Hello! And welcome to another weekly update on memory and metacognition. If you're new to this newsletter, please take a look at the previous editions.This time, I want to touch back on something that I said last week:"Whether we focus on skills, facts or concept knowledge, memory is always playing a role."To me, this point relates to one of the biggest misconceptions about memory among educators: a lot of people seem to feel that it is only about factual knowledge.Worse – some appear to feel that advocating for the importance of professional understanding of memory means promoting a memorisation-based style of teaching, with understanding and skills falling by the wayside.That is certainly not what I want to see, and it doesn't reflect my own practice!I think that memory, and in particular long-term memory, fundamentally underpins all aspects of learning.When you think about:developing higher-order skills like analysis isn't going to help if we can't retain those skills over the long-term.using any skill, from reading to driving a car, involves retrieving things that have been stored in memory (facts, rules of the road, etc)even a broad philosophical conversation that makes you rethink your views and opinions must somehow be retained. Otherwise we'd have the same conversation over again, kind of like Dory in the Pixar movies.Overall, then, I feel that memory is playing a much greater role in education than is sometimes realised. A role that is certainly not confined to cramming for exams.Read more about this idea in an open-access article that I wrote for Chartered College of Teaching. It's aimed at NQTs, but I think it gets into some interesting issues:
The Concept of Memory
The Concept of Memory
The Concept of Memory
Hello! And welcome to another weekly update on memory and metacognition. If you're new to this newsletter, please take a look at the previous editions.This time, I want to touch back on something that I said last week:"Whether we focus on skills, facts or concept knowledge, memory is always playing a role."To me, this point relates to one of the biggest misconceptions about memory among educators: a lot of people seem to feel that it is only about factual knowledge.Worse – some appear to feel that advocating for the importance of professional understanding of memory means promoting a memorisation-based style of teaching, with understanding and skills falling by the wayside.That is certainly not what I want to see, and it doesn't reflect my own practice!I think that memory, and in particular long-term memory, fundamentally underpins all aspects of learning.When you think about:developing higher-order skills like analysis isn't going to help if we can't retain those skills over the long-term.using any skill, from reading to driving a car, involves retrieving things that have been stored in memory (facts, rules of the road, etc)even a broad philosophical conversation that makes you rethink your views and opinions must somehow be retained. Otherwise we'd have the same conversation over again, kind of like Dory in the Pixar movies.Overall, then, I feel that memory is playing a much greater role in education than is sometimes realised. A role that is certainly not confined to cramming for exams.Read more about this idea in an open-access article that I wrote for Chartered College of Teaching. It's aimed at NQTs, but I think it gets into some interesting issues: