21st October 2022
HEADLINES
By James Saunders
SPACED LEARNING I would like to thank our whole community for such an amazing start to the term. If you have had an opportunity to visit during the day you will have seen focused, polite and happy learners engaged in their learning and a calm and purposeful climate. I am proud of the hard work of our staff and learners. Without them, none of this would be possible. It has certainly been a busy, and at times intense, start to the term. Everyone now deserves a well earned rest over the half term break. Each half term and holiday I usually find a TV show that I have heard about and binge watch it in one go. It is the only time I have to keep up with the zeitgeist. The notion of binge watching is something that was just not a part of my childhood or indeed early adulthood. I guess it all started with box sets but more recently is available through online streaming such as Netflix or Disney+. My longest session was season 1-3 of 24; it was exhausting - 72 episodes back-to-back. Why am I going on about box sets? I want to take the opportunity to talk about spaced learning. Spaced learning is connected to the process of moving learning from short term to long term memory - this is what ensures greater exam success. I would like to use boxsets as a way to illustrate this concept. You see when a regular series like Game of Thrones is broadcast each episode tends to be a week apart. When I look back on my 24 days, the one series that stands out in my memory is series eight: the one that I watched every Sunday for 24 weeks. Sure, I can remember parts of series 1-3 but I don’t remember them as clearly as series eight and I don’t feel as emotionally invested in the characters - because I didn’t commit as much to my long term memory. Each episode started with a recap of the previous week. Just as the memory of what happened before was fading, this little recap helped to bring it back to the front of my mind so that the next part of the story would be easier to follow. By
watching the series this way, the way it was originally intended, I was able to learn and remember so much more of the narrative and plot. Each weekly revisit and refocus helped to move what I had learnt from my short term to my long term memory in a way that never happened when I watched the whole thing in one go. Now let’s apply that to learning. Imagine that you learn a load of stuff in a short space of time (just like a binge watch) and then test yourself on it at the end. Imagine you do quite well in that test. Does it mean you have learnt it? The real test is if you were to test yourself again a day, a week, a month or a year later. If all we do is commit stuff to our short term memory we are not really learning. This brings me onto spaced learning. It supports the way our brains actually work, according to basic neuroscience and psychology research. Spaced learning involves a series of short, intense learning sessions with increased learner participation, separated by short intervals in which learners do a completely different activity (Emsley, 2016). Spaced learning is often paired up with a method known as interleaving: Interleaving refers to the benefits of sequencing learning tasks so that similar items – two examples of the same concept, say – are interspersed with different types of items rather than being consecutive. This results in a more variable and challenging task but is associated with benefits in terms of memory and transfer, which apply to concept learning as well as other domains (Kang, 2016). Combined, these two methods really represent what happens when comparing a binge watch to watching over time. Recently I have seen a lot of teachers doing tests with their class to check their understanding of the content that has been taught this term. I have done this myself in my computing lesson. However,