The Expert Teacher by Darren Mead

Author:Darren Mead [Darren Mead]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781781353349
Publisher: Crown House Publishing
Published: 2019-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

Which strategies are useful and when?13

The chance to increase knowledge retention is probably the reason teachers should be interested in using more generative strategies. Strategies such as student generated notes help them to retain knowledge; writing summaries as part of the note taking task has even greater benefit. Weirdly, however, the reviewing of teacher created notes leads to better retention than reviewing learner generated ones. This apparent contradiction reminds us of the balance needed between allowing students to work out the content for themselves and the role teachers play in ensuring learning takes place (Hamaker 1986).

During reading comprehension, simple strategies such as underlining improve retention; students precising and summarising information also helps retention and improves understanding of the material. The teacher’s role in this is vital as students fare better when teachers provide structure in the form of headings and adjunct questions that guide thinking and activity. Frequent questions placed within text encourage the students to reread and organise facts; problem solving questions focus their attention more, while questions that guide them to create their own notes are also positive for retention (Chi et al. 1994: 440). All question types benefit from requiring a response that can be acknowledged publicly, either in writing or verbally.

It is worth reminding ourselves of the importance of teacher expectations, especially during generative activities where students will, at times, perceive the onus for learning being placed solely on them. The messages teachers give, both consciously and subconsciously, about the difficulty and purpose of a task can influence student learning – for instance, students who expect difficult assessments (i.e. essays, or extended writing in the parlance of our times) perform better than those who expect easy or multiple choice questions in tests that require recall of information.

Perhaps students who are expecting a multiple choice quiz feel that less effort is required to simply recognise information (although we should not dismiss the value of multiple choice questions both in terms of being useful diagnostically and for learning itself: Foos 1992). It is also extraordinary to note that even an incorrect pre-quiz multiple choice question benefits long-term learning success. It seems that grappling with the unknown primes us to be more aware of our ignorance and therefore more attentive when a correct explanation comes along (Richland et al. 2009: 246). In designing our teaching and assessment, we must ensure that the students expect to work hard and to be challenged. In short, a blend is needed to aid learning and provide the motivation to persevere and study topics deeply to ensure learning takes place.

Student generated note taking can also help to transfer knowledge from one situation to less familiar situations, and having students extract their own rules from a series of examples is a particularly helpful technique. To accommodate this, we can readily sequence teaching so the rules are not revealed until the students have grappled with the examples first. Careful selection of examples is needed to provide the structured thinking they need.

Illustrating what generative structures might look

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