What are three things you can do in
your classroom that are basically free,
that can maximize learning by 50%? That's what
we're going over today in this episode. Welcome
to neuroeducation. where we're exploring the neuroscience of
how to switch on the brain to supercharge learning. I'll be sharing
with you innovative teaching techniques, effective parenting strategies,
and educational advocacy. I'm your host, Angie Dee.
Together, let's revolutionize children's learning. Hello
and welcome back to Neuroeducation with Angie Dee.
Thank you so much for tuning in. If
you are one of those teachers that blow
out your budget on resources, buying a million things,
laminating a thousand sheets and printing
off endless worksheets for your kids and blowing out your printing
budget, this episode is for you. Often
as a teacher, we try to buy
cute little accessories for the classroom. buying
so many worksheets. I'm definitely even guilty of
it, even though I tried to create the most hands-on learning environment. When
we had to capture a worksheet, you're paying somebody from
teachers pay teachers or somebody. And what
we're doing is spending a huge amount of money on printing
and hands-out. Well, what can we do that
is double the maximization of
the learning benefit for the kids? where we don't have to spend
money on all those extra handouts, resources
that is coming out of our own budget. Amazingly,
it's the children, the environment that
they're in. We can maximize what they're doing to
increase the learning by half, if not more,
by helping the children work together. Sometimes
this is tricky, you might have somebody say oh but I don't want to work
with so-and-so or like she doesn't like me. But
once you set standards in your classroom for
when we're moving into group work that
everyone moves into the group regardless and
we treat each other with kindness You build
slowly strategies and an
expectation that we move in with ease and grace and
it gets better and better. So something like
a group discussion or a group project, what's
the benefit? Well, if we go back
to the learning pyramid and we look, what is the best
method of learning on the learning pyramid? The
three top ones, Out
of the three top ones, two involve peer
interactions. So as a recap, the
lowest form of retention for any kind of learning is
a lecture. 5% retention is
the average expectation. If you go to
audio and visual, we have an expectation of around
20% of learning retention. If we go up,
to a classroom discussion or a group discussion, we
got up to 50% retention on learning rates. So
right there, if we stop and think about that, we
have 5% of a lecture, which when we're time
poor, often we do as teachers, we talk
to the students and we just telling them about the content.
And if they're only retaining 5% of that, and here as
the alternative, you have something that you can do
by activating the children to work together that
increases that by 50% well it's
50% retention so it's increasing it by much more than 50%. So
here we have a very simple strategy that you can
activate. There are fantastic examples all
over the internet of what you can do in a
group discussion that can activate the children. Each
child can share what they learn. Maybe they can read some content
or they watch content and then they have to share. Okay, what was
the most important thing that they got out of that? And then
maybe they have to work out something where they bring it back to the classroom to share
the most important points of whatever the content or
the subject was that they learned from. By doing this,
the children are learning from each other and they're
also engaging in classroom discussion. This
hits two of our top
tier learning strategies on the learning pyramid. 50% at
classroom or group discussion, and the very top
tier 90 to 95% retention if you're peer
teaching. Just by doing this simple strategy in a classroom,
getting the children to work together in a group, share what
they learnt from whatever the learning content was, and
then prepare in some way to share with the classroom, they're
having to discuss what they learned. They're having to share their
understanding and they're listening to the other children share
their understanding. This, by far, is
one of the simplest strategies that we can implement
that's maximizing learning. And what is it doing? It's making learning
more enjoyable for the children. Once they learn
how to work in groups more cohesively, What we
have is something that is absolutely fabulous
for their social development, for their social interactions and
their social connections. Now, as an adult, I
want to ask you, how do you enjoy learning the best? When
is the last time you had a discussion with a friend that
really made you think? And you walked away from that conversation being
like, wow, I'm going to look more into that. Or that you
really learned something. And what was it doing just
from having that personal one-to-one interaction? So
once again, what is one of the best ways we
can increase learning from 5% retention to 50, or if not 90% retention?
just by adding classroom interaction, just by getting students to
work together, to talk to each other, to share their understanding. When
we did this in one classroom, it was amazing to
see how much children learn
and also what was so dramatically different
that one child picked up to another. When I studied my
Montessori specialization, I actually had
a fantastic experience and I was learning
online. And a lot of people say, I can't learn online because there
was no interaction. But amazingly, this simple
kind of group discussion that we had to do online really
maximized my learning. And
Montessori has multi-age levels
of classrooms, usually in ages 3 to
6, and then ages 6 to 9, 9 to 12, 12 to
15, and 15 to 18. And this also allows for the older
children to be able to help guide and nurture some of the younger children, and
a lot of these things to happen naturally in a Montessori environment. Ironically,
in my own learning, my professional learning, studying
Montessori after I did my Bachelor of Education, I was
able to come back to this very similar method of education, but
it was online and it was the most interactive
method of education that I felt I did in my entire teaching
from studying my Diploma of Early Childhood, my Bachelor of Education
and then doing my Montessori. If I look at all of that, my
in-person Bachelor of Education and my in-person Diploma
of Early Childhood was much
less interactive, ironically, than my
specialization in Montessori, because we constantly had to
give each other feedback. We had to share our understanding, then
read somebody else's input, and then comment on
their input. And so what I found was not
only was I learning so much from the content, I was learning
so much from everybody else's understanding. And
this is what we do in life, is it not? When you go to
a friend's house and we have a dinner party, what are we
doing? We're sharing what we're learning and what we're experiencing in life. And
we have to say that we learn so much from our
friends and our family around us. And what is that through? Just
through simple discussions, which we can do in our
classrooms for free to maximize learning. So
Thank you for listening in. I hope you enjoyed this
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