Episode 25 - An Interview with Two Teachers

08/16/18 • 27 min

This episode was funded by The Wellcome Trust, and supporters like you. For more details on how to help support our podcast, please see our Patreon page.

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Show Notes:

This is the fifth episode in a series recorded in London! In June 2018 we attended the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction conference (or, more simply, EARLI) for the special interest group on Neuroscience and Education (@EarliSIG22). While there, we recorded live interviews with teachers and researchers.

In this episode, we speak to Ms. Amanda Triccas and Dr. Claire Badger at The Godolphin and Latymer School. Amanda was Yana's teacher in the 1990s, and we've reconnected recently around the science of learning.

Amanda has always worked in the private sector - usually in girls' schools - and a few years ago got into the science of learning. Claire's PhD is in Chemistry, and they both work at Godolphin and Latymer School for Girls. Amanda and Claire both got interested in the science of learning when Amanda found The Learning Scientists Twitter account and recognized Yana's name. For Claire, it was starting at the school with Amanda, and reading Efficiency in Learning: Evidence-Based Guidelines to Manage Cognitive Load by Clark, Nguyen, and Sweller.

We discuss how cognitive psychology can help teachers and students. Amanda mentions efficiency, and Claire mentions having more time for teachers to do things in the classroom by optimizing learning. We also discuss students' resistance to change, and teachers' fear of embarrassing themselves in front of students.

Claire and Amanda integrate strategies from cognitive psychology into their teaching, but they also explain their importance to their students, as well as to parents by providing them with the 6 strategies for effective learning posters.

As a Senior Teacher in Teaching and Learning, Claire set up a teaching-learning community based on ideas by Dylan William (see this White Paper). This allowed teachers who were interested in the science of learning to come together and explore theory and practice. This community soon grew to encompass virtually all the teachers in the school. Similarly, Claire has created student learning communities, though these require more guidance to avoid misunderstandings.

Amanda and Claire have some thoughts for how we can help. The illustrated work we've done with Oliver Caviglioli has been particularly useful, and they would like to see further resources produced for younger children. Claire also likes the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), which provides concrete examples of how strategies can be used in the classroom. She would like to see more comprehensive reviews and summaries of the literature, with suggestions for teachers and students.

Claire is currently pursuing her Masters in Learning and Teaching at the UCL Institute of Education.

Previous Episodes from this series:

Episode 21 with Dr. Emma Blakey
Episode 22 with Michael Hobbiss
Episode 23 with Rina Lia
Episode 24 with Ignatius Gous

This episode was funded by The Wellcome Trust, and supporters like you. For more details on how to help support our podcast, please see our Patreon page.

Listening on the web? You can subscribe to our podcast to get new episodes each month! Go to our show on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.

RSS feed: http://www.learningscientists.org/learning-scientists-podcast/?format=rss

Show Notes:

Claire is currently pursuing her Masters in Learning and Teaching at the UCL Institute of Education.

Previous Episodes from this series:

Episode 21 with Dr. Emma Blakey
Episode 22 with Michael Hobbiss
Episode 23 with Rina Lia
Episode 24 with Ignatius Gous

Previous Episode

Episode 24 - The Golden Spiral of Lifelong Learning with Ignatius Gous

This episode was funded by The Wellcome Trust, and supporters like you. For more details on how to help support our podcast, please see our Patreon page.

Listening on the web? You can subscribe to our podcast to get new episodes each month! Go to our show on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.

RSS feed: http://www.learningscientists.org/learning-scientists-podcast/?format=rss

Show Notes:

This is the fourth episode in a series recorded in London! In June 2018 we attended the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction conference (or, more simply, EARLI) for the special interest group on Neuroscience and Education (@EarliSIG22). While there, we recorded live interviews with teachers and researchers. This episode features Ignatius Gous.

