TEACHING THAT STICKS LIKE SUPER GLUE

Teachers spend many hours every week, researching, planning, creating ways to engage students effectively in lessons that they can not only understand and remember, but retain over the years ahead of them.  To accomplish this phenomenal feat to any degree of success, one must have a sense of how the mind and memory work. Cynthia Vinney wrote a very succinct article which breaks down and simplifies the Information Processing Theory put forth by American psychologist, George Miller, and others during the 1950s.  In a nut shell, memory is broken down into three categories: sensory, short term, and long term. Sensory is absorbed through our senses and is retained a mere three seconds. Short-term memory is generally accessible for 15-20 seconds but can be expanded to possibly as long as 20 minutes through repetition.  While long-term memory is generally considered to be stored away forever (Vinney, 2020).  The question for teachers is: What can we do to access that long-term memory? 

The simple answer would be to make the information memorable.  Meriam Webster identifies memorable as something “worth remembering” (Merriam Webster, 2020).  How does a teacher make something worth remembering to a child?  You must tap in to something thing the child can relate to or appreciate as worthy.  The staff at TeacherVision published an article which quoted an excerpt from Anthony D Fredricks’ book The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Success as a Teacher. Fredericks suggested that providing the student with some of the responsibility for his/her own learning was key.  Teaching a child to problem solve should be accomplished in five steps:  

Making sure the child can…

  • understand the problem and can explain it in their own words
  • recognize anything that may keep them from solving the problem
  • find several solutions to the problem
  • work through proposed solutions
  • assess the various results

sources:

https://www.teachervision.com/problem-solving/problem-solving

https://www.thoughtco.com/information-processing-theory-definition-and-examples-4797966

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