Common Teaching Strategies Benefits Students Too
Using shared routines and strategies across subjects, teachers and year groups builds familiarity and students' ability to adopt the strategies themselves
The Big Idea 💡
🔑 Common teaching vocabulary or codifying strategies isn’t just helpful for teachers - it directly benefits students, especially when they transition from one teacher to another. Familiar strategies mean fewer surprises and a smoother learning experience across classrooms.
A Closer Look 👀
🧠 When students encounter the same or similar strategies from teacher to teacher, it reduces their cognitive load. Instead of spending mental energy figuring out new methods or expectations, they can focus their working memory on absorbing the content itself.
💡 Example:
When every teacher uses a consistent approach to strategies like White-board Work or feedback routines, students know what to expect. This frees up mental bandwidth to engage more deeply with tasks, problem-solving, or responding to feedback itself.
🎯 What’s more, this consistency promotes metacognition. Students start to adopt these strategies as self-study habits. Take retrieval practice: when it’s embedded in class, students begin using it independently as a powerful revision tool.
👧 A Personal Story
My FS2 daughter recently started role-playing phonics at home, taking on the role of the teacher using the ‘I do, You do’ approach during the infamous Fred Talk. She was rehearsing a learning strategy through play, developing metacognitive habits.
🚀 When students consistently experience and adopt these strategies across different teachers, they not only reduce cognitive load but also build lasting learning habits. This is where critical thinking and creativity truly take off, as visualised by Efrat Furst in the image below.
📝 More from WAGOLL Teaching
Exploring Success Criteria - Make Them Dynamic and Accessible ➡️ A guide on how to select the best success criteria format for your lesson
5 Triggers to Boost Classroom Engagement: Harnessing Dopamine and Cortisol for Learning ➡️ Understanding how dopamine and cortisol influence classroom engagement
Retrieval Practice: 7 Activities That work in Primary ➡️ A handy list of retrieval activities for Primary children
Speak soon,
Coops 😎