Memorable Teaching

Memorable Teaching: A summary of Peps Mccrea’s book

In education, the key to transformative learning lies in the interplay between working memory and long-term retention. Peps Mccrea's Memorable Teaching distills the science of memory into actionable strategies that empower teachers to design lessons fostering deep, durable learning. Grounded in cognitive psychology, the book explores how understanding and optimizing working memory can ensure vital concepts transition into long-term memory, laying a robust foundation for future learning. Mccrea introduces nine practical principles, equipping educators with a blueprint to create impactful, memory-rich classroom experiences.

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Harnessing the Working Memory

• Managing information

Eliminate distractions.  Distractions can come from the physical environment (displays, clocks, music), social environment (interruptions, off-task conversations, teachers talking while students are working), the tasks or activities (redundant text or images in presentations or worksheets, a forced focus on real life contexts or unnecessary complexity during early acquisition).

• Streamlining information

Consider how best to communicate the information we need students to learn. Speech allows us to communicate in a linear way, while diagrams can illustrate how components relate to each other. Text can allow students to process the information at their own pace, but speech is more flexible and can be adapted to meet the needs of the students. Our working memory can handle more information if it is presented to more than one component simultaneously (e.g. speech goes to our phonological loop and images go to our visuo-spatial sketchpad).

• Orienting attention

Information must be attended to if we want it to enter our working memory and consequently move into our long-term memory. Help students to filter the correct information by explicitly showing or telling them what to focus on in advance. Stress the most important information and reduce distractions that may take up valuable space in their working memories.

• Regulating load

Our working memory is most effective when processing two or three interacting elements at once. We can reduce the demand on students’ working memories by relating new information to concepts that the students are already familiar with. When this is not possible, reduce the amount of new information students are asked to process at the same time. Give students time to pause and write down what is being discussed to reduce the amount of information that they are required to store in their working memory; once it is freed up they will be able to contribute more fully to a discussion.

Directing the Working Memory

• Expediting elaboration

Elaboration occurs when our working memory interacts and modifies our long-term memory. Learning will be more effective if the relevant areas of the long-term memory are readily available through a starter activity (priming). You can explicitly discuss how the new knowledge fits in with previously learnt content.

• Refining structures

Variation is a useful strategy to help students refine the structures in their long-term memory; showing contrasting examples will allow students to discern the defining aspects of an idea or definition. Separating similar concepts into different lessons allows students to appreciate the subtle differences; often we do the opposite and teach similar topics at the same time.

• Stabilising changes

Memories in our long-term memory decay if they are not used in order to make the long-term memory more efficient. Forgetting is a default setting in our long-term memory and the information we teach will be forgotten unless we intentionally take steps to prevent it. Memories are strengthened every time they are retrieved. The less help students have with the retrieval, the stronger the memory becomes. Retrieval is more effective when it is in a low-stakes setting; otherwise, anxiety can take up space in the working memory and makes retrieval from the long-term memory more difficult. Retrieving something just before it is forgotten is the most effective time, so spacing retrieval throughout the term is best. Interleaving is also an effective approach to strengthening memories; moving from retrieving information about one topic another unrelated topic.

Amplifying Impact

• Aligning pedagogies

This is about selecting the right teaching strategy for the skill or content being taught. The same content may need a very different approach during the early acquisition phase that it will once students have a secure introductory understanding of it. Direct instruction may be necessary initially before an inquiry-based approach can be effective.

• Embedding metacognition

For teaching to have the greatest impact, students need to understand the principles of memorable learning and strategies to improve retention, they need to have goals and be aware of whether they are on track to reach these and they need to be able accurately assess their own level of understanding. Teachers can explicitly explain to their students why they have selected certain activities for them. A practical way to improve calibration is to ask students to predict how they will score on a quiz or assessment, evaluate their own performance using a mark scheme or assessment objectives and then reflect on how accurate they were and why they were or were not successful at predicting their performance.

Mccrea, P., 2019. Memorable Teaching: Leveraging Memory to Build Deep and Durable Learning in the Classroom. JOHN CATT EDU Limited.

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