Dear Parents and Carers,

As a school, we aim for our students to become lifelong learners. To help do this we as teachers are continuously learning and developing our knowledge of current practice and educational research. We study for at least four years to learn what we need to begin our professional journey including child development, health and well-being and the knowledge, skills and effective teaching strategies in each curriculum area. Then when we enter the profession, we continue learning about new and updated research about how children learn and look to apply it in our classrooms. We are always striving for the strategy and thinking that will have the greatest impact.

This year, as part of Catholic Education’s Catalyst project, our teachers are undertaking in learning in the Science of Learning and Cognitive Load Theory.  As part of this project, our classroom teachers engaged with Mrs. Debbie Neilson from COGlearn on Monday. She will be working with us this year on our High Impact Teaching Practices as we fine-tune and re-shape some of the practices at our school to have the greatest impact on the learning of our students.

 High Impact Teaching Strategies are based on a number of sources of research. One significant area is called Cognitive Load Theory (CLT). CLT is simply the understanding that in our learning environment there are limitless amounts of information for us to access and learn from, i.e. everything we see, hear, taste, touch, smell, etc. Our body and brain notices, collects and filters this into our working memory, a temporary holding space for processing the information - sorting it, connecting it to ideas, and relating it to previous knowledge. The problem is that our working memory is not limitless. In fact, it can hold only 4-7 items in there at once as it processes them. Learning happens when the information we take into our working memory is organised into larger concepts, understandings and complex skills and then moved into our long-term memory. The long-term memory is limitless. The real skill is to be able to retrieve these facts, concepts, understandings and skills when we need them and in some cases develop 'automaticity'.

Have you ever driven home from work and wondered 'How did I get home? I don't remember that drive?' Well that is because driving is an automatic skill for you and the path from work to home is also an automatic path.

When you first learnt to drive, you were consciously thinking of all the little things you had to do, e.g. check mirrors, change gears, operate pedals, remember road rules, etc. These were all separate aspects being processed in your working memory. The more you practised, the more you started to develop patterns and order to your behaviours. You did not have to remember separate steps, just one pattern of steps. You also developed a greater awareness about typical driver behaviours on the road, and the paths to get to familiar venues, enabling you to predict your journey and anticipate what you will need to do. Driving became automatic. Some of the journeys you undertook became automatic too. Especially those you took on a daily basis.

The same theory of learning can be applied to everything we do at school, from reading, to sport skills, to music and mathematics. This understanding about learning helps us to shape highly effective teaching and learning experiences for our students. We ask questions such as:

• How many new ideas can we teach at one time to not overload a student's working memory?
• What knowledge and skills do the students already have with which to connect the new ideas and experiences to, enabling them to move it to their long-term memory?
• What strategies can we use to help students practise recalling the information and skills they learn to help it become embedded in their long-term memory and automatic?

The more we unpack the research, the more we realise that our genetics play a smaller role in our learning than we realise. It is the environment, the opportunities and the learning we experience that has the greater impact on achieving our potential. It is also the belief we have in ourselves and the persistence and resilience we show in the face of challenging learning that also plays a major role.

God bless.

Rachel Smith
Principal