Book review: ‘Memorable Teaching’ by Peps Mccrea

If you have a spare half hour (honestly, you can read the whole book in that time) you should check out this highly accessible book filled with useful insights and tips for teachers. As someone who is fascinated by memory and values its role in teaching, I totally agree that memory is integral to learning but until recently it has been misunderstood and often associated simply with rote learning.

The 9 short chapters of the book are organised around the principles of memorable teaching and a clear distinction is made between Long-term memory (LTM) and Working memory (WM).

LTM = knowledge. WM = thinking.

Building a powerful LTM relies on using our WM to maximum advantage.

Mccrea is very clear that this is a simplified model of memory and learning and he uses the first 4 chapters to address strategies to control and make use of WM such as managing information by eliminating distraction as much as possible.

I found the need to regulate load particularly interesting. This refers to cognitive load (the total amount of mental effort being used in WM) and he suggests that we need to find a balance between too much/too little and that 2/3 interacting elements is ideal.

It makes sense that our own familiarity with the material we are teaching gives us ‘expert induced blindness’ where we underestimate the complexity of tasks and we overestimate how good our students’ knowledge is of related material.

He provides tips about how we can regulate load such as using decomposition where you break down complexity into constitute components and give students a piece at a time to tackle. He also suggests ‘Recycling structures’ where you set students tasks with familiar structures so this doesn’t increase load. These routines are then built into lessons.

Chapters 5 – 7 go on to explore how we can direct WM to build powerful LTM. Chapter 5 looks at how we can make elaboration happen sooner whereas Chapter 6 looks at refining structures and how when we learn something new the context often gets encoded in our LTM alongside their knowledge of the concept. This is why students struggle to transfer concepts to different domains (something that we increasingly expect our students to do and to be able to make cross-curricular links). He suggests that we present students with examples and non-examples to establish and refine the boundaries of a concept. Difference is as important as similarity.

Chapter 7 looks at how we can ‘stabilise changes’ as LTM is only useful if we can access it. Therefore we need to take deliberate steps to help students to remember. The process of retrieval and accessing a memory increases its strength. Mccrea states that the less assistance we provide students during retrieval the greater the strengthening effect. This means that asking questions about a topic is more powerful than presenting the topic again. In order to have spaced retrieval, having increasingly distributed intervals between quizzes/questions will have the greatest impact, which can be done by having regular cumulative quizzes.

Mccrea’s point about the delayed returns really resonated with me- in the short-term many of these don’t feel productive as students make more errors and slower progress. It is important for both teachers and students to be aware of this and to think more about the long-term effect on learning.

Finally, chapters 8 and 9 look at approaches that can be used to ‘amplify the impact of previous principles’. He refers to the need to use the right pedagogical tool for the job as different phases of learning demand different tools. He also looks at the need to use metacognitive strategies, as we need to enable our students to learn memorably even when we are not directly managing their attention.

Each of the 9 chapters explains considerations that we should be making when planning our lessons and also offers tips about how we can improve our students learning and the likelihood of remembering what we teach them – a must read and really thought provoking!

Julie Watson, Memory and Metacognition lead, Huntington Research School

17 January, 2018 —