Ignatius begins the episode with an interesting explanation about the origins of his name. Ignatius is a professor at the University of South Africa, which is primarily a distance university, with students from all over the world taking online classes. He has developed a program for students to learn better and master content more effectively. This program is used by learners at the primary, secondary, and college levels, with advanced students of medicine and law, and even in the workplace.

Ignatius has long wondered why neuromyths are so prevalent, and his theory is that people want to know about how the brain works, and these neuromyths fill the void. He thus set out to create a framework that would actually be useful and evidence-based, to help those interested in learning to do so more effectively - even those as young as primary school age.

According to Ignatius, learning is not linear - it is more of a spiral - but it still needs structure. Ignatius built his model with the Fibonacci code as the basis. The spiral includes 6 aspects involved in the learning process, with metacognition as the 7th. You can see all the steps represented here in visual form:

We talk in this episode about different mnemonic strategies that fit into this model, including the method of loci - you can read more about this method in this blog post. We also discuss the importance of learning basic facts before moving on to transferring learning to new, more complex situations. One idea Ignatius suggests is for students to memorize the headings of a chapter to use as a guideline for organizing and retrieving information. This ties in with this guest blog post by Yana’s former student, who used a similar method for retrieval practice after taking notes in class.

Ignatius emphasizes that we need to always think about how students are going to use the material we are teaching them. He calls his model “the golden spiral for life-long learning”, because learning isn’t just something you do to cram for a test - learning happens until you die.

Previous Episodes from this series:

Episode 21 with Dr. Emma Blakey
Episode 22 with Michael Hobbiss
Episode 23 with Rina Lia

Next Episode

Episode 26 - Classroom Noise and Learning with Jessica Massonnié

This episode was funded by The Wellcome Trust, Chartered College of Teaching, and supporters like you. For more details on how to help support our podcast, please see our Patreon page. In today's episode, we feature one of our patrons, Abby Zavos.

Listening on the web? You can subscribe to our podcast to get new episodes each month! Go to our show on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.

RSS feed: http://www.learningscientists.org/learning-scientists-podcast/?format=rss

Show Notes:

This is the sixth episode in a series recorded in London! In June 2018 we attended the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction conference (or, more simply, EARLI) for the special interest group on Neuroscience and Education (@EarliSIG22). While there, we recorded live interviews with teachers and researchers.

In this episode, we speak with Jessica Massonnié, who is pursuing her PhD at Birkbeck University on the effects of noise in primary school classrooms. She Tweets at @jess_masso and you can find her website here.

Primary school classrooms tend to be noisy (approximately as noisy as traffic or a vacuum cleaner). Jessica's work looks at how this noise affects learning outcomes. One of her first studies looked at the effect of recoded classroom noise on children's creativity in a lab environment. In the podcast, Jessica talks about some preliminary findings from this study.

More recently, Jessica has moved on to classroom-based research. In a study that takes place in France, she is looking at individual differences in how annoying children find noise. This factor appears to be related to how difficult it is for children to switch between tasks, and how often they mind-wander. Jessica is also looking at the effects of a mindfulness intervention on noise levels, noise awareness, and French/math test performance.

The big take-away

It's important to be aware of noise levels; for example you can easily download an app to check noise levels in your environment. It would also be good to identify sources of noise in the learning environment - particular noises that are completely irrelevant to learning, such as the sounds of chairs scraping on the floor - and attempt to eliminate those noises.

Relevant reading and links:

Klatte, M., Bergström, K., & Lachmann, T. (2013). Does noise affect learning? A short review on noise effects on cognitive performance in children. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 578.

Mehta, R., Zhu, R., & Cheema, A. (2012). Is noise always bad? Exploring the effects of ambient noise on creative cognition. Journal of Consumer Research, 39, 784-799.

Shield, B., & Dockrell, J. E. (2004). External and internal noise surveys of London primary schools. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 115, 730-738.

A website with yoga tutorials, created by the expert we have hired for my school study.
A kit created by the association I am part of, to introduce children to the brain, to attention and distraction.

Previous Episodes from this series: