal calendars), last two weeks (climate zones of Australia, mapping conventions, primary sources) and last term (community roles, local landmarks). Ask for short-sentence answers and one drawing per week, since the class writes better than it multiple-chooses.

If you only have ten minutes today: fill in just last lesson and one bullet from last term, and ask for Monday and Tuesday only. That is enough to make the first two days of the week feel prepared, and you can run the same prompt again on Tuesday night for the rest of the week.

Print the set on Sunday, put a highlighter on the desk, and mark the common wrong answers, not the ticks. That is where the retrieval starter actually pays for itself.