We pick up the story twenty-four years into my teaching career. Seven months into exploring how best to support the pupils in my classes diagnosed as, or recognised as, learning with dyslexia and / or with poor working memory. After …
I recently shared a summary of Simonsmeier et al., (2022) work suggesting that pupil’s prior knowledge is a critical factor for teaching and accounts for about a third of the variance in learning outcomes. On the back of summarising that …
The metaphor was largely Sarah Cottingham’s work. In presenting to TTCT I had developed the foundations of dynamic, adaptive and interconnected. After a first release there were a few questions and queries that led to a second draft. My opening …
In spite (or because) of the complex relation between prior knowledge and learning, however, assessing learners’ prior knowledge before teaching them something new remains of utmost importance. Dr Garvin Brod The importance of prior knowledge can not be underplayed. Previously …
When your daughter shares a view of her world. This evening Freya shared a poem with me, taken from an anthology she was reading. Her words as she handed over her phone to read it. This is like my world. …
Following the excellent TTCT PD event, I posted the above slide on the metaphorical reference of memory as an ecosystem, as opposed to a library, and received two very interesting responses. Before I go further, I should say that the …
Chatting with Jon Owen @JonOwenDI of the past two days has drawn out a lot of thinking on cognition. It started with a question. What is knowledge, before it become knowledge. We settled on “sense data” and the teacher poll …
Do we have a terminology problem – yes. I think so. Comically highlighted by @C_Hendrick. ‘Retrieval practice’ the ‘testing effect’ or indeed test-enhanced learning is the case in point. In fact, Dr Agarwal asks us to ‘stop calling it that,’ …
