More tips from Craig Barton
Video transcript
hello i’m craig barton and welcome to this tips for teachers video now one of the key takeaways from the research into cognitive load theory is that where possible as teachers we should try to avoid what’s known as the split attention effect now if you’re not aware of what the split attention effect is just have a read of that sentence on the left now for me the key to the split attention effect is avoiding this switch this switch between different sources of information every time a student needs to do a switch it has a cognitive cost it takes up attention in working memory now it turns out that the way i was doing worked examples for about probably trying to split as much attention as i could with my students which is not ideal so let’s imagine you’re my kids and i’m trying to teach you the wonders of a prime factorization so i’m going to teach you how to write i would do is i would be at the board doing some writing so there’s something that you need to watch and also read at the same time i’d be talking i’d be offering verbal explanations and asking questions and if that wasn’t enough at the same time i’d be expecting you to copy the word example down was it any wonder that my students didn’t take it in or worse than that they seem to take it in at the time because it’s all very easy to kind of nod along frantically scribble things down yeah yeah and almost convince yourself you’re understanding it but then everything falls apart whenever you then have to do some independent practice so i’ve now got a three-stage process that i do for all my work examples so first i model the process in silence i then try to prompt self-explanation in my students and finally my students copy it down or maybe they copy it down so let’s have a look at this in action let’s start with this model in silence now there’s a real danger that when we model something in silence it can be a very passive experience for our students they just watch something unfold in front of them so i don’t want that to happen i want my students thinking hard at all stages so i give my students a challenge i say that whilst i’m doing my silent modeling i’m gonna pause at key points so when i pause i want you to ask yourself what’s he just done why is he done it and what do i think he’s gonna do next and they don’t have to write this down they don’t have to tell anybody it’s just for them to be thinking in their heads and this prompts this self-explanation that’s going to be then followed up in the second part of this process so i’ll just show you what i mean and i can’t do this as effectively as i would be able to do in the classroom but hopefully you’ll get a sense of it and you may be familiar this is how i set out my board when i’m doing worked examples a worked example column on the left a thinking column which we’re going to fill in in a moment in the middle and then the your turn on the right so in silence i’d go through something like this and i pause here so my challenge for students is what’s he just done there why has he written that six what do i think he’s gonna do next and then i’d do it pause again what’s he just done why has he done it what’s he gonna do next pulls and then finally pause sorted now once i’ve gone through that model in silence i then move on to the second part which is where i want to prompt self-explanation this is where i would ask the kind of questions that normally i would have bundled together with my silent model so things like this what pair of numbers can we choose for that first row was it just six and four what’s special about six and four could have chosen some of the numbers which type of numbers do we circle and what order do we write our final answer now those questions again it’s up to you as a teacher how you choose to get your students to respond and what i’ve experimented with is is reading out the question and having it there on the board giving my students time to think silently and then explaining the answer myself but of course what i could also do is they could write their answers down on mini whiteboards and hold them up or they could discuss their answer with their partner or we could have a whole class discussion whatever works with you but the idea here is that we are now prompting thought we’re prompting the students to reflect on what they’ve just seen but we’re not bundling it together they’re not having to watch and reflect at the same time and what you can also do is you can break it up and this works particularly well for longer examples so you might choose to do something like this start with the 24 split it like that and then pause and give that self-explanation prompt and then once you’ve dealt with that self-explanation problem move on to the next stage and then give the second one so you can break it up that way but i really like the idea of presenting something in silence even if it’s for a short period of time before then we verbalize and ask the questions so students get chance to really focus watching and then they can do the talking listening and so on and so forth and then we get to this bit copy it down now i never even considered this for probably about 15 years of course you copied down that’s how students learn but do they learn from copying things down is there value in them then copying this word example down i’m not so sure i’ll give you the argument why it might not be that good an idea so first we get books that look like this and it looks beautiful but i’ve got two questions about this one how long does that take how much class time is that taking up and two do kids use their books to revise because that’s often the argument given right you copy down the words example so the kids can use the books to revise how many kids do that and are the books the best way to revise maths we know the best way to do maths is to is to learn maths and remember math is to practice doing maths i’m not convinced that many students will learn from their books or the books the best medium to do it and then of course you get things like this the kids who are so slow writing their example down that they never get around to actually finishing it and that’s a bit of a waste of time and then you also get things like this this is my favorite example so this was a worked example on pie charts and the teacher asked the students to copy that down and this was the result some kind of deformed egg which isn’t accurate at all and you don’t really want the kids revising from that so i’m not so sure anymore and one of the best things i’ve seen if teachers do get kids to copy things down is they copy down the word example but then what they ask the students to do is to annotate around the word example their answers to their thinking prompts and that way the copying down is a bit more of an active process it’s not just blindly copying things down it’s copying things down but then thinking so why did we choose the six and four could we’ve chosen some other numbers why do we circle our answers so copy down the words example and annotating with answers to thinking prompts i think works quite well but i’ll leave that for you to decide so that’s my words example process and now and that i used to kind of bundle those three together but now i separate them what do you think about that and might you give that a go is that similar or different to your words example process if you found that useful i’d be so grateful if you could like the video and subscribe to the tips for teachers youtube channel and visit tipsforteachers.com uk for more tips like this thanks so much for watching