Psychology in the Classroom

Exam season is now in full swing and we are all really trying to encourage students to move away from the comfortable passive revision strategies such as reading and highlighting notes and get them to engage in more retrieval practice with flashcards and mindmaps. This week I talk to psychology teacher, Jonny Wainman about how he teaches his students study skills, we cover a wide range of topics and if you want do dive a bit deeper into the different concepts he mentioned you can find much more on the links below:

Cognition & Learning: https://changingstatesofmind.com/cognition-and-learning-1

Exam prep mini series: https://changingstatesofmind.com/mini-series

My guest this week is Dr Michelle Tytherleigh author of Positive Education at all Levels: Learning to Flourish, and we are talking about how we can use positive psychology in the classroom to students to flourish. Martin Seligman asked two questions:

• In two words or less what do you want for your children?
• In two words or less what do most schools teach?

To answer these questions so that the responses are not contradictory or incompatible Positive Education recognises the need to incorporate wellbeing into education, into the everyday learning experience and needs to involve the whole community - teachers, leaders, parents and student. In this podcast we look at how we can do just this.

Link to Michelle's book: https://books.emeraldinsight.com/download_pdf.php?k=9781837531578

Link to Worthit: https://www.worthit.org.uk/

Dr Charl Emmerson is an Organisational Psychologist who has worked in schools and researches wellbeing in schools. In this interview we are discussing teacher wellbeing at both an individual level and an organisational level. WIth top tips of teachers and leadership on creating a supportive culture. In addition we discuss how SEND impacts teacher wellbeing

Key papers/links:

NASUWT study findings on pupil behaviour: https://edexec.co.uk/verbal-and-physical-pupil-abuse-skyrockets-in-the-past-year-says-nasuwt-report/

Importance of teacher-pupil relationship:https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10648-011-9170-y

Pupil wellbeing - teacher wellbeing:https://www.sueroffey.com/wp-content/uploads/import/32-Roffey%20ECP29-4.pdf

Charl’s research with University of Sheffield: EU-funded project looking at developing compassionate workplaceshttps://www.sheffield.ac.uk/iwp/research-projects/eu-cowork

Education Support Partnership:https://www.educationsupport.org.uk/

This week I am joined by Professor David Daley from Nottingham Trent University to talk about Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. ADHD is something that most teachers will come across at some point and managing it well in the classroom can make a huge difference to outcomes for young people with ADHD. In this episode we cover the main psychological underpinnings of the disorder and how these manifest in the classroom as behaviour. David also offers some really useful tips on how to help young people with ADHD manage in the classroom.

You can find more on executive function, working memory and cognitive psychology here: https://changingstatesofmind.com/cognition-and-learning-3

You can learn even more about ADHD here: https://changingstatesofmind.com/send-and-inclusion

The teaching profession is in crisis and whilst it can be an extraordinarily rewarding and it is also an exhausting profession so self-care is essential. As a regular diary keeper I was curious to find out just how this might be helping my own wellbeing. Dr Lucy Kelly is an Associate Professor in Education in the School of Education whose main research interest is reflective practice as a positive tool for educator wellbeing, and she is Principal Investigator for the 'Reimagining the Diary' project. Lucy talks about how our narrow concept of what diary keeping is could be a barrier to engaging with it, how it can many benefits and how we can engage with a broader and more creative concept of diary keeping.

If you want to find out more about Lucy’s work here are the links:

The Diary Toolkit: https://thediarytoolkit.com/

Reimagining the Diary (Book): https://www.johncattbookshop.com/products/reimagining-the-diary-reflective-practice-as-a-positive-tool-for-educator-wellbeing

More about the project itself: https://reimaginingthediary.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/

In this episode Dr Hannah Wilkinson talks about her doctoral research which focused on re-evaluating teachers’ use of test-taking practices from a psychological lens; unpicking how students appraised these types of communications and how it affects their engagement in the classroom. Essentially we will consider the messages that we, as teachers, give to students when we talk about exam preparation specifically and the different ways that students might interpret these communications and how, hopefully we can make them more impactful. We talk about threat and efficacy appeals. Papers Hannah Mentioned: Wilkinson, H. (2024). Efficacy Appeals in the High-Stakes Classroom: Re-Examining Teachers' use of Test Preparation Strategies (Doctoral dissertation, Liverpool John Moores University): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2215091920300018?casa_token=DxwxBEbesPIAAAAA:TUTqZCb43dZAokxGby9v6k2sfGKV9FosFhbi7Lhux0xjlYsgtYw8Hk_U_GeQjJsdkmWQ13Gw Putwain, D. W., Symes, W., Nicholson, L. J., & Remedios, R. (2021). Teacher motivational messages used prior to examinations: What are they, how are they evaluated, and what are their educational outcomes?. In Advances in motivation science (Vol. 8, pp. 63-103). Elsevier: https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/22471/2/2024wilkinsonphd.pdf

In this episode, and as we fast approach exams, we look at how to help student manage their nerves. There are lots of strategies that can be employed but learning to sit comfortably with the uncomfortable feeling of exam anxiety can be challenging. This episode looks at one way we can help our students to learn to bring their thoughts and feelings under control using a technique stolen from sports psychology, but equally effective for high pressure exam performance situations: visualisation. It allows students to practise their coping skills and to understand that they can manage any exam scenario however terrifying!

For further tips of Exam anxiety strategies do also listen to these two podcasts:

https://changingstatesofmind.libsyn.com/control-the-controllables

https://changingstatesofmind.libsyn.com/exam-preparation-exam-anxiety

This week we look at why exam technique matters - the more working memory students can free up to write good answers, rather than figuring out what they need to do and how long they have got left, the better. This episode covers 5 things that students should practice to help make an exam go smoothly:

• Knowing the rubric

• Overall plan of attack

• Managing timing (including extra time)

• Breaking down the question

• Spotting traps

If you want to know more about working memory and cognitive load there are a couple of good episodes you can listen to here:

Working Memory: https://changingstatesofmind.libsyn.com/long-term-and-short-term-memory

Cognitive Load: https://changingstatesofmind.libsyn.com/cognitive-load-finding-the-sweet-spot-with-bradley-busch

Despite all our efforts to teach students to revise using effective methods they often revert back to less effective methods such as copying and reading and rereading notes. Why is this, when we have told them that these techniques are less effective in the long term? This week's episode looks at 4 common reasons why students revision fails:

• Planning Fallacy
• Illusion of Fluency
• Misinterpreted-effort hypothesis
• Failure to reflect

The link to the episode about Roediger and Karpicke's research is https://changingstatesofmind.libsyn.com/recall-or-re-read-the-research-into-retrieval-practice

The references for Misinterpreted-effort hypothesis is:

Afton Kirk-Johnson, Brian M. Galla, Scott H. Fraundorf, (2019)Perceiving effort as poor learning: The misinterpreted-effort hypothesis of how experienced effort and perceived learning relate to study strategy choice,Cognitive Psychology, Volume 115, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2019.101237.

This week the episode will be based around retrieval practice - a concept most of you will be familiar with, and if you aren’t then do take a listen to this episode which delves into the research underpinning the concept.

Many students when learning, make the error of being passive recipients of information, reading, listening, watching or copying. Whilst a few bits may stick, more information will stick if they actively reconstruct the information through some sort of recall activity.

Today we will cover 4 retrieval concepts you will know but thinking about the why. My hope is that this episode will perhaps reframe some of these basic ideas so that students use them even more effectively.

Just in case the link above doesn't work here it is in full to copy and paste:

https://changingstatesofmind.libsyn.com/recall-or-re-read-the-research-into-retrieval-practice