Explaining and Training

Overview

The problem

The outcomes

The solution

timely practice was created as the glue to help teachers teach low attaining maths learners more efficiently, i.e. to make learning stick.

The second section describes the cognitive science we apply to do this.

The first section describes how we can more efficiently teach low prior attaining learners, learners who do not learn well with our current methods of teaching (or is it our current methods of teaching do not suit low prior attaining learners?).

(1) Increase the efficiency of teaching

Most teachers won’t be surprised to learn that a more effective way to teach low prior attaining learners can be summarised as “little and often”.

In essence this means teaching only a small bites from a topic at one time + spiralling through the curriculum faster.

The mp4’s below explain, in more detail, what is required to do this.

Introduction	More detail

However if we can’t fix forgetting, it doesn’t matter what manner we chose.

The subsequent section describes the cognitive science we apply: what makes good glue to make learning stick.

(2) Increase the efficiency of learning (by which we mean learning that sticks)…

A very effective way to raise attainment, especially for low prior attaining learners is to significantly increase the proportion of in lesson learning which can be recalled rather than allow the learning of the lesson to be forgotten. There are two threads to improving memory:

Increase the duration of Long-Term-Memory recall	Effectively increase Working-Memory capacity	References

(3) Teacher training

… and we realise that education isn’t like this for all learners.

Throughout our successful education, we have learned with blocked teaching (larger units taught in a sequential manner) and blocked learning (practising lots on what we have recently learned) and we have become successful at revision (reviewing what we learned previously). It may seem that that is what education is.

Then we become teachers, and we realise that education isn’t like this for all learners!

What timely practice proposes, is that we used spaced teaching (smaller units) and spaced learning (practice spread of weeks and months) and do away with formal revision. It’s a big change to ask of teachers … and yet it isn’t … it’s just cutting and pasting the scheme of learning (which some one has done for us) and cutting and pasting the practice (which something else schedules for us).

Importantly our skills as teachers that we use everyday are just the same: analogy, think aloud, questioning, listening, explaining, feedback, encouragement, scheduling, time management … these are our teaching skills. We quickly get used to spaced teaching and learning and become comfortable and much more effective at applying at our skills, and we learn more detailed topic related much more quickly because we have a higher proportion of the lesson to practise our feedback skills.

We are just about to begin teacher training using timely practice with these topics:

assessANDfeedback - is the glue of the timely practice process - it describes what makes the glue to make learners' learning stick
chunk-basedTheory - how teaching becomes learning becomes embedded learning in long term memory
planTeaching - what timely practice provides on top of traditional lesson planning: finds firm learning foundations + automatically adds retrieval practice to follow up the teaching of the lesson
retrievalPracticeTheory - how we can gradually stretch the durability of recall-ability of new learning and retain existing learning
tpVocab - new vocabulary specific to the timely practice app
trainLearners - how to train learners in the classroom systems which will make timely practice is as effective as possible
The last page within the explaining and training module is Xtras + FAQ which holds some extra information that teachers may be interested in looking at.

Teachers may rest assured that they may read ahead secure in the knowledge, that

they will only receive training on what they don’t know,
they won’t need to waste their time being taught skills and knowledge that they already have,

as they will

use timely practice and this customer knowledge base to fill their learning gaps and
experience the power of timely practice to learn efficiently.