Teaching So Students Remember

The first TESOL workshop I went to was given by Kathy Olson, an educational consultant who reminded me of a veteran elementary school teacher--in a goood way. Her presentation outlined ways for teachers to capitalize on basic brain-research findings.

Naturally, she cited the alarming statistic that most of us forget as much as 80% of what we read and 90% of what we hear within 24 hours. However, she offered lots of ideas for working with this in the classroom.

Her first suggestion was about attention. She is WAY into stimuli, the more intense the better. She points out that students don't learn anything if you don't have their attention...so she recommends music, movement, humor, emotions, costumes, surprise. She points out that most of us love to guess and apparently, we try harder to remember information we've guessed wrong.

Olson recommends visuals, as vision trumps all other senses in the impact it makes on the brain. Even simple things like color can make a measurable difference: colored paper, highlights and of course pictures. (Evidently, groups using illustrated texts performed 36% better than groups using text alone.) She touted the great return you get by accessing prior knowledge. Connecting new information to information already stored in long-term memory enables the brain to process more effectively.

Her main idea is that once you have the students' attention and introduce some new material, it is important to "rehearse" or "manipulate" the information right away. This will move the new input from short term memory--where it will stay for fewer than 24 hours--to long-term memory, where it actually becomes useful to the student.

She offered lots of ideas about ways to do this: paraphrasing, summarizing, personalizing, predicting, repeating, mapping, classifying--especially classifying. The brain loves identifying patterns, charting differences and similarities, connecting ideas to each other or to personal experiences. I tried and failed to attach her powerpoint, but if you're interested, look her up on the web (Kathy Olson and "Teaching So Students Remember").

At times during her presentation, Kathy seemed a little grade school--or perhaps old-school: costumes? Really? However, I overheard a bunch of juniors yesterday fondly reminiscing about the 9th grade lecture Daniel gave dressed as Theodora of the Byzantine Empire. It's true that they remembered the costume better than the lecture, but at least two out of three remembered that there was a Byzantine Empire, with Theodora and Justinian on the throne.