Introduction to the Teaching & Learning blog

The teachers at Nova Hreod Academy have, for some time now, been paying increasing attention to the cutting edge cognitive science of learning and how we might be able to use its teachings in our classrooms. Cognitive science and psychology have always studied learning, and now seem to be cracking the methods to best retain knowledge in the long term – the holy grail for teachers preparing their students for ever more demanding GCSE exams after five years of study with us.

We now have an evidence base for the revision techniques we teach our students, for our curriculum design (if not content), and pedagogical methods to employ in the classroom to boost our students’ long term memory of the material they need to remember.

Probably the underpinning idea is that knowledge matters. The notion that a vague understanding of generalities in a subject prepares you for all aspects of that subject is unsupported by the evidence. Concrete and specific facts always precede deep understanding. The reason for this boils down to the fundamentally small capacity of the working memory: the part of the mind that does our thinking. It holds objects or ideas in our conscious awareness (items that can be sensed in our surroundings or pulled from our long term memory) and allows us to do things with them. Literally, to think about them. This working memory is very much the limiting factor in our thinking capability, however, as it can only hold around seven things at once. Happily, with good knowledge of a subject, each of these things can become larger and larger. For example, we all have a good idea of ‘a dog’ – this only takes up one spot in our working memory, even though any dog is built from many smaller concepts. If you saw an extra-terrestrial, your working memory would be soon filled up processing all the aspects of it. But a dog is familiar, only needing one chunk. By exactly the same token, complex ideas and concepts in our subjects, when well-understood, become simple chunks.  

As a result, this series of blogs will get stuck into why and how we will apply the lessons of cognitive science and the psychology of learning to the curriculum and Teaching & Learning in our academy.