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  • Support for early career teachers
  • Teach First
  • Year 2: Second half term: revisit how you support pupils to develop subject-specific skills
    • Autumn week 2

    Mentor materials

    Discussion - integrating strategies to support the working memory in classroom practice

    Duration: 60 minutes.

    Outcome

    By the end of this session your ECT will have:

    • articulated why it’s important to avoid working memory overload
    • identified 2 tricky concepts in their subject or phase
    • considered the prior knowledge needed by pupils to access these concepts
    • worked collaboratively to break the material in these tricky concepts into smaller steps
    • considered the most effective way to teach these steps, taking into account pupils’ working memory capacity

    Reference materials

    Key questions and talking points

    1. What are the key skills you have identified that your pupils will need to develop for your current scheme of learning, unit or topic?
    2. How have you identified the concepts, knowledge and skills needed?
    3. Select 1 subject-specific skill. What prior knowledge would pupils need to have?
    4. Have you identified the foundational knowledge pupils will need to have and the vocabulary they will need to know?
    5. What instructional procedures or strategies will you implement to develop key skills (consider those shared in the training session)?
    6. How can you break down 1 key skill into smaller steps (its component parts)?
    7. Why does breaking down content into smaller steps or parts support a pupil’s working memory?
    8. Why is it important to avoid overloading the working memory?
    9. How else could you support your pupil’s working memory? (prompt for - clear expositions or retrieval and spaced practice, combining graphics and visuals, and so on.)
    10. Let’s agree on an area of focus for this half term, linked to developing subject-specific skills.