Make class prep easy with 8 flexible prompts for retrieval practice

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By Pooja K. Agarwal, Ph.D.

I’m creating a brand new course this spring semester for my college students. Yikes.

If you’ve created a course from scratch before, you know the feeling – the energetic sprint to plan everything in advance, but also the anxiety that class prep is going to eat up all your time for the next few months.

Here are 8 no-prep prompts for retrieval practice I’ve developed over my 10+ years of teaching. I’ve also included a variety of new resources I highly recommend. Good luck this spring!

P.S. Interested in virtual or in-person professional development for your school or organization this year? Email me at ask@retrievalpractice.org for more information!

 
Person holding notebook and coffee cup

Photo credit: Freepik

 

Flexible prompts to boost learning

Retrieval practice doesn’t require more class prep. Here are 8 flexible prompts you can customize for your students:

  • What would you like to remember about [topic]? Why is this important to you?

  • What was really memorable for you about [topic]? Why did it stand out to you?

  • What is one thing that’s surprising or confusing to you about [topic]?

  • What is one thing I didn’t ask you about [topic] that you learned?

  • What is an example of [topic] from your own life?

  • How does [topic] relate to your favorite TV show or movie?

  • What is a retrieval practice question I can ask the rest of our class? (create an open-ended question and share the answer to your own question)

  • What is a question you have about [topic] that you’d like to discuss during class? What do you hope to learn from the discussion?

Why these prompts are effective

Whether you’re prepping a new course or you’ve been teaching for more than a decade, here’s why I recommend these prompts:

  • You can save yourself time because you don’t have to come up with new questions each week.

  • You can use them with a range of subject areas and course topics, including STEM, language arts, and foreign language classes.

  • You can use them for a range of grade levels, from K–12 to graduate school.

  • You can customize them for in class activities (entry or exit tickets), Canvas or LMS discussion boards, ed tech tools (Flip is a personal favorite), Google Forms, synchronous Zooms, etc.

  • You can reduce students’ reliance on ChatGPT because these prompts ask students about how class topics relate on a personal level. (The prompts aren’t AI fool proof, of course, so I recommend asking students for as much detail as possible in their responses.)

  • You can encourage students to use elaboration, an evidence-based strategy that takes retrieval practice to the next level (check out my 1-minute video on elaboration and this 3-minute video by The Learning Scientists).

 
 

Additional tips

In my book Powerful Teaching and in my SXSW keynote, I shared additional no-prep activities, including brain dumps and two things.

My literature review of 50 classroom experiments indicates that there is no optimal amount or timing of retrieval practice, so embrace flexibility. Do what works best for you and your students.

Keep in mind that retrieval practice is a learning strategy, not an assessment strategy. Keep it low stakes!

New resources about the science of learning!