Edssential article from @GoldfishBowlMM :
‘What students think about is what they will remember.’ Daniel Willingham
I had a lesson this week which seemed to be successful: students worked hard, produced lots of work and some great poetry. When I reflected on exactly what they had learnt, I realised that they had no real understanding of what a sonnet was. It wasn’t exactly a lesson wasted, but the fact was that they had barely concentrated on the main point.
In Visible Learning and the Science of How We Learn, Hattie and Yates state that “…learning occurs effectively once the mind responds to a meaningful experience through making a meaningful response.” Lessons must be constructed around the thinking that we want to take place, otherwise they don’t learn anything. In the example above, I wanted the thinking to be about the sonnet form, but students actually thought about the content of their poems.