Thanks Folks
A lot of thank-you’s this week especially to some of our parents who supported our activities over the last week.
I took the opportunity to visit Lorne last Thursday to see how the students were enjoying the surf sessions. Remarkably it was quite warm though the water had a bit of bite. The surf was reasonably clean and the kids from IEPS were having a lot of fun in a very safe well organised environment. It was a great afternoon. One of the reasons it was so great was because we had fantastic parent helpers. They supervised, participated and generally helped the staff run a very active and engaging program. So to Johnnie, Frank and Craig, I say thank you on behalf of our community.
The second shout out goes to the crew from the Parents, Teachers and Friends Association, who ran our Mothers and Special Persons Stall. This event clearly created a lot of excitement and a lot of anticipation. So a big thank you to the following parents -
Caroline L
Jessie S
Sarah O
Sandra A
Aliki S
Carmen M
Kellie L
Caty S
Jessica M
Cindy S
Mia T
Robintha G
who took the time to run the stall and do all of the administrative work and publicity that goes along with it . Events like this are part and parcel of school life , and its good that they are back on the agenda.
Some more research about learning
In 2019 I had the opportunity to attend a short course at Boston University that linked ideas from neuroscience to education. One of the most interesting parts looked at How Working Memory and Long Term Memory work together. In a nutshell the Working Memory (aka short term memory) holds new information, processes it and when its ready transfers it to Long Term Memory –so that it can be retrieved further down the track. The learning process involves;
- Taking in new information in the working memory and processing it
- Transferring the information into the long term memory
- Retrieving the information when it is required.
The research of these areas is starting to develop some common themes and implications for learning. This week I’ll write a little bit about some of the strategies that work for practice –so that what students have learnt can be more easily retrieved or remembered.
- The notion of spaced practice is important. It is much more effective to have 10 minutes practice over 3 days rather than a thirty minute intense session of 30 minutes.
- There is a term called Interleaving which means that you practice multiple related skills at once. A very good example of this is to practice different times tables problems in a cluster. Maybe a few 5 times tables mixed in with 2 times tables and some 10 times tables in a block rather than the three run separately.
- Blank page retrieval works better than giving people notes and asking them to remember them. An example of doing this would be to provide the learner with information, ask them to read it and then later on just to recall it on a blank page. (this works extra well in group situations)
The key research in this area comes from three people Pooja Agarwal, Andrew Watson and Judy Willis. The School Improvement Team have had a bit of a look at some of the key implications and how we may put some of these ideas into practice. I’ll add a bit more about memory and retrieval in next weeks’ Bulletin.
Brett Millott.