Headlines By James Saunders 1st February 2019
If all we do is commit stuff to our short term memory we are not really learning. This brings me onto spaced learning. It supports the way our brains actually work, according to basic neuroscience and psychology research. The world of the box set is an interesting phenomenon of modern times which brought with it the pastime of binge watching. The notion of binge watching is something that was just not a part of my childhood or indeed early adulthood but I have partaken now and then. Box sets make great gifts. My mum took about three years to get through the Criminal Minds one I bought her for a birthday a few years ago. I will wager that some of you may well have given or received box sets as gifts over the Christmas period, or used the break to catch up on your favourite show through a box set-style binge session. My longest session was season 1-3 of 24; it was exhausting - 72 episodes back-to-back. Why am I going on about box sets? Recently I shared with you some of the changes we will be implementing in September. One of these changes was a move from 100 minutes to 75 minutes. During the recent parent forum I spoke with parents about the concept of spaced learning as one of the reasons we have decided to make this change. The process started by looking at learning in school and the process of committing stuff from short term to long term memory - this is what ensures greater exam success. This brought me to the concept of ‘Spaced Learning’. I would like to use box-sets as a way to illustrate this concept. You see when a regular series like Game of Thrones is broadcast each episode tends to be a week apart. When I look back on my 24 days, the one series that stands out in my memory is series eight: the one that I watched every Sunday for 24 weeks. Sure, I can remember parts of series 1-3 but I don’t remember them as clearly as series eight and I don’t feel as emotionally invested in the characters - because I didn’t commit as much to my long term memory. Each episode started with a recap of the previous week. Just as the memory of what happened before was fading this little recap helped to bring it back to the front of my mind so that the next part of the story would be easier to follow. By watching the series this way, the way it was originally intended, I was able to learn and remember so much more of the narrative and plot. Each weekly revisit and refocus helped to move what I had learnt from my short term to my long term memory in a way that never happened when I watched the whole thing in one go. Now let’s apply that to learning. Imagine that you learn a load of stuff in a short space of time (just like a binge watch) and then test yourself on it at the end. Imagine you do quite well in that test. Does it mean you have learnt it? The real test is if you were to test yourself again a day, a week, a month or a year later.
Spaced learning involves a series of short, intense learning sessions with increased learner participation, separated by short intervals in which learners do a completely different activity (Emsley, 2016). Spaced learning is often paired up with a method known as interleaving: Interleaving refers to the benefits of sequencing learning tasks so that similar items – two examples of the same concept, say – are interspersed with different types of items rather than being consecutive. This results in a more variable and challenging task but is associated with benefits in terms of memory and transfer, which apply to concept learning as well as other domains (Kang, 2016). Combined, these two methods really represent what happens when comparing a binge watch to watching over time. By moving to 75 minute lessons it will help us to deliver our learning using a spaced learning approach and will provide more opportunities to revisit learning. Subjects will now have an additional times to meet their class each week which will mean they will be able to create more spaced intervals. There are other, more practical benefits to making this change. For example, it will allows us more flexibility with the construction of the timetable. This in turn will mean that we can reduce the need for split classes - classes that share several teachers. If you are interested in spaced learning and want to find out more here are a few useful links to a blog post, an education endowment foundation study and an article from the chartered college of teaching: https://3starlearningexperiences.wordpress.com/2017/10/3 1/tips-and-tricks-for-spaced-learning/ https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/public/files/ Projects/Evaluation_Reports/ EEF_Project_Report_SpacedLearning.pdf https://impact.chartered.college/article/firth-spacinginterleaving-classroom/ Thanks To: Xanthe Goodman, Thomas Last, Jake Ring, Marcia Swain who all helped support a visit fr om Bishops
Stopford'school this week.