Inspired by the work of Barak Rosenshine, who first mentioned daily review back in 1982, and was a feature of his seminal work, The Principles of Instruction. It focuses on the importance of spaced and guided retrieval practice of fundamental facts and skills to build long term learning.

Daily Review is a high-impact teaching strategy that is based on evidence and practices derived from the Science of Learning. It is designed to consolidate long-term learning by giving students the necessary volume of guided practice they need to develop mastery.

Daily reviews are a fast-paced learning event that happens for 10-30 minutes at the start of a teaching block. The focus is on prompting students to retrieve knowledge from long-term memory, and to then engage in rehearsal of those ideas through various learning tasks that rely on working memory. This process is often referred to as the information processing model, and it is great way of conceptualising the relationship between attention, working memory, and long-term memory. See Oliver Caviglioli’s wonderful representation of this here.

To deliver daily reviews effectively, teachers need both quality content and effective strategies. Tried and tested ideas like Hollingsworth & Ybarra’s Engagement Norms and the TAPPLE checking for understanding protocol. These become part of the daily review routine, and once sufficiently embedded for students, classes can cover a huge amount of meaningful content.

With all of this interaction between the teacher and students, there are more opportunities to provide targeted feedback at the point of error (formative assessment). Dylan Wiliam highlights that, “Short-cycle formative assessment has to be the priority for schools and teachers, because the impact on students is greater“.

Dr Lorraine Hammond AM CF says, “Daily reviews represent the greatest return on time invested for a teacher and should therefore be prioritised”.

Shaped by research and guided by 15+ years of experience teaching and leading school improvement. We have spent countless hours designing, testing, and refining our daily reviews and we’re really excited to share what we’ve learned.

Daily Review Maker — all of the impact without the workload!