In this episode, I had the privilege of speaking with Professor Lesley Painter Farrell about how we can help students retain more language lessons for the long haul. During the podcast, Lesley outlines the difference between short-term learning and long-term memory. We discuss evidence-based techniques teachers can implement to optimize retention. Lesley also shares some simple but effective techniques such as recycling content across lessons, building in reflection time, avoiding cognitive overload, and using retrieval practices. Listen now to uncover how we can help our students remember more!
Hi Leslie, thanks very much for joining me. I wanted to start off by asking you about long-term memory.
I think most of our listeners will have experienced before teaching students something and by the end of a class being fairly confident that the students had learned what we were teaching them. But then a few weeks or months later the students apparently forgetting pretty much all of what we taught them in a previous class. Do you want to tell us why that happens and what teachers can do to avoid that? So learning and remembering are two different things.
You learn something but you've got to remember it. So it's that understanding and I think you're right in that people think, oh I learned that, I remember it. No, you learned it for sure.
But do you remember it three days, six days, ten days from now? Maybe not. Instead of seeing a curriculum that goes like this, start here. Students learn here and they've learned this.
Let's see it more as a spiral, right? A spiral that just keeps going back and back and back. So you're retrieving what they've learned. You're really building those strong schemas.
But at the same time you're reviewing, you're reviewing, you're reviewing. Recycling is the most critical thing you can do in a curriculum and when you look at coursebooks and people evaluate coursebooks, the question or one of the questions could be, do they reuse vocabulary that they taught in lesson one? Do they reuse grammar that they used in unit one? If they don't, then either you've got to compensate that as a teacher or you just say, you know, maybe this isn't the best coursebook that I could have used. That's another thing that I think teachers have to think about.
Of course, there are other simple activities which become much more rooted towards memory and that's whether it's mnemonics, whether it's absolute strategies for language learning, whether it's pop-up quizzes, which I know everybody says, oh, assessment, whether people like it or not. Pop-up quizzes, now we know that they really help students. They just have to be less stressful.
Maybe it's not right. I'm going to give you a quiz. Everybody write down the answers.
Maybe it's just much more of an oral test, but something that constantly works on retrieval because, okay, we can put something to long-term memory, but then if we don't keep reviewing it and retrieving it, we know that it begins to get lost. I also wanted to ask you about reflection. I think reflection is something that is meant to help in memory because I think it also encourages you to think deeply about something you've done.
And also, I suppose, because it involves some kind of retrieval, you're usually reflecting on something that's happened earlier. How can teachers encourage their students to reflect as a way to remember more of what happened in a lesson? Right. This is a brilliant question.
So, if, for example, you've taught a lesson, and it was a wonderful lesson, you really enjoyed it. You give your students homework. Part of that homework could be, okay, three days from now, I want you to sit down and I want you to just walk through that lesson.
Just think about what we did at the beginning. Think about what we did at the second part, third part, fourth part, fifth part. What was the overall aim? Just write it all down.
Just jot it down. And then either you can email it to me, or we'll talk about it in the next lesson. But that reflective learning, I think, is critical.
I'm trying to write more and more about that. I'm doing it a lot with my learners, and I'm doing it with myself. Even if you just have a conversation with somebody, and maybe a podcast.
Well, okay, the podcast that you listened to this morning, Ross, I want you three days from now, sit down, and I want you to see how much you can remember. Now, Ebbinghaus is going to tell you that you've lost 60% of it. That's what Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve is, which is scary.
But it's also actually universal. We all do the same thing. So if we catch it at that three day, let's try and bring it back.
But I think getting students to just not walk away from a lesson and think, okay, that's lessons gone. No, keep bringing it back. Keep thinking, okay, what did Leslie say? What did Ross teach me? Or what was that funny game he played? And why was that useful? And before you know it, they're engaging in reflective learning.
And I think that that's really helpful. I think we can do other things. We know about spaced repetition, for example, we know about how to review different activities.
But that actually might be a real key, i.e. rethink what you've learned. Okay, so up until now, we've been talking about long term memory. I also wanted to ask you about working memory.
So this is related to the idea of only introducing around seven new things in a lesson. I'm sure a lot of teachers will be familiar with that, because that's how much we can hold, roughly, in our working memory at the same time. I wanted to ask you, are there other applications of this concept of working memory? And there must be other ways to avoid overloading students' working memory.
Can you tell us a bit about those? So if we think about just working memory and how very quickly it can get overloaded, then we've got to think about processing pauses. In other words, if we have long chunks of information that we've given students, maybe we've dealt with quite a complicated grammar structure, maybe we've dealt with, I don't know, something that just was far from their understanding of, say, first language to now learning English. Let's pause.
Let's just say to the students, okay, stop for a minute, look to your partner or think on your own, just close your eyes and think through what we've just done. Now tell your partner or ask me a question, or just write a question down. What didn't you understand? What do we need to go over again? So rather than seeing a lesson as you start driving, you put your foot down on the gas and you just carry on, let's not look at it like that.
Let's get in the car, we drive, we stop. We get in the car, we drive, we stop, a constant stop. So these pauses that can be two minutes, five minutes, just to let students go over this and to see where they are in terms of their overload, whether, okay, we're ready for more or no, we've really got to stop, we've done too much.
So I would say lesson planning pauses and also thinking about, okay, when you start a lesson, probably when students come in, they're excited, they're interested to see you, they chitchat, you do a little warmer, you get students engaged, you start here. But you then start to teach and maybe their interest starts to peak, but their concentration now is being stressed. So the concentration starts to dip a little bit.
