Three Benefits of Spiral Reviews in the Classroom

There seems to always be an argument in the education community about the best way to help students retain information. Based on over a decade of teaching experience, I fully support using spiral reviews in the math classroom. 

I use spiral reviews as warm-ups for my students to complete while I take attendance before the start of the lesson. My students know the procedure for completing their 2 problems for the day: start working on your review as soon as the bell rings, you have 7 minutes to complete the 2 problems, and ask your neighbor for help before you ask me.

After several attempts over just as many years at other types of warm ups, I switched to spiraling the content as my bell ringer. I saw tremendous growth in my students' retention the first year I used spiral reviews, which also translated to higher end-of-course and state exam scores. 

So, let's dive into the benefits I think spiral reviews had on my students: reinforcement of previously learned concepts, continuous skill development, and increase in long-term retention.

Reinforcement of Previously Learned Concepts

I designed my spiral reviews for students regularly revisit and practice previous concepts, including the essential skills taught in previous grades. By consistently reviewing older material and learning new topics, students reinforce their understanding and retention of foundational concepts. This approach helps prevent knowledge gaps and promotes a deeper understanding of mathematical concepts over time. This strategy also provides students who struggled with previous concepts another opportunity for success.

Continuous Skill Development

Spiral reviews allow students to continuously develop and apply their skills as they encounter familiar topics in new contexts. By revisiting skills presented as new concepts and incorporating them into higher order thinking (HOT) questions, students gain a deeper understanding of how mathematical concepts connect. This approach fosters critical thinking, problem-solving skills, and the ability to apply mathematical knowledge to real-world situations. As I previously stated, I fully believe this is why my students showed improvement on their end-of-course and state exams.

Long-Term Retention

When my students regularly reviewed content in a spiral manner, their long-term retention improved. When students revisit previous material, they strengthen their memory and increase their ability to recall information when needed. This systematic approach to review helps transfer knowledge from short-term to long-term memory, supporting students' overall mastery of mathematical concepts.

The Best Method of Review to Increase Student Retention

Teachers are under so much pressure to have their students do well on standardized tests. So, the question is how do teachers even begin to help their students actually retain information? For me, the answer was reviewing my content in a cyclical manner.

I have been teaching for over a decade and I finally saw success when I implemented spiral reviews as warm ups in my classroom. I would like to put a disclaimer up front and center. Spiral reviews were not the answer for every one of my students, but these reviews did help a majority of my students.

Let’s start at the beginning. At my first teaching job, I was handed a 1-inch binder of the “curriculum” the previous teacher used. I opened the binder to find most of the pages were blank and the ones that weren’t were merely used as scratch paper with no context of the problems. I was shocked! Straight out of college, I was completely lost on how to help my students. Let’s just say I learned a ton in my first-year teaching.

My next few years were spent learning how students learn: what methods work, where mistakes and misunderstandings happened, what is the best way to explain this process, etc. I eventually realized my students were just learning the material for the chapter assessment and then they would forget it. I was literally watching the old adage “out of sight, out of mind” playing out before me.

About this time, my administration was pushing for teachers to implement the practice of bell ringers or warm ups. Most teachers, as well as myself, would use this time to review skills needed for the current lesson. I began to create weekly papers to hand to my students that had 2 questions per day for them to complete that pertained to that day’s lesson. I would then collect these at the end of the week. This worked as a quick reminder for my students how to do the prerequisite skills needed, but severely lacked increasing long-term recall.

Our school's next initiative was to incorporate higher order thinking (HOT) questions into our lessons. So, I revised my weekly warm up questions. I had Monday to Wednesday with the basic 2 question skill review, then Thursday and Friday were adjusted to the HOT questions. These questions were still related to the skills needed for the current lesson. This change did help students think more deeply about math, but long-term retention was still an issue.

I finally decided, after 3 years, to completely overhaul my thoughts on how to use warm up questions in my classroom. I decided to spiral the questions' content. Let me clarify what I mean by spiral. I would start with basic information students should know from previous classes. For example, in algebra 1, I would start with a rectangle and ask students to divide the shape into 7 parts and shade 3 of them. I know this seems elementary, but the first few spirals were used to teach the procedure of my warm ups as well as give students confidence in math class. Below is the first spiral review I use with my class.

After 2 or 3 weeks of basic review, I added the content that we had been learning about. Again, for algebra 1, this started to include order of operations, evaluating expressions, and combining like terms. So, in the 4 - 5 weeks of school, students were reviewing concepts from previous grades as well as content from the first weeks of school. I would continually add concepts about a week after students were first introduced to the material. At the same time, I would add questions from previous chapters and grades. By the end of the first quarter, students were not only reviewing previous grades’ content, but also content of the first 3 chapters WEEKLY. Below is the 4th spiral review I use with my students in the first quarter.

