More videos from Bradley Busch
Video transcript
okay bradley what’s tip number three please okay uh so tip number three uh is essentially to really actively challenge students on what they think is best for them so i’m growing increasingly aware that when people get to self-select how they study and learn pretty much they do the opposite of what all the research suggests they should do um so the classic one you know i think a lot of people know like re-reading versus retrieval practice like we know retrieval is probably more effective and yet students will tend to self-select re-reading um we know spacing versus kind of blocking students tend to lose stuff to the last minute whereas you know it’s more effective to do it um in advance and the other one that i’m finding increasingly uh interesting is i would say when i go into schools about 80 percent of students tell me it’s better for them they learn better if they revise whilst listening to music and yet when you look at the research um there are some individual differences but music that has lyrics leads to a huge degradation in learning and memory compared to no music or music without lyrics and yet students will swear blind that they know what works best for them as i i’ve i’m wrestling with it but i find it interesting the balance between giving students autonomy which i think is important motivation versus people make really bad choices and people tend to do what they prefer as opposed to what’s best for them so the example that i always come up with at the moment my four-year-old he prefers chocolate buttons for breakfast right that’s what he that’s what he likes for breakfast but i know as an adult that’s not what’s best for him and i think something similar happens with learning and memory and revising is people do what they like because revising is hard so we do stuff that makes it more fun but not necessarily what’s actually best for us and so now i think it’s not enough just for educators to know about being research informed we have to kind of make this stuff explicit to students and challenge some of their preconceived notions because as they get older their the decisions they make working independently become more important and we need to help educate them to make better better decisions this is another great one bradley i’m really pleased if you’ve picked this it reminds me of what i used to do with my u11s i used to say in the build up to exams right we’re gonna have a revision lesson here and you can just bring in the top bring bring in you know go through the textbook go through exam papers work on the things that you feel you need to work on i’ll never forget this girl erin she used to sit there and she would do fraction after fraction after fraction and i’d say well why are you working on fractions here and she saw cause i like him i love a fraction right and like quadratic graphs you never flipping clue what one of them was but forget that let’s just keep working on the fractions and it’s really tricky as you say the trade-off between kind of motivation autonomy and and kind of self-direction feels feels a tricky one and also of course you’ve got that issue that if you’ve got 30 kids in a class you could kind of make the argument that as a teacher you might not actually be able to pinpoint exactly what each of those person to do is the student themselves but as you say it feels like they need educating in certainly like things like bjork’s desirable difficulties i think a really good one to share with students along the lines of look spacing feels hard but here’s why it’s better interleaving feels hard and crucially like you know practice testing feels hard certainly compared to watching a youtube video reading notes but here’s why it’s better it feels like kids need some kind of real practical examples and explaining the theory in a way that they can understand so they can make those informed choices if that makes sense i don’t and i have to say because we go into it i see a broad range of schools the progress in this area i think is phenomenal in the last few years um like it used to be how to help make a revision time table yeah there around the conditions within that revision is better and the big challenge for me is i i don’t know any domain apart from school where so students don’t go to school for intrinsic motivation they get told like legally parents you have to send their kids to school so i’m asking you to develop intrinsic motivation for something that wasn’t your choice to do and we know because desirable difficulties is going to be tough and so i’m asking you to choose the more difficult path and not make it fun and enjoyable at times repeatedly and you can see why people do want to make it easier and more fun because it’s not their choice and it’s difficult um but we need to help help them with that decision so it is it’s a hard one but i’m starting to think it’s one of the most important things we can help them knowing the conditions under which they learn best as opposed to what just they like the most yeah i i i agree and if we just shift to the practical slight there for a second so um i agree with you i’ve i’ve i’ve certainly used to spend a lot of time on making a revision timetable the kids would spend ages just laminating things and cooling things in and all sorts it was absolute disaster and what i try and do now i’ve i’ve certainly found i’ve spoken about this on a previous tips for teachers video even showing them the diagram of the forgetting curve i think is quite powerful the fact that every time they revisit something it flattens out this this slope of the forgetting of i find that quite powerful and also the dunlosky strengthening the student toolbox paper that does things like shows that practice testing is more effective than rereading things like that i’ve seen to be quite effective is there anything else practically you’d suggest that teachers could kind of share with students or approaches that that could help them make more informed choices yeah so um just like i i agree uh we do very similar stuff like we showed them to getting code we should talk about the donorski toolkit on a really basic practical level one of our favorite activities to illustrate um one of the areas is if i ask you to draw like the apple logo from memory most people actually aren’t very good at drawing the apple logo yeah and they’ve seen it thousands of times in their life and yet if you saw it now on screen you’d go i can identify which company that is that’s obviously the apple logo but it’s a great illustration of how this didn’t seem familiarity and real deep knowledge uh and so we can do that um expand with them as an icebreaker to talking about so we need to revisit uh likewise there’s loads of activities that you can do where around multitasking so students are convinced that they can multitask and you know got tabs open or tv or youtube at the same time and yet there’s loads of neat experiments you can do where it’s impossible to do two things at once and yet we assume we can so i think starting not talking about it from a revision and learning perspective but a general principle and then following up with that discussion so what does this mean for your revision is a really good one and you can do the same with listening to music you can give basic quizzes and you can see how much people remember in quizzes versus if they don’t have distracting lyrics so yeah i think nice practical ice breakers i think are a good starting point for that i like that i’ve never thought to do that i always start with the revision element but i like that show them the power of it first and then link it to revision that’s lovely though
