Oliver was a special school head teacher for a decade before becoming a trainer and author. During his decades in special schools he learned the behavioural analysis taught by educational psychologists and used the design education he received at home from his architect father, to create a range of visual teaching strategies. He has continued this pursuit by becoming an information designer and helping authors gain a wider readership through illustration and book design. His own book — Dual Coding With Teachers — was praised by professor Paul Kirschner as being “a monumental work”. It’s certainly different and represents his quest to ‘magazinify’ educational books.
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Lethal mutation, transient information and professional amnesia are some of the background reasons for the birth of the WalkThrus (a.k.a. Doorloopjes).
Discover how precise descriptions and visual depictions combine to address these problems. And then how an array of online resources support the introduction of Instructional Coaching personalised to school and individual routes of development.
Until recently, organisation was considered to be a lower-order skill. Cognitive scientists, Fiorella and Mayer, place it at the centre of their model of learning. This presentation explains why ‘word-diagrams’ (aka graphic organisers) are one of the best ways to organise ideas for teaching and understanding. During the course of this explanation, you all also learn about the Extended Mind and catch up on related Cognitive Load Theory developments.
There are two major reasons why dual coding works in the classroom. One it addresses the problem of the vanishing words in teacher explanations, and, two, it offers an easier route to understanding meaning than words alone. We will both experience what this feels like, as well as learn the research behind these situations. Then, a solution. I will teach the participants a topic that is unfamiliar to them such that they will demonstrate perfect recall by virtue of a sequence of activities based around peer explanation and embodied cognition.
Starting with Baddeley’s memory model that integrates Ebbinghaus’ habits for retrieval with Barlett’s linking of memory to schema, the focus moves to the impact of organising information. Reif’s hierarchy of knowledge structures is examined and then linked to the hierarchies within which individual words can be identified — and the role that has in encoding and retrieval.
Stories and activities embellish the concepts.
After introducing dual coding via immersion activities and links to cognitive load theory, I move on to methods to improve personal practice. We will look at the fundamental building blocks of: napkin sketching, sketchnoting, graphic organisers, infographics and general design principles that can be applied to PowerPoint and Word documents.
This session should see you launch your own practice in dual coding, so come along with pencil and paper.
