Brain Based Teaching & Learning: Reflection Part 5

Only by truly attaching meaning and understanding to learning will my students retain what they have learned. When faced with “research on retention indicat[ing] that 70 to 90 percent of new learning is forgotten within 18 to 24 hours,” (Sousa, 2006, p. 70) I am even more motivated as a teacher to actively employ these strategies to help my students make connections. As previously discussed, to help my students to retain this knowledge, I must create an emotionally safe classroom and help students to attach meaning and emotion to learning. As students make these connections, I want to challenge them to take more ownership of their learning by having them teach the material to others. Supported by the statistic that students retain 90 percent of what they teach others after 24 hours (Sousa, 2006), activities such as presentations, “jigsaw,” “find someone who,” and “quiz, quiz, trade” are effective strategies to encourage long term retention. I also want to better monitor my students’ retention through more accurate assessment methods. I am very convinced by the argument that announced assessments and word banks test more for working memory than for long term memory (Sousa, 2006). While I do not plan on eliminating all forms of announced assessments, I now see the benefit of more regular unannounced assessments in order to determine what my students are actually learning and to strategize how to re-teach material that has been missed. Through these methods, I hope to have a better grasp of what my students are actually thinking about, learning, and retaining in my future classroom.