Headlines By James Saunders 16th October 2020
Business as usual
I am sure that you will all be feeling anxious about the ever changing rules about how we are to live our lives. When I heard about Essex becoming a Tier 2 zone I started to think back to lockdown in the summer. However, I was comforted by the supportive way that we navigated that period together and feel just as confident we can all do it again. So what are the implications for schools? Very little is the short answer. We will continue to work as we have done this term: carefully and as a community. With just one week to go to half term I would like to thank you for your tremendous support in getting our school back to normal. If we continue to work together I am confident the next half term will be just as enjoyable as this one. Improving memory with Dual Coding/Visual note making I have found that on my tours around school this week there have been many classes preparing for end of unit assessments to consolidate the learning from the last seven weeks. Tests are an important part of learning. Tests help learners to practice recalling what they have learnt from their long term memory and they help teachers to identify misconceptions and areas that By using a dual coding approach to record information need to be re-covered. and to recall it we strengthen our ability to remember. By providing this type of structure to the information we Our C11 learners are a week into their mock are recording it helps us to build our own mental maps exams. Mock exams are no different to end of unit and schemata more effectively. tests. Every test counts and every test should be approached with the same focus. One way to help Schemata are mental structures that we create and use develop our memories and the learning process is to to organise and categorise our knowledge. By using a develop our ability to organise our learning notes to dual coding approach to organise, and in some make recall easier. One such technique to support this instances connect, knowledge we are helping to create is a topic I have spoken about before: the cognitive these mental knowledge maps. Here are some key theory of dual coding. Dual Coding was introduced into takeaways regarding dual coding: psychology theory in the 70’s by Allan Paivio. Put simply, it is a cognitive theory about how we think. It is  Visuals are powerful for communicating complex based around the idea that the creation of mental ideas in an efficient way; it takes a great many words images supports the learning process by using a to describe the simplest of images combination of visual and verbal information.