An A-Z of key concepts for educators

A is for active learning. That is to say, learning that involves the students doing something, rather than sitting and listening to a teacher or instructor talk/lecture. Of course, it’s a little difficult to define what that something should be – what counts as active. If listening to a talk isn’t considered active, then is reading? What about filling in a worksheet? In short, there is near universal agreement that active learning is a good thing, but defining it is another matter. A pragmatic approach is to ask, ‘what does the learner need to do?’ If it is the teacher/instructor that is doing all of the work, then the activity is probably not an example of active learning.

B is for brain, and there are no shortage of people who will tell you that educators need to understand the brain better, or that their preferred education ideas are ‘brain based’. Of course, the brain does underlie all of a student’s learning and behaviour; it is the thinking organ, and therefore responsible for everything that goes through our minds. All the same – or, perhaps, because of this very fact – claims of techniques being brain based should be treated with skepticism, even though they often appear convincing. Every learning technique involves the the brain, but so what? We can’t scan the brains of learners while they are in class, and we have no way of knowing if the latest fad is having more of an effect on their brains than the previous one did.

C is for creativity; sometimes dubbed one of the ’4 Cs of 21st Century skills’, creativity can be defined as making something that is both new and useful. Usually, rather than a totally novel invention, it refers to putting existing elements together in a new way, or putting something to a new use. This is reflected in tests of creativity such as Guilford’s multiple uses test, where people are asked to think of as many uses as they can for an everyday object such as a brick (since the time that I first drafted this post, I attended a CPD session where we did exactly this!). More broadly, C is for cognition, a term that refers to a wide range of mental processes and sub-processes including creativity, attention, memory, and many others. A major recent trend in education is the application of cognitive science/cognitive psychology to teaching. Follow the #CogSciSci hashtag on Twitter for more about how cognitive science can be applied to science teaching – most of the examples are relevant to other subjects too. Click here for more about creativity.

D is for distributed practice. This is an evidence-based teaching technique that applies to all subjects and settings, and is also known as the ’spacing effect’. The basic principle is very simple; when does learning and practice occur? According to the principle…

Read on: I have explored these and more on Medium.

You can also download the whole A-Z guide right here.

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For more on these and many other education concepts, check out my co-authored book, Psychology in the Classroom.