In ‘The Teaching Delusion 3’, Bruce Robertson describes two purposes of plenaries:
- Sum up, in other words restate the main points of the lesson to make them clear in pupils’ minds
- Gather evidence, in order to find out what has actually been learned and inform future teaching
Robertson suggests that pupils should be reminded of what they were supposed to be learning by revisiting the learning intentions and then the success criteria should be turned to in order to evaluate the extent to which this has been achieved. Plenary tasks should require pupils to prove themselves against the success criteria.
As much as possible, plenaries should be individual activities.
Plenaries are about gathering evidence of short-term learning in relation to the content of that lesson.
Lesson Resources
Retrieval Pyramid resource
Item 2
Item 3
Read, Watch, Listen
Why Do I Need a Plenary? Connex Education. Blog Post. Available here.
Principles of Instruction by Barak Rosenshine. Article. Available here.
Daily, Weekly and Monthly Review by Tom Sherrington. YouTube Video. Available here.
