Setting up the SOL

(6) teaching strategies which give greatest benefit to the hardest to teach learners

Learners with ALN and SEN and learners living with poverty and trauma, usually find learning harder than peers. These learners benefit most from teaching strategies

which reduce the working memory load of the lesson,
which teach on firm learning foundations,
which help the learner to embed the learning of the lesson into long term memory and
which lead to success, which leads to increased motivation.

avoiding pitfall: teachers (and sometimes learners) are overly optimistic that teaching and fluent practice in the lesson will result in efficient learning

People are not naturally good judges of what they have learned, so rather than finding out if teaching has become learning, by asking learners if they know something or by assessing them at the end of the lesson, it would be better to assess by questioning at least one sleep after teaching.

Research by Bjork tells us that, until we learn more about our own learning, we are often seduced into thinking

that finding practice easy means we are learning well
that finding practice hard means we are not learning well.

In fact almost the opposite is true. Fluency of practice is not an indicator of learning taking place, it's when we struggle to practice (Bjork calls it desirable difficulty) that we embed learning better i.e. it's easier for us to recall for longer. Once learners, learn about learning, over time, they will overcome this misconception.