Research School Network: Keeping memory in mind Part 3: Considering the evidence on memory when planning your curriculum

As the memory specialist at Huntington Research School teachers often contact me for advice and how we can make learning ​‘stick’ and help students to retain the huge amount of content that they are now expected to be able to retrieve and apply to new scenarios . My advice is always that they consider their curriculum design in order to support long term learning and I refer to Christine Counsell’s suggestion that Jane shared in the first blog of the series that we should think of the curriculum ​‘as continuous, not just a sequence or chronology, it is much more like a narrative… content structured as narrative over time with multiple strands all spinning at once but constantly unifying and pulling things together’.

This relies on us being more aware of how the curriculum builds up over time and explicitly explaining this to students so they can see how new information links with things they already know. David Didau defines schema as ​‘an interconnected web of items and knowledge’ that we hold in our long term memory. We need to consider how we deliver the curriculum in order to support children to acquire increasingly robust, interconnected schema, and to enable them to retrieve these schemas effortlessly and automatically in order to support them to become ​‘fluent’ in the language of our subject.

In the second blog of the series Rob’s asks ​‘How do we plan for a systematic approach to supporting children develop core knowledge and skills?’ This is such an important question to consider as we need to carefully map out how we will develop schema over time. If we don’t develop these and present new information as an isolated, solitary thing that students need to learn it will be very hard for them to retrieve as it’s not linked to anything else.

The seven step model in the EEF’s Metacognition and self- regulated learning Guidance Report offers a really useful structure to develop schema by ensuring that we support students to activate relevant prior learning as a starting point for any learning activity/​lesson/​series of lessons. It states that we should think about the teacher and pupil role in detail. Steps 1 – 3 will be almost entirely teacher led (activating prior knowledge, explicit strategy instruction or teaching of new content and then teacher modelling). Steps 4 and 5 (memorisation of strategy often done through Q&A and guided practice) are more of a collaboration between the teacher and student, whereas strategies 6 and 7 (independent practice and structured reflection) should be led by the student whilst the teacher facilitates and poses key questions to offer structure.

We often skip the step of activating prior knowledge as we assume that students will be able to see links between topics and access relevant schema. But as they are novices (with less complex schema) they may miss these links therefore it’s so important that we make them explicit. This also forces us as teaches to consider exactly what relevant prior learning is relevant and therefore to consider the careful sequencing of the curriculum. We can do this in simple ways like regular low stakes quizzing at the start of each lesson that activates all relevant information for the current lesson.

Keeping memory in mind by using this seven step model and considering knowledge as schema that are developed over time enable will ensure that our curriculum is delivered in a logical order. This will be strengthened by regularly returning to prior knowledge and will enable us to create long lasting memories for our students.

To find out more about evidence informed approaches to developing cognition, visit the EEF’s Metacognition and self-regulated learning Guidance Report https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/tools/guidance-reports/metacognition-and-self-regulated-learning/

Or get in touch with us at Huntington Research School to find out how we might support you https://researchschool.org.uk/huntington/

You might also want to book onto our course starting in May to support you with planning an evidence-informed curriculum for long term learning https://huntingtonschool.co.uk/calendar/planning-an-evidence-informed-curriculum-for-long-term-learning/

Julie Watson is the Assistant Director of Huntington Research School specialising in memory and metacognition, Subject leader of Psychology and an experienced Sixth-form pastoral leader.