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There are SO MANY issues that teachers have to think about every lesson just to run the room and work through the curriculum – and there are SO MANY concepts and ideas from research and the world of cognitive science to explore ….it’s just a bit overwhelming! Realistically you can only work on so many fronts so it helps to have some headline ideas to keep to the top of the pile – things to pay attention to in preparing for lessons and when they’re in full flow. Side note: Normally, when I post something like this, someone will chip in a comment that I missed all the social and emotional issues students are contending with. I don’t think that is especially helpful. With a class full of young people – the best you can do for them in that moment is to help them feel successful as learners, whatever else is happening. This means helping them to participate, to build their confidence and to secure learning from whatever their starting point is. Five Ways: Here, I’m suggesting five key barrier to learning that are worth keeping in mind as you monitor students’ progress in a lesson. There are more – but I think if you deal with these five, you’re doing incredibly well.  Attention Deficits: It’s self-evident that unless students are focusing their attention on the learning in hand – they won’t actually be learning. This should be a constant continuous consideration. Is everyone focusing their attention? As you talk, model, explain, listen, watch, read…. is every student with you? You can’t assume… you need to check and this requires routines to be established where checks for attention are normal and involve everyone. The key thing is not to just expect or hope for attention – it’s to require it through the structure of your means of participation: cold calling, show-me boards, pair-share (where both people must exchange ideas), Show Call. It’s a question of making tasks systematically require individual involvement and readiness to respond. Lack of Prior knowledge How confident are you that your students can follow what you’re saying based on their prior knowledge? Are you using words they don’t understand? Are you referring to people, places, events, phenomena or experiences they don’t know about? It pays to evaluate your assumptions and do a quick check, looking for gaps and teaching students the things they need to know. Obviously this is hard – and it could be that nearly everyone knows except a few – but they matter and you don’t want to leave them behind. Cognitive overload and transience Ever since Oliver Caviglioli shared his view that cognitive load theory largely comes down to the problem of transience, I’ve noticed it in lessons over and over again. It’s just so very common for teachers to impart information that doesn’t hang around long enough for students to really engage with it. This could be when giving verbal instructions, explaining things verbally, defining new words or running an extended class discussion: it all happens too fast or contains too much information – and students simply can’t process it. It can happen with slides: each click introduces new information or a new example, but simultaneously removes the previous one. Students may not have had time to process the last set of information and it’s already gone before you’re onto to something else. The trick here is to be super conscious of it. Keep examples visible side by side; write down anything you think is important for students to know and remember on a board, flipchart. Use dual-codes resources to refer to while explaining or giving instructions so students have a visual supports for what’s being said. Or make a routine of running through things once to get the ideas out and then again for consolidation. If you know you’ll hear things twice (as in an MFL oral exercise e g chunking, repetitive games, guided practice) – you process information more strategically and confidently. Never underestimate how significant the transience issue can be for some learners. Poor Fluency of Recall Here the issue is that students go from one concept to another without enough opportunity to consolidate. They develop sketchy, tenuous schema with ideas half-remembered and poorly connected because of a lack of practice. This can relate to words – they never really know the names of things or people; it can relate to key facts; it can relate to phrases, procedures, steps in a complex skill. A lot of teaching can feel wasted because of a lack of thought given to the need for consolidation. It’s always more helpful in the long run to build secure foundations than to rush through content in a half-learned, surface manner. The key question then to ask is: has everyone had a chance to practise? And was this enough? Task completion – poor proxy for learning. Finally, my selection of five includes this very common issue: students are trained into thinking that they just need to ‘get things down in their books‘ – to create the appearance of having ‘done the work’ – without having had to think very hard about what they’re writing. It’s actually remarkable how much students can do in this way without learning much: copy diagrams; write out worked examples; copy model paragraphs; create tables of information, ‘borrow’ answers from their neighbours…… It happens all the time. The implications for teachers are important: you can’t assume that the look of the work on the page represents learning outcomes unless the task absolutely required independent thinking. Sometimes it would be better to issue resources with tables, diagrams and model answers ready made – and then use time to focus on checks for understanding. If making notes simply means copying, then hardly any learning will happen. The same goes for those ‘match word to definition with a line’ activities – they’re usually so trivial that, again, students don’t learn by doing them. Think hard about how much hard thinking is needed to complete each task! Don’t let the time needed for ‘getting it down in your books‘ eat into the time for practice using the ideas and exploring the meaning. Shared by Tom Sherrington, an experienced educator of 30+ years
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