And it doesn't mean anything about they're not motivated, they're not good students, it's just a natural process. So let's think about where that is. Let's start the class.
How is everybody feeling? Good? Do we need to stop? Can we carry on? Then think about, okay, can do activities. So when we are stressed, when we've concentrated too long, too hard, and we're finding it difficult, and we're thinking, oh my gosh, I'm never going to learn English. Let's do a can do that could be repetition, it could be a game, anything.
In other words, that's easy. Lots of teachers do stretching activities, lots of teachers do something that's just different, then bring the students back. So in other words, you're working with not only the content of your lesson, and the understanding of content difficulty, but you're beginning to think more about, okay, what are the stress levels cognitively in my class? So it sounds like some of those things related to overloading students' working memory, or maybe cognitive overload are caused by things that teachers do.
And obviously, those things prevent students from remembering more. Can you tell us what other things might teachers do in class, which stop students from remembering? Right? Well, I think you've mentioned one, and that's the overload theory. So cognitive overload theory, which is, we just teach too much.
And that's something that we inherently want to do. I mean, I think typically, we as teachers, we want to help our students as much as possible. So we pack lessons with, oh, and I'll do this activity.
And oh, I love this activity. And why don't I throw in a song as well. The problem is, the simpler your lesson is, probably the better it is in terms of cognition, meaning that students aren't overloaded with all of these different things.
And they're trying to work out what's happening in your lesson. I always tell my teachers, your students have not seen your lesson. The only person that knows your lesson is you.
They're following Ben in two different ways. They're following it in terms of trying to learn something. But they're also trying to follow it in what you're doing.
Why am I doing this? Why did I do a warmer and talk about the weather? And now why are we talking about, I don't know, fortunes, or I'm just thinking of a lesson I just watched you was doing like good luck charms. And why am I doing this? So there's two different processes that are going on, which is make it complicated, right? We don't want to make it complicated. We don't basically want to make lessons a guessing game.
The more we make lessons a guessing game, the more cognitively stress the students off because they're having to, okay, but why is she listening this? Why is she thinking about this? Where are we going? So signposting your lessons, right? What did we just do? We just looked at the weather. Why did we look at the weather? Because now we feel like we can speak English a little bit more. Okay, great.
Now we're going to look at this and making those connections for our students so that they don't have to. I'm not saying that we shouldn't have fun and, you know, sort of discovery type lessons. I'm just saying let's not make it a guessing game.
I think we can do that with, as you said, without really realising that that might be problematic. That's really interesting because I think some teachers, and I include myself in this, might want to make the lesson at the beginning a bit of a mystery. So you might want to get students thinking, oh, I wonder where this is about? Or where's this going? Or how's it all going to link together? So that students later on in the class are going to have some kind of an aha moment where everything in the lesson will make sense.
But I guess the problem there is students are probably thinking not so much about the language, but maybe more about the lesson procedure, which isn't really what we want them to walk away remembering. The end of a lesson, if you have an exit ticket, and I strongly recommend every teacher sets an exit ticket at the end. And one of the questions is, you know, was it easy? Was it difficult? But why? You know, did you understand? Can you remember this? Then you get some feedback, and you can kind of realign your class.
Was it too much? Did we do too many vocabulary words? Did we do with the grammar too complicated? Then you can constantly give yourself feedback. And if you just say to them, well, what do you want to do? Often it's just, I want to listen. I want to speak.
The bells and whistles aren't that important. For me, my favourite question to ask at the end of the lesson, and this is in teacher training as well as in teaching, is just what did you learn today? And I think it's really useful because, well, one, you get students to retrieve what happened in the class. Students get to hear what other people learned.
And of course, you as the teacher get to hear what students thought that they learned and compare that with what you thought you taught. I think that's wonderful. I once did a piece of research with Eileen Murphy.
She's over in Ireland now. She was in New York for a long time. And what we did with her class was we would start the class, just no sort of information about the lesson at all.
We'd just teach. And she did one lesson on love letters. It was around about valentines.
And it was a really lovely lesson about a valentine that got lost. It was really nice. The bottom line was she was actually doing the past simple.
That was the key. So at the end of it, we did do the exit ticket. What did you learn today? And of course, there were things like they were beautiful.
They were like, we learned about love. We learned not to be mean. We learned that you should write letters to the people that you love.
We learn all about Valentine's Day. And of course, Eileen was like, oh, my God, but I taught them the past simple. Wasn't it clear? I said, well, who knows.
So then we did some research where we actually said, OK, today, we're going to look at the past simple, or we're going to look at how we tell stories using the past. Then we did exit tickets. And the difference was dramatic.
So I think signposting, giving our students a little bit more help can help. But yeah, absolutely. When you say what did you learn? It's interesting sometimes you know what answer you get and how far it is from what your objectives were.
So that research that you mentioned, I suppose that's the rationale for, at the beginning of a lesson, telling students the aim of a class. And in some way there, I guess you're priming students, aren't you? You're kind of saying to them, the most important thing in this lesson that I want you to pay attention to is the past simple. Because of course, if you don't say that, then I guess you really leave it up to chance a little bit for what students are actually going pay attention to.
Well, and that would very much link with processing pauses. So whether you want to label it and say, OK, it's the simple past, I'm a firm believer in it. I know a lot of other teachers aren't.
Or whether you say we're going to learn how to talk in the past, or we're going to learn how to explain something that happened to us in the past. So they're aware of that. But then when in the lesson have you covered that, that you then need to remind them that this is it.
So let's stop and let's think, OK, so what have we just done and why? And what can you do now? And then I think that combination will ultimately make your lesson maybe more learnable, but definitely more memorable.