How to Get Primary Students to Remember
Jon Brunskill on the most important educational theory you’ve probably never heard of…
What is a teacher’s core business? In modern times, this question is not as straightforwardly answered as it always was.
Education secretary Damian Hinds confessed during a recent speech that society expects much more from schools than it did a generation ago.
Classroom teachers can feel like they have taken on multiple roles: quasi social worker, therapist, mentor, data analyst, medic – the list goes on and on.
Other professions don’t suffer from the same lack of clarity. We all know that doctors make poorly people better. Architects design buildings. Barristers defend and prosecute people in court, and accountants… Well I’m not exactly sure what accountants do, but it definitely involves spreadsheets.
So, what about teachers? Flag to the mast, what do we do? Well, schools are first and foremost educational institutions, and so a teachers’ core business is ensuring children learn stuff they didn’t know before.
And by learning, really what we mean is remembering things in their brains.
The useful thing about brains is, despite occasional evidence to the contrary, every child has one. And although they do vary in subtle and wonderful ways, the way that our brains work is much more similar than dissimilar.
Children don’t, despite what that expensive consultant may have told you, have individual learning styles. The manner in which we store, process and retrieve information is broadly the same for every human. That’s what makes teaching so intuitive.
This common understanding of how children learn is sometimes called ‘folk psychology’, because it’s what the average folk just sort of ‘know’ about how other people think.
Of course, as teachers, we want to go a little beyond what the average Joe or Jane knows about learning, though. And, happily, science is beginning to give us some answers.
One of the most powerful theories about how the brain processes information was developed by psychologist John Sweller. It’s relatively unknown to many teachers, despite its huge potential to improve the quality of teaching and learning.
Last year, educational researcher Dylan Wiliam even went so far as to declare Sweller’s cognitive load theory as ‘the single most important thing for teachers to know’.
So what does this magic theory tell us? Firstly, the mind, at a very simple level, is split into two parts: the working memory and the long term memory. The former holds information that is currently being thought about.
Unfortunately, everyone’s working memory is severely limited. You can only juggle five or six chunks of information at any one time. Any more than this will overwhelm your brain in a phenomenon known as cognitive overload.
Any teacher is well acquainted with the expressions of confusion and strain that students exhibit when their working memories are overstretched in this way.
The second part of the mind is the long-term memory. This is effectively limitless in the amount that it can store. Like a vast warehouse, everything you have ever encountered is tucked away or ‘encoded’ here.
These two parts of the mind are constantly interacting, with new information being stored away and old information being brought back into your mind. The long term memory therefore, acts as a kind of crutch to your working memory. The more that you have stored, the more space in working memory is freed up.
The role of the teacher, then, can be seen as effectively managing this interplay and creating the conditions in which children have as much information as possible stored in long term memory, ready to be retrieved at an instant’s notice.
This is all very well on a theoretical level, but what are the practical implications for the classroom?
Firstly, we should be ensuring that children think about whatever it is that we want them to remember. This may sound obvious, but it is very tempting to introduce fun activities that distract from core content.
The second implication is that new information should be introduced in small steps through explicit teaching. Fashionable techniques such as inquiry-based or discovery learning are best avoided here.
Instead, we should focus on clarity of explanation, ensuring the children practise each step and have the opportunity to boost their ‘retrieval strength’ by completing regular, low stakes quizzes.
Lastly, activating prior knowledge is very effective in priming the working memory to approach more complex tasks. Therefore, beginning each lesson with a short review of previous learning related to the topic is likely to best set up children for success.
Jon Brunskill is the head of Year Two at Reach Academy Feltham. He tweets at @jon_brunskill and you can find him at pedfed.wordpress.com.