I continued the process of rewriting my warm ups with previous content for the rest of the year. I kept the same structure of some days practicing only skill recall and other days incorporating HOT questions. At the end of this first year, I finally started to see increases of students' scores on standardized tests as well as students’ long-term recall. Over the years I have continually adjusted the questions to fit with my school’s curriculum, the pace of my teaching, and the rate at which my students learn. 

Here is what my students are reviewing in the 7th week of the 3rd Quarter: dividing polynomials, function notation, slope, multiplying binomials, simplifying radicals. And those concepts are just in the first 3 days of the week!

Last year, I was blessed enough to have a remediation teacher help me once a week. Her job was to work with the lowest 3 - 4 students to help them with understanding our most recent content. At the end of the school year, she told me the reason my students were seeing so much success in Algebra 1 and on the end of the year state test was because of my spiral reviews.

A Method for Using Stations in a High School Math Classroom

During my tenure as a teacher, I have always taught Algebra 1 to students who struggle the most with math. The structure of my classes depended upon the school I was teaching. Two schools had students take Algebra 1 over 2 school years while another had students taking 2 classes of Algebra 1 every day for an entire school year. 

One day I was talking with my co-teacher about the best way to get our students to actually attempt their assignments. After several brainstorming sessions, we landed on trying stations for our Algebra 1 class. We both went home and thought about what we could do in the upcoming school year to best help our students. We landed on M.A.T.H. stations. I do not remember where we saw this acronym, but I can tell you, we did not create it. 

First, we decided to split students up into groups of 4 or 5. We created a PowerPoint slide to show students who were in their groups. We decided to group students together with similar abilities. Below is an example slide that my co-teacher and I used. The next slide would rotate the heading instead of the student names to make our lives easier when creating the presentation.

Second, we named our stations by slightly altering the original acronym’s meanings to fit with our classroom. And finally, we determined for our 45-minute class period, our classroom structure would be 4 minutes of introductory directions, 9 minutes stations, and roughly 1 minute between each station for rotating.

M - Mr., Mrs., or Ms. Teacher Last Name

This station allows students to work with their teacher on the current lesson’s assignment. My co-teacher and I were fortunate enough to have kidney bean tables (see our classroom below), so we used them to our advantage. One of us would sit with this group of students and answer one question at a time, then move to the next student. This process repeated until the last student and then would start over. We trained our students on this procedure to help us limit chaos and misunderstandings.

We generally started one of our groups that we knew would struggle the most here so they could be provided with individual instruction or refocusing directions.

A - At Your Seat

Our students had individual devices for them to access our lesson’s materials. This station was a chance for students to see what they could do individually without teacher or peer help. We used this station for several types of activities: IXL strands, watching videos, digital assessments, exit passes, or continuing to finish the current lesson’s assignment.

We typically assigned this station to our self-starters and higher achievers because they did not need the additional support to start.

T - Technology or Together

This station was used differently depending upon the lesson. Some lessons technology was a better use of this station and other times a group activity was best.

For Technology, our school had purchased IXL for us to utilize in our classrooms, so sometimes we would assign an IXL strand for our students to practice. Other times, we had our students explore concepts using graphing calculators like slope or games on Desmos.

For Together, we would have students work as a group to complete a card sort or matching game. Two examples come to mind. One example was having students sort Properties of Real Numbers example cards to their appropriate category. Another example was having students practice applying exponent rules by matching the question with the answer.

We liked to place students who were successful in math but needed a confidence boost in this station first. This station allowed these students to bounce their ideas off each other, generally, correcting misunderstandings quickly.

H - Hands-On Examples

This station had the other teacher directing students to finish their lesson’s assignment by using manipulatives to demonstrate the math concepts. The different types of manipulatives we used were algebra tiles, Hands-On Equations, and Desmos the graphing calculator. This station helped our visual and tactile learners comprehend the concepts that teachers so often only present with algebraic symbols. (You can click on the picture below to see where we purchased our algebra tiles set.)

This was the station we assigned to our students who struggled the most with grasping mathematical concepts for two reasons. The first reason was the opportunity to show students a different method of solving the problem that may "click" with them better than the one presented in class. The second reason was due to the order of rotations. Directly after this station, these students would be rotate to the M station with the other teacher. This provided back-to-back stations with teacher support.

Additional Note: I would like to mention these stations were designed for students to have several avenues of interacting with the lesson’s concept. This means the corresponding assignment was only 10 - 15 questions long depending upon the skill. Students are gaining additional practice through the use of technology, collaborating with teachers and their peers, and working with manipulatives. I would strongly suggest if M.A.T.H. Stations is a strategy you would like to implement in your class, then you should reduce the number of problems you assign for homework (or as we called it, practice).