Page 96: The importance of practice in learning
As the 'cringe' and 'simple' phrase goes ... practice makes perfect. Through our teaching and learning approaches, as teachers we need to facilitate 'good' practice opportunties to provide our children with the tools needed to flourish in their learning and make deeper thinking connections.
Research is a great place to begin here.
As teachers, we are passionate about inspiring our learners, exposing and exploring new learning and igniting a love of learning. Lifelong learning. Learning depends upon memory. So what is memory? In terms of our vital underpinning pedagogy, we must think about the model of our learner's mind and the relationship between environment, attention, remembering, learning and memory stands. In order to learn something new, pupils need to transfer information from their working memory into their long term memory. Firstly, working memory is where information being actively processed is held. However, the capacity of our working memory being limited, it can therefore often become overloaded. This introduces our link to learners' long term memory. Long term memory is our store of infinite knowledge. Overtime, we build up our store and recall of information is placed here. As teachers, for effective teaching and learning and practice in our classroom, we need to provide the tools, opportunities and practice for children to be able to make these meaningful, important connections. Extensive previous and current educational research suggests how learning can be defined as this change in long term memory. By transferring information from their working memory to their long term memory, pupils' store of knowledge begins to change and grow as they integrate new ideas with their existing knowledge. How does this look in our classroom? To stimulate this model effectively, we need to ensure all prior knowledge is activated and use a combination of learning strategies (which support cognitive science research) to embed and consolidate the learning taking place.
Lets further explore this in terms of an example from my practice ...
The EYFS is built upon language and vocabulary. It is fundamental to expose our learners to high quality models of spoken English and an extensive range of vocabulary. This is simply beyond the introduction of new words. Through meaningful and well planned language opportunities, language is progressive, with range and complexity of words building up over time. The key is revising prior language learnt. An example of this is in Aut 1 we learn all about ourselves and our bodies, in Nursery by naming key body parts. Similarly to how the well known retrieval practice model looks in KS1 and 2, in Aut 2 we study the song ‘heads, shoulders, knees and toes’ where children are recapping, revisiting and expanding the vocabulary taught in Aut 1. Children's prior knowledge is activated, supporting the store of the vocabulary from the working memory into the long term memory.
Effective teaching and learning is underpinned by cognitive science. It is evident that we need to support pupils' cognitive load through referring and building upon prior knowledge. When this is activated it supports the retention of new content taught. When supporting freeing up working memory, practice quite literally makes perfect! Recent evidence supports three main gains in practice. A, it being essential to learning new facts, b, helps pupils to remember what they have learnt and c, most relevant in this case - can reduce the chance of working memory overload because it helps pupils to develop automaticity. To target successful and meaningful practice opportunities, as teachers we must ensure pupils achieve a high success rate through lots of successful independent practice for skills and knowledge to become automatic. There are two key forms of practice that are integral when combined in an holistic approach.
Recent cognitive research states that if we know how children process and retain information, we can adapt our approach to teaching and learning to maximise effectiveness. The Education Endowment Foundation produced research on cognitive science in the classroom, developing teacher understanding of memory, balancing cognitive load and applying this in classroom practice. Research suggests that as soon as you learn something new, you begin forgetting it almost immediately. The rate of forgetting is often exceptionally high and a few hours after learning something, you routinely remember only a fraction of it. Each time you practice recalling what you know, the rate and amount of forgetting is reduced somewhat. Through adopting an approach that ensures the review and refresh information regularly, it allows learning to be remembered and never lost. When pedagogy is centred around retrieval practice (the use of a variety of strategies to recall information from memory) paired with spaced learning (the distribution of the learning and retrieval opportunities over time) maximum progress can be made.
Miss Yeoman
Comments
Post a Comment