Turbocharged Teaching: Cognitive Science, HITS and Technology
The findings of cognitive science can give teachers insights into how students learn most effectively, and inform lesson structuring and classroom teaching style, but ‘best practice’ in this area is not common practice in schools because it is counter-intuitive, disconcerting for students and requires teachers to be more organised in their planning and more intentional in their delivery.
On the contrary, most teachers teach in ways that ‘come naturally’ and do help students achieve short-term performance on tests, but do so at the expense of long-term proficiency. Once the test is over, they forget what they learned!
In this workshop, Andrew Douch will lead an exploration of some of the surprising findings of cognitive science, draw parallels between those findings and some High Impact Teaching Strategies (including differentiation, structuring lessons and multiple exposures) and suggest practical ideas, using simple technologies, for leveraging our understanding of how students process information, so we can turbocharge their capacity to –
- Solve problems innovatively
- Think critically about new information
- Store knowledge in long-term memory, and retrieve it when needed
In the workshop you will learn to –
- Structure a lesson sequence that helps students build long-term memory
- Create PowerPoint presentations that enhance learning (whereas most teachers’ PowerPoints suck!)
- Help students to better use working memory for problem-solving tasks
- Improve your questioning/testing approach to build learning strength
BRING WITH YOU: A computer (Mac or Windows) AND any other mobile devices you use (smartphone, tablet, etc).
