Friday Mindset #73

Happy Friday, folks.

Double-check those classrooms and corridors are empty, give the common room the once over, then swipe yourself a Custard Cream from the secret training room supplies, brew up, and let's finish the week with a few interesting ideas!

Something to try...

We came across the work of Cognitive Psychologist Rebecca Lawson (University of Liverpool) and found it fascinating and fun. Lawson's interested in our ability - or not! - to explain things we think we understand. The example she uses is bicycles. Well over 90% of us know how to ride them, about 50% own one, and 100% of us see them regularly. So.... how do they work? Most people think they know, so Lawson tests their understanding by asking them to draw a bike, giving them an outline to get them started (you can see here all the saddles and handlebars are the same.) She's done it hundreds of times. Here are some examples:

The drawings are regularly pretty hopeless. The frames are the wrong shape, and couldn't possibly support a rider. They connect both wheels, making steering impossible. The pedals are in entirely the wrong place, unconnected to the chain or attached to the front wheel. The chain connects both wheels, not just the rear one. Important components - brakes for example, are often missing. Lawson uses this simple experiment to show we might think we know something well, but it's an illusion.

The same goes for classroom learning. Our judgements of what we know well are often poor. In his book Ultralearning, Scott Young goes on to argue that until we can clearly explain something to someone else, we don't truly know it. He shares an often-referenced approach by the famous theoretical physicist Richard Feynman which is often referred to as the Feynman technique:

We're going to try the bicycle drawing activity with students, and then challenge them to revise a topic using the Feynman technique. And we're working on a powerpoint to share next week too, so you may want to hang fire. Anyway, let's see how it goes!

Something we're reading...

This is a great blog from Blake Harvard. It caught our eye this week because we were preparing a staff training session on effective revision and we're just putting the final touches to our slides about Robert Bjork's work on desirable difficulty when Blake's take on the subject popped up in our feed.

His "inform and model" approach very much mirrors ours. There's some interesting concrete examples of classroom activities used too - all-in-all a great introduction to the idea of desirable difficulty if it's something you're not yet familiar with. Check it out:

Our latest offer...

Last year we ran a free online session called Practice - a crash course. It's a super-quick 45 minute summary of how we're currently teaching effective revision. There's some theory, followed by 4 or 5 quick (and new) VESPA activities - all practice ones, obviously.

This seems like a good time of year to run it again, if there's any interest. It will be largely last year's session with a few small adjustments, so you might not want to come along if you've seen it before. However if you're interested, here are the details:

Practice - a crash course on teaching effective revision

Wednesday 15th February - 3:45 - 4:45pm, Zoom.

For a link to the session, just email us at [email protected] and we'll send it out (we'll use this to judge whether there's any interest.)

OK, that's it for this week! Take a two-day holiday. All the best to you and yours,

Martin, Steve and Tony