News

“Attention Please Class”! Practical ways to get it…. We recently flagged an excellent overview of attention regulation skills, which was great on the principles but whose scope wasn’t to cover practical classroom strategies. So, conveniently those clever people at Edutopia have just released “30 ways to bring calm to noisy classrooms”. There are a couple of the usual favourites (teachers hand goes up to signal silence and focus, everyone else mimics), to some we hadn’t heard of but have to be worth a go: ‘The Silent Spot’, ‘The Magic Wand’ and ‘The Remote Control’. Or how about ‘The Silent Typist’? In a document linked to the big screen, begin typing the description of an essay that will be assigned if the room doesn’t quieten down. If you reach typing out the due date …. then everyone has to do the assignment. So far, apparently, the due date has never yet

Learning’s Silent Killer: The Transient Information Effect Given what a killer it is for learning, we’ve long thought that there isn’t enough importance placed on how to teach for “The Transient Information Effect” – when important information disappears before learners can process it. And so, we were excited to receive this incredibly timely substack from Dr Nidhi Sachdeva, in conversation with the OG of Cognitive Load Theory, Dr. John Sweller, which provides a really good overview of a) what  it is and b) some excellent classroom ways to deal with it. In a nutshell, if what you are trying to communicate is complex, put it in permanent form (written, drawings etc) because if it’s in verbal form or your written material disappears too quickly from sight (i.e. it’s transient), it’s less likely to be remembered. Dr Sachdeva has also included a nicely constructed micro lesson on it all too. Comprehensive

Attention Regulation Skills: Inhibition, Working Memory and Cognitive Flexibility The team at the Center for Curriculum Redesign have released an excellent read that looks at the complex concept of executive functions (EFs) and their crucial role in learning. The paper seeks to clarify the current splurge of research in EF, and proposes a user friendly framework that defines EFs as “Attention-Regulation Skills” comprising: Inhibition Working Memory Cognitive Flexibility  The authors dig into how these EFs develop across a lifespan, their plasticity, and the effectiveness of training interventions, noting that while EFs are highly heritable, they are influenced by environmental and cultural factors. The document concludes by highlighting what we’d describe as high level principles (rather than practical implementation guidance) for education, particularly regarding optimising learning environments to minimise distractions and managing cognitive load in the context of increasing digital device use. The framework is, in our view, really solid, and

Study Mode … Coming for our jobs?  Chat GPT’s Study Mode has, perhaps coincidentally, been released to the public whilst teachers in the Northern Hemisphere are away on holiday. If you haven’t used it yet, then you absolutely must have a go. It is genuinely impressive – and has already helped me with my childhood bête noir of re-arranging equations!! There are countless reviews out there about what it offers, but it does genuinely seem like a tool which, at the very least, will do significant damage to the already under threat personal tutoring market. Whilst existing personalised AI tutors have been with us for a while already, and the likes of Khamigo are probably big enough to weather the storm, a raft of smaller providers aimed at schools will now be feeling somewhat poleaxed that the big LLM boys have trained their guns on this space. What does it