Remember to succeed

We have fantastic memories. You do (although it does deteriorate with age). Your students do. The reason they forget what you think you have taught them is not because they have poor memories, although many students think that is the case and grow up into adults who feel they have lousy memories too. They forget because the learning was not memorable. We spend a great deal of time teaching children things but never seem to spend any time helping them to remember what we have taught them. Yet memorizing key information is one of the easiest parts of the learning cycle and can be one of the most fun if you take rote learning out of the equation (although not altogether because it does work). To what extent, if at all, are you helping young people remember what

you have been teaching them? To what extent have you addressed the ‘hidden question’ I mentioned in Essential Motivation that is there every time you say to a group, ‘Now go away and learn this and I’ll test you tomorrow’, which is ‘How shall I go away and learn this so you can test me tomorrow?’ Yet I see it time and time again – teach a child how to remember the information, then test them and that child will perform well. What’s more, there are two big benefits from teaching children memory

strategies. One is that, obviously, it improves their memory. The second is that it has a direct impact on their self-esteem. Remember in chapter 16 I said that you can’t raise someone’s self-esteem? What you can do, however, is set up the opportunities that allow people’s self-esteem to grow. If I say to an individual or a class, especially a bottom set group, ‘Guess what, you all have great memories’, then they not only won’t believe me, they will also have the data to back up their refutation of my claim. All they would need to do is to show me their test results for the last however many years of school. However, if I simply teach them a strategy, test them and allow them to get ten out of ten they will see for themselves what they are capable of. And, in my experience, they often soon see the

bigger picture of, ‘If I can do that what else can I do … ?’ Research has found that learning new things actually helps strengthen your brain and that this is all the more effective if you believe you can learn new things. People who have what is known as a ‘growth mindset’1 have higher levels of brain plasticity. In other words, by reassuring children that they can learn and proving to them how powerful their brains really are, we actually help grow their brains. Some people have said, me included, that we remember every little

thing that ever happened to us, that it all goes in and stays there somewhere, but we have trouble getting it out when we need it. Research is now showing, though, that our memory isn’t quite as eidetic as that, as pointed out in a fascinating paper entitled the Seven Sins of Memory by memory researcher Daniel Schacter. He describes seven ways in which our memories can let us down, the first three – ‘transience’ where memories slip over time and with age; ‘absent-mindedness’ where you forget where you put the scissors and go looking for them where you had them last and then forget what you were looking for and so go back to the room where you started and remember that this was about scissors and then you go to where you think you last saw them making scissor movements with your fingers; and, thirdly, ‘blocking’, an example of which is the tip of the tongue syndrome you experience at parents evening with the name of that child whose parents are sitting expectantly in front of you – being ‘sins of omission’ (Schacter 1999). The last four – ‘suggestibility’ where you can be tricked into registering false memories through things like leading questions; ‘bias’ where the way you feel now can alter the way you remember events from the past (remember how wonderful and free teaching used to be under the Tories?); ‘persistence’ as seen in the recurring unwanted memories experienced in post-traumatic stress disorder; and ‘misattribution’ where you ‘remember’ experiencing something that didn’t happen (remember how wonderful and free teaching used to be under the Tories?) – are ‘sins of commission’. So, although our memories are fallible, they are still good enough to

never be the problem when it comes to passing exams. In other words, forgetting to remember to pass the exam is an unforgivable way to fail given all that we know about remembering. One of the most useful ways to look at memory is with the following

equation:

RRR+R

At the risk of making you sound like a pirate if you happen to be reading this book out loud, our first three Rs are:

Registration – taking the information on board in the first place Retention – hanging onto it when it is in there Recall – bringing it back out, preferably as and when you need it.