Mrs Molyneux

There are two weeks to go until the Bryanston Education Summit 2024 and we looking back on what a great event we had last year and are even more excited for what is to come this year! Don't miss out and book your ticket at bryanston.co.uk/educationsum…

Attended a superb Teaching and Learning Summit today organised by @Eton_CIRL and @Inner_Drive #TandLSummit Heaps of inspiration delivered! A thread…

So what are the implications of over 100 years of research on forgetting for educators? Principles to know: ▶️ Our capacity to store stuff in memory is relatively limitless but our capacity to retrieve it is not. In other words, just because you know something, it doesn't mean you can remember it. This process happens in classrooms every day without us realising it - so much effort (planning/teaching/student work) is wasted because of ineffective instructional design. ▶️ Our brains are quite efficient at some things but also really inefficient at other things which is why learning how to do quadratic equations is so hard for teenagers. It's also why for the vast majority of people, trying to discover stuff on your own is such a bad way to learn anything. ▶️ We're very good at learning stuff we want to learn but incredibly bad at learning stuff we don't want to learn. (and most kids don't want to learn quadratic equations.) Storage strength and retrieval strength are crucial concepts to long term learning - without regular retrieval practice/questioning/generative activities we will not be able to recall learned material - it's as if our brain throws stuff in a warehouse without cataloguing/indexing any of it. Retrieval practice is the way to make that catalogue/index. ▶️ This process of long term learning is largely dependent on the context in which students try to remember stuff and the good news is that teachers can do something about that (curriculum + instruction). ▶️ You don't learn something when you encounter it, you learn it when you forget it-remember it-forget it -remember-link it to something else you know and so on... Think of learning as something which happens over 6-12 months not in a single lesson. What to do: ▶️ Because of these limitations of how learning happens, the first thing to consider is curriculum. But curriculum doesn't just mean what you're teaching (content), it also means how you teach it (instruction). ▶️ Don't just ask students questions that have 'answers' - those answers really need to be connected to stuff they already know and this needs careful planning. For example, knowing the year of the storming of the Bastille is likely to be of very little use unless it's linked to deeper understanding of how this event relates to the broader trajectory of the French Revolution. ▶️ When planning curriculum and building in retrieval practice, consider when they will forget the material and where they will remember it. As in, actually plan for them forgetting it. If you're teaching them something in September and then giving them a quiz on it in May and thinking that's retrieval practice then you're doing it wrong. Think really carefully about where they will re-encounter what you've taught them. ▶️ Do you want students to remember what you're teaching them now or in a year? If it's the latter then you have to use desirable difficulties otherwise they will probably only remember it by chance not design. (See Bjork on this and also Fiorella/Mayer on generative learning.) ▶️ Lastly, If you're leading teaching and learning in a school, stop asking teachers to 'show student learning' in a lesson. This is a waste of time and in most cases, gets in the way of actual learning.