Secrets of secondary: How the brain works and how we learn

This blog has been written in collaboration with Nathan Burns, a former Head of Maths, who now works with schools and Universities across the UK (and the world) providing training around metacognition and effective learning.

Are you heading off to secondary school in September? Are you eager to get yourself prepared so that you are ready to learn from the very first day? If you have answered yes and yes to those two questions, then this is the article for you, as I’m going to give you the inside track on how the brain works, memory and have we can improve limit forgetting.

The ‘Jump’

Secondary school can feel like a really big jump for some students when compared to primary school. You go from having one teacher to over 10, or sometimes 20. You have a tutor group, but most of your lessons are with different students. Break and lunch times are often at different times and there is a new timetable to learn. But you know what, you will be fine! As long as you know the differences, ask lots of questions on those first few days in September, and listen really well, you will settle in and start loving secondary school straight away.

For more tips on transitioning smoothly to secondary school, check out our detailed guide here.

But how do I know? I used to be a teacher, the boss of a Maths department, actually. I also did lots of work around primary to secondary transition and was a tutor for many years. So, trust me when I say you will be fine!

Something I know even more about than Maths and getting ready for secondary school is all about the brain. This is my real area of expertise – so I thought I would tell you a little bit about it, so that you could be even more ready for secondary school in September!

The ‘Inside Track’

Why does it matter how we learn? Or how we remember? Or how our memory works? Well, the more we know about these things, the better we will be at learning. We will know more, be able to do more, remember more and find everything far more interesting and far less stressful. Everything I have to say then, should be super helpful!

Memory

Let us start with thinking about memory! Imagine that you have a glass (this is your brain), and it is being filled full of water (these are the facts that you learn in lesson). To begin with, the glass is fine – it is slowly filling up with water. However, as time goes on, the level of the water will go higher and higher, and eventually water will start spilling out of the top. This happens with our memory too. If we are pouring in facts, we are fine to begin with, but as we keep being given more and more facts they begin to ‘overspill’, which means we start to forget some of the facts that we have been told. This isn’t good! Fortunately, your teachers will teach you in such a way that this shouldn’t happen. However, when you are doing homework and revision outside school you need to think about this. If you are trying to learn too many facts at once, your cup will start to overspill, and you will forget some of the information!

How We Learn

Let us now move on to how we learn. Firstly, I want you to imagine a big box full of tools – hammers, screwdrivers, saws and so forth. This is our long-term memory. Secondly, I want you to imagine a workbench, which has just one spanner on it. This is our short-term memory.

Our brain is split into short and long-term memory. Short-term memory are facts and pieces of information that we have just been told. Long-term memory are facts and pieces of information that we can definitely remember and have known for a long time, like our name or our birthday.

In a lesson, we get taught a new skill or fact. This is our spanner. We practice doing things with it, like tightening different types and sizes of nuts and bolts. Once we have done enough practice with it, we can put it into our toolbox, which are all of the different tools that we have been taught and mastered to use before. These are facts and skills we just know.

Passive versus Active Learning

Let us go back a step. Imagine that you were being shown how to use this spanner. You were listening a little bit, and doing some of the work, but not all of it. We would call this passive thinking. If you listened to everything really well, then challenged yourself with all of the questions, even where they got very difficult, we would call this active learning.

The biggest difference between passive and active learning then is on how hard your brain is having to think. Things like copying down information, doing the same type of question over and over again, and peaking back at previous answers when you get a little bit stuck, don’t make you think very hard, so you won’t learn as much. Answering more questions, trying more problems, and trying to remember information you have been told previously makes your brain work really hard and means that you will learn more.

Forgetting

This brings us nicely on to forgetting. Even if you are actively thinking; even if your cup never overflowed with facts; even if you moved that spanner over to the toolkit, it doesn’t mean that you won’t forget how to use it again in the future.

If you didn’t go back to practice with the spanner for a year, you’d probably have forgotten how to use it. You might have even forgotten it after about a month, or even a week. I’m sure that this happened in primary school, too! You probably learnt lots of information, got all your questions right at the time, worked really hard, but a week or two later, had forgotten how to do it.

This is perfectly normal – it’s called forgetting – and we can’t stop this from happening permanently. We can, however, do things to stop us forgetting quite as much. There are lots of top tips I could give you here, but we’ve only space for a couple! The first thing is don’t worry if you forget something. But when you realise you have forgotten something, the important thing to do is re-learn that information (in an active, not passive way). Next time you forget that information, you won’t forget quite as much, and then the next time you’ll forget even less. Finally, you just won’t forget the information at all, like your name or birthday.

The other thing that you can do is to retrieve that information. Let us go back to our toolkit example! The more times that you pull out that spanner from the toolkit, and use it on your workbench, the more confident and comfortable you will be with using it. Therefore, forcing yourself to remember something and to practice a skill helps you to remember it!

Conclusions

That is how the brain works, how we learn, how we forget and how we can slow down forgetting, all in one article. I hope that knowing this information will make you feel a little bit more prepared for September. I wish you every luck in the world with starting in secondary school. You’ve got this!

Teachers – you can follow Nathan on X and connect on LinkedIn. He is always open to emails and is happy to answer questions and provide support

X: @ MrMetacognition (https://twitter.com/MrMetacognition)
LI: Nathan Burns (www.linkedin.com/in/mrmetacognition)
Email: [email protected]

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