Teach Secondary 13.7

recalling information. As a teacher, you obviously have little control over what happens at home, but by recommending this apparently easier approach to better memorisation, you might at least encourage some to give it a go. He said, she said An equally pleasurable activity for students is to encourage them to simply talk to each other – albeit around the topics being studied, rather than their favourite TikToks. Peer-to-peer explanations not only help speakers formalise their thought processes and understanding of the subject, but the very act of conversation itself makes the information gleaned more memorable to listeners than when read from the page. During later recall, students will have clear memories of their classmate’s voice and where they were sat in the room, with the content they’re trying to learned linked to those memories of their circumstances. Via these informed dialogues, both students will come away with greater confidence in their ability to remember the crucial facts in question. Distributed practice Another technique I like to encourage is known as distributed practice. This is where material is regularly repeated every fewweeks or so, in a process that moves it from the temporary storage of working memory and into long-termmemory, for later recall when needed. (As with all memorisation techniques, however, it goes without saying that a topic has to be properly understood first – otherwise, any subsequent memorisation activity will ultimately be pointless). A good way of deploying distributed practice is via flash cards or self-testing, whereby students actively test their knowledge through self-questioning, rather than by simply re-reading their notes. The trick here is to gradually extend the periods of time between each learning session to help ensure the information is stored in the brain. No age limits Other, more traditional methods are also available, of course, such as mnemonics. ‘Big Elephants Can Always Use Small Elephants’ once helped me sort out the vowel order of ‘because’ when I was younger, for example. For more sophisticated learners, memorising the first letter of each entry’s opening word in a list of procedures can help the brain retrieve the relevant informationmore reliably. All these techniques may be aimed at teenagers working in an educational environment, but there’s really no age limit to their effectiveness, Perhaps we should all be reaching for pencil and paper, and work on reactivating our rusty handwriting skills when recording directions, or even draw ourselves the occasional map. Let’s make our GPS redundant. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Gordon Cairns is an English and forest school teacher who works in a unit for secondary pupils with ASD; he also writes about education, society, cycling and football for a number of publications SUGGESTED ACTIVITIES 1 MISSINGWORDS One activity I’ve found useful in helping students recall quotes is to have them copy the full quote with words blanked out, then ask them to rewrite the quote with the missing words restored. Gradually increase the number of missing words until they’re left with just one word, and must write the full quote around it. 2 PATIENCE When asking students to recall information from an earlier lesson, be patient with their powers of recall.We might be focused solely on our own subjects, with the relevant information foremost in our minds, but our students are having to hold new information from a range of widely differing subjects in theirs. Give them a moment to retrieve knowledge before assuming they don’t know it and moving on. Imagine the brain as a messy filing cabinet, in which you wouldn’t expect to find the document you’re looking for immediately – so why expect a quick answer from your students? Moving on too quickly may also cause students to become anxious about the reliability of their memory, which will further hinder their ability to remember things accurately. 3 REGULARLY REFRESH Don’t just compartmentalise your topics, covering each area of the course then moving on. Instead, return to certain aspects of topics over the academic year at regular intervals to review the information – through low stakes testing, online quizzing or by setting relevant homework tasks. 29 teachwire.net/secondary R E V I S I O N TEACH SECONDARY SPECIAL REVISION