A series of short posts, focusing on the challenges of teaching all students successfully, informed by lesson observations.
Sitting in the corners, trying to get a sense of what it's like for the student next to me to follow the lesson discourse, engage, connect and learn.... I'm often reminded of my friend and colleague Oliver Caviglioli's assertion that much if not all of cognitive load theory boils down to the problem of transience: information presented so fleetingly that's hard to hold onto; our working memory can't process it fast enough before it's gone.
This links to the issues explored in this post;
I see this played out time and time again and I think it could be something teachers were much more explicitly conscious of. There are two common scenarios:
1. Verbal transience: words said are immediately in the past. We have to have heard them and begun to process them there and then if we're to remember them. It's possible for one student or a teacher to give an answer and for the next student immediately to have forgotten what was said - at least, it was processed so tenuously that it feels forgotten. This is why I never remember people's names when they're introduced to me. Transience. The classic 'in one ear and out the other' situation! It's not a trivial matter; it's common and predicable.
The solutions are simple enough:
a) repetition: The more ideas are repeated, especially when students themselves are doing the repeating, the easier it is to hold on to what's being said. Teachers should make it routine to repeat what is being said, verbally underlining key ideas that are spoken and inviting students to repeat things back to themselves or the class or their partner. Simply running through the steps, the labels, the key points, talking things through, helps to encode. Don't assume that things being said will be remembered. Chances are they won't be.
b) written reinforcement. Write the words down that matter. Use the static, non-transient nature of notes or text, pre-prepared or spontaneously generated, to anchor the verbal discussion.
2. Visual Transience. It's very common for teachers to whizz through slides before students have had a chance to fully absorb the information on them. This nearly always happens when people give presentations with text: Read through the quotation.. ... You're only part-way through and the teacher /presenter has already started talking. This is particularly problematic with worked examples - eg in maths or science. The teacher says 'how does this example compare to the previous one?' But we can't tell because the previous one has gone.. it's on the last slide that we can't see anymore and it's really hard to remember.
The solution is to remove transience whenever possible.
a) show related examples side by side. Keep examples in a given sequence in view as you explore new ones. Let students see all the examples together, aligned to see the pattern, kept static so there's the opportunity to focus attention on the meaning, without students struggling to recall hazy details.
b) extensively use of static visual aids. Visual aids can be diagrams or graphic organisers such as tables and flow charts.. Sometimes students have them but teachers just assume students know how to use them - and they don't. It's helpful to rehearse by inviting students to seek out the information and read it our or to use the diagrams as a scaffold to explain things as they talk them through in pairs - anything that gives them time to engage, encode, rehearse.. before the information disappears.
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