#009 - How To Increase Children's Learning 🔍📚

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 tip and it would be a massive favor if you could subscribe on YouTube and also give us a five star review on Apple podcast or