The slides with my model of working memory are here.
More tips from Craig Barton
Video transcript
hello i’m craig barton and welcome to this tips for teachers video now i’m a massive fan of showing my students diagrams particularly diagrams and visuals that can be used to convey something that’s potentially quite complex and abstract you may have seen in a previous video that i absolutely love the diagram of the forgetting curve to help illustrate to student just how important retrieving prior knowledge is for memory well this is another of my favorite diagrams so here we have working memory and long-term memory and i use this diagram to convey to students of all ages two important lessons so the first one is that things you’ve learnt in the past help you learn new things so i say to my students let’s imagine that this is your working memory and it’s really really full to the brim with all this prior knowledge that you need to know in order to learn the new stuff and then i come along as a teacher and i try and teach you this new material and you just your brain feels like it’s about to explode it’s absolutely rammed full well you can do a couple of things that will really help so let’s imagine that this prior knowledge that’s represented by these two big circles let’s imagine that that’s something really really familiar to you well instead of it taking up loads of your attention it actually reduces in size you have to pay much less attention because you’ve automated it you can just recall it straight away without having to think too hard so all of a sudden you’ve got much more space to think about learning the new stuff and here’s another thing you do you can do if you’re really familiar with this prior material instead of having to think about four separate things you might chunk it together and instead just have to think about one thing because you now understand the concept as a whole instead of it being broken up into these little parts and lo and behold you’ve now much more space much more capacity to think hard about the new idea the second lesson that i think this diagram can be really useful to share with students is to be careful what you pay attention to so we know working memory’s got this fixed capacity we know students and anybody can only pay attention to a certain amount at any one time well what we hope is that we’re all thinking really hard about whatever big idea is going to help contribute towards learning and understanding but let’s imagine that instead we find our mind wandering off to something else we either get distracted or we start thinking about something else that isn’t related to the learning well our working memory doesn’t know what’s relevant and what’s not and all of a sudden we find our attention being divided some of our attention is being soaked up by stuff that’s not going to help us learn so we simply have less attention to dedicate to the stuff that is going to help us learn so the chance of us learning it absolutely nose dives so instead let’s focus on what’s important let’s try and close our mind to everything else and that leaves us much more space to think about the stuff that really matters so i found this diagram super useful to use with students so what do you reckon to that is that useful how might you use it how might you need to tweak the language to make it work with your students and if you found this useful please i’d be so grateful if you could like the video subscribe to the tips for teachers youtube channel and visit tipsforteachers.com at uk where you’ll be able to download a powerpoint of that animation if you find it useful thanks so much for watching