heart of heartlands lessons

Inner Drive, an organisation dedicated to using psychological research to inform teaching and learning practice within schools, delivered an insightful session titled Recent Psychological Studies Every Teacher Should Know. I will outline the key findings from three influential studies and suggest strategies for implementing in your practice.

1. Resilience and Growth Mindset

To develop resilience in learners, teachers must provide the right balance of challenge and support. Too much challenge with too little support will lead to stress and student burnout, whilst too much support leads to students feeling too comfortable, too reliant or worse- stagnates their progress.

Strategies to reach the optimum level of challenge and support are providing strategy based responses to students’ work and scaffolding independence for example, weaning students off sentence starters over time. Most significant, however, is the pygmalion effect, or self-fulfilling prophecy. When our words and actions set high expectations and foster self-belief, students feel more confident and perform better in our classes.

2. Self-regulation Schulman et al (2015)

Success at school requires a student to defer gratification. That is, to sign up to working hard with the promise of eventual reward, in the form of qualifications and the opportunity to embark on a worthy career. The widest gap between sensation seeking (the disruptive behaviour that hinders learning) and self-control (essential to deferred gratification) is, surprise surprise, in year 9.

Researchers found that key to fostering self-control and endorsing deferred gratification was student’s trust in their teacher. When students had high levels of faith that their teacher knows what they are doing they are more likely to regulate their behaviour in the classroom.

Strategies for developing trust with student include sharing the ‘why’ and learning journeys, using high-level academic language, being human (acknowledging and celebrating mistakes) and being positive around exam failure as well as mistakes.

3. Changing long-term memory Adesope et al (2016) “The Testing Effect”

Adesope et al argue that regular low-stake knowledge quizzes were the most effective teaching strategy to promote a change in long term memory. They found that low-stake knowledge quizzes strengthen connections, connects the dots between existing and new knowledge and forces us to confront knowledge we do not know. Furthermore, Roediger and Kerpike (2006) found that quizzing as a revision strategy is significantly more effective than just reading or copying.

In my subject, sociology, students have a bank of low stake knowledge quizzes that covers the breadth of the GCSE course. Students are instructed to quiz each week for home learning and virtually every ‘do now’ is a knowledge quiz. Students have a corresponding PLC that allows them to track their performance on each quiz so they can effectively target their revision. Having a bank of quizzes also allows me to effectively space revision - another crucial strategy in developing long term memory.