So far, I am sticking to my plan to record three things I learn or encounter each week.
This week I was reminded about the Protege Effect or ‘learning by teaching.’ I first encountered this strategy as “Explain it to an alien,” and admit, I have used it much recently.
Teaching others rather than just preparing to teach others, gives students an even deeper and more persistent understanding of the material. Digging around the strategy there is support for increased metacognitive processing and increased motivation to learn. Thinking about my own practice, it got me thinking about my Y9 ‘A Christmas Carol’ class and creating a ‘timeline of events’ to teach to their… peers, parents… next years – Year 9?
When one teaches, two learn.
Robert Heinlein
This rest of the week was dedicated to sleep. Not my own but reading about the importance of good quality and quantity of sleep to our well-being, how to encourage sleep and the role sleep plays in both attention for learning and consolidation of learning. These points are important in their own right, however they are particularly important now, for those schools operating a two-mock schedule. Why? Because these schools will be reaffirming the importance of revision, and revision without consolidation is heavily inhibited. In twenty years of teaching, I have not explicitly underlined the importance of good quality and quantity of sleep for purposeful revision. I will from here on in.
On Saturday I attended ResearchEd Surrey. Congrats to the team at Farnham Heath End Schools. My favourite nugget.
As far working on, and investing in, curriculum development. Mark Enser reminded us there are no short cuts in curriculum design and that his departments journey was four years in the making with another two years needed to consolidate.