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  • Support for early career teachers
  • Teach First
  • Year 2: Second half term: revisit how to anticipate and address common misconceptions in your subject or phase
    • Spring week 2

    Induction tutor materials

    Training session - using meaningful and memorable explanations

    Duration: 90 minutes

    Session objectives

    By the end of the session early career teachers (ECTs) will have:

    • understood that engagement can be a poor proxy for learning
    • explored the importance of ensuring pupils’ thinking is focused on what you want them to learn
    • identified strategies to make abstract concepts meaningful
    • identified strategies to make steps in a process memorable
    • practised incorporating identified strategies into an explanation

    Session structure

    Introduction (10 minutes)

    Settling task: Ask ECTs to reflect on:

    • how do you remember complex or new information?
    • what techniques or strategies do you use?

    Explain the purpose of the training session, session outcomes and the related early career framework (ECF) statements.

    Committing information to long term memory (10 minutes)

    1. Present the quote ‘Memory is the residue of thought’ by Daniel Willingham and explore this idea. Note to ECTs that we remember what we focus our thinking on.
    2. Link this to classroom practice with a scenario. For example, a teacher introducing the concept of units of measurement by getting pupils to make a cake mixture.
    3. Ask ECTs to reflect on the scenario: Where is the pupil’s attention in this activity? What are they focusing their thinking on? Drawing out that pupils’ thinking is likely to be on the activity of making the cake (for example: whose turn is next, who gets to pour in the chocolate powder) rather than thinking about the different units of measurements.
    4. Link this to the next section of the session on how to make explanations memorable for pupils.

    Strategies to make explanations memorable (5 minutes)

    Introduce key strategies that will support in making explanations memorable. We suggest:

    • analogies
    • metaphors
    • mnemonics
    • stories

    Making explanations meaningful and memorable (55 minutes)

    Select 2 of the above strategies and explore them in more detail.

    Outline how these strategies make explanations more meaningful and memorable by:

    • linking information to prior knowledge
    • providing memory cues

    Provide an example and non-example of the strategy in your subject or phase.

    Ask ECTs to analyse the example and non-example to identify what makes them effective and less effective.

    Activity: Get ECTs to work in pairs or small groups to identify how they would use one of the strategies explored to introduce new learning to pupils. Get them to script this as part of an explanation.

    Next steps and close (10 minutes)

    Ask ECTs to reflect on the learning from the session and record their actions and next steps related to their classroom practice. Options include re-visiting certain areas of the course, talking with their mentor, watching another teacher, planning to adapt their practice, and more.

    How pupils learn

    • 2.2 Prior knowledge plays an important role in how pupils learn; committing some key facts to their long-term memory is likely to help pupils learn more complex ideas. 

    • 2.5 Long-term memory can be considered as a store of knowledge that changes as pupils learn by integrating new ideas with existing knowledge.

    Classroom practice

    • 4h Using concrete representation of abstract ideas (for example, making use of analogies, metaphors, examples and non-examples).  

    • 4j Making the steps in a process memorable and ensuring pupils can recall them (for example, naming them, developing mnemonics, or linking to memorable stories).