Principal's Report
We welcomed some lovely rain this week which was great to see. The Autumn weather has been fantastic and has allowed us to participate in our High Jump events over the last two weeks. The Athletics carnival is set down for Wednesday 26 May and we will be heading over to the Bull Paddock in Tumut for the day, notes to follow in the upcoming weeks.
Teachers are continuing their learning this year with the CE initiative of Catalyst. High impact teaching strategies is one of the areas that staff are focusing on.
One significant area is called Cognitive Load Theory (CLT). CLT is simply the understanding that in our learning environment there are limitless amounts of information for us to access and learn from, i.e. everything we see, hear, taste, touch, smell, etc. Our body and brain notices, collects and filters this into our working memory, a temporary holding space for processing the information - sorting it, connecting it to ideas, and relating it to previous knowledge. The problem is that our working memory is not limitless.
In fact, it can hold only 4-7 items in there at once as it processes them. Learning happens when the information we take into our working memory is organised into larger concepts, understandings and complex skills and then moved into our long-term memory. The long-term memory is limitless. The real skill is to be able to retrieve these facts, concepts, understandings and skills when we need them and in some cases develop 'automaticity'.
When you first learnt to drive, you were consciously thinking of all the little things you had to do, e.g. check mirrors, change gears, operate pedals, remember road rules, etc. These were all separate aspects being processed in your working memory. The more you practised, the more you started to develop patterns and order to your behaviours. You did not have to remember separate steps, just one pattern of steps. You also developed a greater awareness about typical driver behaviours on the road, and the paths to get to familiar venues, enabling you to predict your journey and anticipate what you will need to do. Driving became automatic. Some of the journeys you undertook became automatic too. Especially those you took on a daily basis.
The same theory of learning can be applied to everything we do at school, from reading, to sport skills, to music and mathematics. This understanding about learning helps us to shape highly effective teaching and learning experiences for our students. We ask questions such as:
- How many new ideas can we teach at one time to not overload a student's working memory?
- What knowledge and skills do the students already have with which to connect the new ideas and experiences to, enabling them to move it to their long-term memory?
- What strategies can we use to help students practise recalling the information and skills they learn to help it become embedded in their long-term memory and automatic?
Current research shows us that daily review – revising previous learnings is a great strategy to make those connections and transfer our knowledge to long term memory. Having time to practice and work independently to master skills is also a necessary part of this process. Students need time to do consolidate their learning – so great teaching ensures that students have time to do this. There may not necessarily be new learnings happening every day – but it is important to acknowledge that this is an essential step to transferring what students know so they can apply that knowledge to new situations and learnings. If your child says that they didn’t learn anything new today – rest assured they are learning.
Kirsty Beavan
Principal
