Teaching and Learning

Australian Maths Competition  

Exciting news - I get asked almost every day if the results are out. The good news, is that I received an email today, letting me know that our results are out and the certificates are on the way. Once I receive them, I will send a Compass message letting parents know when I will be presenting certificates to the top performers in each level at an assembly.

Learning Routines

You may or may not have been hearing the phrase, 'Cognitive Load Theory' through the media, educators or in articles about how students learn best. This theory is based on research that looks at how information is passed from working memory to long term memory. Learning occurs when new information has been transferred to long term memory.

In simple terms, it is believed that the human brain can only process around 6 new chunks of information at a time. It is therefore paramount that a person's working memory is not taken up with unnecessary extraneous cognitive load. As a result of this research, our staff are undertaking professional development about how we can reduce overloading our students with unnecessary distractions and information through introducing learning routines. Once learning routines are in place, a person's cognitive load is freed up to learn new information. 

You may hear your children talking about some of the strategies the teachers are trying across the school, such as routines when using small whiteboards in the classroom. You could hear words like 'hover, chin it, reset'.

As a school, we will be working on developing school wide consistent learning routines to ensure that we give our students the best chance of being able to process new learning and transfer this information into their long term memory where it can be recalled and applied when needed. (Please be mindful this is a very simplistic definition of CLT - but I wanted to share what we are doing and why we are doing it).