Research into Practice: Edition 2 Linking academic expertise with professional wisdom Focus: Using understanding of how learning happens to connect students with powerful prior knowledge.
Introduction How does learning happen? Building schema of important knowledge, processes, concepts, vocabulary in our memory provides the foundation for students to access higher thinking skills such as evaluation and the making of links across topics and curriculum subjects. The development of these schema, for example times tables, concept of an AD/BC Timeline in history, happens over a number of years through a spiral curriculum where concepts are revisited and added to. This constructivist theory of the spiral curriculum approach was first developed by Jerome Bruner (1960) and has 3 main facets: 1. 2. 3.
Students revisits the theme, topics of concept several times throughout their school career The complexity of the topic increases each time it is revisited New learning has a relationship with old learning and is explicitly linked to it
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Research into Practice: Edition 2
To develop schema that can be used to springboard students into the next phase of their learning we need to be aware of attention deficit, memory overload, lack of prior knowledge and insufficient fluency of recall. This screencast explains how these key ideas link together.
With thanks to Oliver Cavilioli and Tom Sherrington
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Research into Practice: Edition 2
Academic expertise Research summaries: Retrieval Practice
This 3 minute read ‘Concrete not sand’ by Tom Sherrington explains the importance of sequencing key knowledge to enable deeper student understanding and thinking through clear subject examples.
In this 10 minute read Why don’t students like school? In which Daniel Willingham explains that thinking is slow, effortful and uncertain, that thinking well requires knowing facts because critical thinking processes are tied to the background knowledge.
Developing expertise: This 20 minute read Cognitive Science Approaches in the Classroom by the EEF (2021) is a summary of the evidence considering strengths and weaknesses of the current research and considering how principles might make a difference to students (p.31-36 especially focuses of building schema).
Professional Wisdom Theory into practice Emily Stevens and Gemma Rayson each explain how they employ cognitive load theory to avoid split attention and attention deficit within their lessons to connect to and build on prior knowledge. Key terms: retrieval practice, threshold knowledge, interleaving, cognitive load, dual coding, attention deficit. Digital tutorial: How to use Google forms to monitor your students knowledge recall over time
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Research into Practice: Edition 2
A round up of the current evidence from the EEF, Bristol University Summary Service and What Works Clearinghouse
The effects of high quality professional development on teachers and students. The Bristol University Summary Service
What and how children are reading. The Bristol University Summary Service
Working out how working memory works: evidence from typical and atypical development from the University of Bristol
Staff email intro Routine investigation of research provides a solid foundation on which to grow and develop pedagogy for us all to drive the best possible outcomes for our students. Research into Practice provides you with easy access to the latest educational research combined with practical application in the classroom.
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