Hi everyone and welcome to the Effective Teaching Podcast. I'm your host Dan Today. We're going to continue our series applying House students learn. Now, Have you ever read a novel and found yourself really immersed in the universe that the author has created? You can see the scene. Perhaps it was a beautiful landscape that were described in the Lord of the Rings trilogies or flame of trilogy.
It's longer than that or one of the magic spells cast by Harry and his friends. Although, one thing for sure, as you were reading, you were creating a picture in your mind. You were imagining what it looked like and this is because we think in images. So, as we continue our series looking at applying how students learning your classroom Today.
As you may have guessed we are going to be looking at imagery. Now our mind is very capable of remembering visuals especially if especially if they are familiar to you, You can see that what your house looks like. As you enter the front door, look to your left to your right and straight ahead.
What can you see? I can guarantee that you can recall many specific items from that picture. Perhaps it is a monstera that's growing in the corner or your coat. That's hanging on the hooks. Perhaps you have a table to your right, where you have, just put your keys and your wallet.
You have probably never attempted to memorise any of that stuff as you go into your front entrance of your house. Yet we can all remember our house entry, it is a visual image and that is how our brain works. We find it much easier to remember and recall information, if we store it in an image, pretty much all of those best recalls in the world.
You're the people who go and enter memorising competitions and they memorise decks of cards and stuff like that, and they do other similar feats. They use this kind of a trick. They take a familiar image such as going into a room and they put things in specific places so that they can easily remember the item.
So, for example, they might put a queen with a bleeding heart in the corner at the entrance, then see, five four-leaf clovers on the table. And then on the right, they might see a king with a club in his hands. This then helps them. Remember the queen of hearts, the five of clubs and the king of clubs, If you put them in order, or as you walk into a room and scan for one side to the left, it can be easy to remember things quite quickly, but we don't just want to remember things quickly.
We want to build this into long-term memory and to do this, I want to encourage you to work with your students in creating visuals to summarise. What you teach them? This could be a simple creation of an infographic or a poster on Canva or as complex as a large-scale painting or a sculpture, One of my favourite ideas to implement this idea of visuals is sketch.
Noting Sketch noting is when you take notes but you use visual images, and minimal words to create those notes. These notes are easier to remember because we have made them visual. So, how can you make things visual for your students in your classroom? Perhaps just using images and no words in your PowerPoint presentations, or putting posters around your room to capture key concepts.
You could give your students the challenge of creating great sketch notes or visual mind maps. Again, using images more than words to help them to remember what they're learning, You can even teach us students. The idea of memorising, important facts states, formulae, or concepts using the placement process where you walk into a room and you see what is in the first place?
Then, what is in the second place and so forth, so that they enjoy the success of memorising. Something really quickly. And so just like we did with our card trick basically. So you could even challenge them to see who can memorise 20 items and provide them with some kind of reward or prize or something as they work on this concept and teach them to apply it to other things that they learn.
This whole idea of imagery, I think, is really amazing because it is exactly what we do with our brains Every time that we are learning something or thinking about something. We have a visual that really comes to our head that captures out here, When I say the word phone, you picture a phone, you don't picture the word phone or some concepts of how phones are designed in the back end or program.
I mean, you think of a foam what it looks like. And so this is what we need to do with our students when we're teaching them concepts, when we're teaching them. Ideas is to actually attach these ideas to images and the more that we can do that for them and show them how it's done or the more that we can train them to attach things to images, the greater and easier, it'll be for them to be able to recall things later on and that will help set them up for success in their learning.
Well, that's it for this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Please let me know if you did. You could leave a review or you could shoot me an email, you can come and connect with me on Instagram or something like that. I would love to hear from you but do make sure you hit the subscribe button.
Come back and join us again next week. When it continue this little series, looking at applying how students learn So come and join me. And remember to invite other teachers as well to come and enjoy this series. I think it is so pivotal for us as teachers to understand this.
Thank you so much.
