Interleaving involves going back and forth between different concepts or skills rather than just focusing on one thing at a time. The benefits of interleaving have been demonstrated in a range of activities including baseball, handwriting, recognising bird species and in a variety of academic subjects with different aged students from pre-school to adult learners.
Historically, teachers and textbooks have tended to focus on just one concept or skill at a time, referred to as ‘blocking’. However, this does not match how concepts and skills are tested in exams or used in real life. In spelling, students need to identify and apply different rules and grapheme knowledge to the encoding of words. In reading, students need to know that although ‘oi’, ‘or’, ‘oa’, ‘ou’, ‘oe’, and ‘oo’ all begin with the same letter, they represent different phonemes and at times more than one phoneme.
Yan (2025) suggests that when a new concept is first taught that it is introduce via blocking. For example, you might introduce the common graphemes used to represent a particular phoneme. You could link this information to a picture cue and then have students read and write words containing those graphemes. Once students can recognise those graphemes, you can start interleaving words that contain previously learned graphemes.
The following are some examples of Yan’s interleaving ideas applied to literacy:
- Contrast and compare: Explicitly compare and contrast new concepts with previously learned concepts. How are a-e, e-e, i-e, o-e and u-e the same? What’s the difference between the prefixes ‘re’ and ‘un’?
- Using drawing: Use concept maps to show words using a particular root word. Draw a picture that show what happens when you add ‘r’ to the end of ‘oo’, ‘ea’, ‘ee’, ‘ai’, ‘ou’.
- Find the connection: Create a set of flashcards containing vocabulary words students are learning. Randomly withdraw two cards and challenge students to connect the meaning of the two words in some way.
- Apply different perspectives: Ask students to write on the same persuasive essay topic twice – once from a supporting perspective and once from an opposing perspective.
- Combine interleaving with spaced practice: Continually ask students to retrieve or apply previously taught concepts. Spelling tests should contain word from previously learned lists. Word building activities can incorporate previously learned prefixes and suffixes.
- Align activities with real life: If teaching idioms, proverbs or similes, students can link to real life examples. Similarly, a real life situation can be linked backwards to an idiom, proverb or simile. For example, if students have been working quietly, you could make the comment, “You are all working as quietly as …..” and students could brainstorm appropriate responses.
- Keep interleaving activities small and cumulative: Interleaving can be as simple as re-ordering practice questions
Reference
Yan, V. (2025). Interleaving: Mix things up to support long-term learning in P. Agarwal. Smart Teaching: Stronger Minds – Practical Tips from 10 Cognitive Scientists. Unleash Learning Press: Boston.