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Memorable Teaching: Leveraging memory to build deep and durable learning in the classroom
"If you have a spare half-hour or so, you could read Memorable Teaching from cover to cover. I doubt you'll find an education book with more useful insights per minute of reading time." - Dylan Wiliam - Emeritus Professor of Educational Assessment, UCL
This book is for any educator who’s interested in understanding how learning works, and how to optimise their teaching to make it happen.
From the author of Lean Lesson Planning, this latest instalment in the High Impact Teaching series pulls together the best available evidence from cognitive science and educational research, and stitches them together into a concise and coherent set of actionable principles to improve your impact in the classroom.
POWER UP YOUR TEACHING
It's an evidence-informed teacher's guide to building enduring understanding, and sits alongside books such as Make It Stick, Why Don't Students Like School?, and What Every Teacher Needs To Know About Psychology.
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CONTENTS
Act I PreliminariesWhy memory?Memory architectureThe 9 principlesAct II Manage Orient Streamline Regulate Expedite Refine Stabilise Align Embed metacognitionPRAISE FOR MEMORABLE TEACHING
"I can't remember when I have ever read a book that takes such complex ideas and communicates them with sophistication and simplicity." - Oliver Caviglioli, Founder and author of HOW2s
"The book packs an awful lot of useful material into a short, easy to read format and as such is something that all teachers should add to their collections." - Josh Goodrich, Head of CPD at Oasis Southbank
"A truly excellent book which sets out the science behind learning with remarkable clarity." - Mark Enser, Head of Geography at Heathfield Community College
This book is for any educator who’s interested in understanding how learning works, and how to optimise their teaching to make it happen.
From the author of Lean Lesson Planning, this latest instalment in the High Impact Teaching series pulls together the best available evidence from cognitive science and educational research, and stitches them together into a concise and coherent set of actionable principles to improve your impact in the classroom.
POWER UP YOUR TEACHING
It's an evidence-informed teacher's guide to building enduring understanding, and sits alongside books such as Make It Stick, Why Don't Students Like School?, and What Every Teacher Needs To Know About Psychology.
---
CONTENTS
Act I PreliminariesWhy memory?Memory architectureThe 9 principlesAct II Manage Orient Streamline Regulate Expedite Refine Stabilise Align Embed metacognitionPRAISE FOR MEMORABLE TEACHING
"I can't remember when I have ever read a book that takes such complex ideas and communicates them with sophistication and simplicity." - Oliver Caviglioli, Founder and author of HOW2s
"The book packs an awful lot of useful material into a short, easy to read format and as such is something that all teachers should add to their collections." - Josh Goodrich, Head of CPD at Oasis Southbank
"A truly excellent book which sets out the science behind learning with remarkable clarity." - Mark Enser, Head of Geography at Heathfield Community College
113 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 28, 2017
64 people are currently reading
134 people want to read
About the author
Peps Mccrea
14 books13 followersPeps Mccrea is an award-winning teacher educator, designer and author. He is Dean of Learning Design at Ambition Institute, author of the High Impact Teaching series, and holds fellowships from the Young Academy and University of Brighton. Peps has three Masters degrees, two lovely kids, and dances like no one is watching, which is probably for the best. Visit pepsmccrea.com for the full shebang.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
May 31, 2019
OMG. Where to start? As an experienced and (in my eyes) committed teacher, I am astonished, somewhat confused, and most of all disturbed that this ‘book’ has received favourable reviews from people, who I can only assume are fellow teachers, who I would consider my peers. I begin to doubt myself and wonder if I am a lesser breed of professional for not recognising the (ahem) ‘wisdom’ in this text? How can others see 5 stars, where I see less than zero? So, like I said, where to start? Other reviewers have mentioned the thin-ness and oversized font that would make this more of an hour-long magazine article than a book, and I agree, but really, it’s the content that is utterly devoid of substance, totally lacking, unworthy of mention, and utter, utter, complete tripe. Please allow me to include a few examples to highlight what the author, Peps Mccrea, is selling us here for £11 a pop: “Having a clock in plain view can easily trigger tangential (good word) trains of thought, so position it at the back of the room.” That is genius, thank you. Here’s another: “Listening to ambient music using noise cancelling headphones can help people focus in an otherwise noisy environment.” Brilliant! Let’s all reach for our class set of noise cancelling headphones. Or not. There’s more: “Text and speech are efficient tools for communicating meaning, particularly abstract concepts.” You don’t say?! I did not know text and speech could do that. But it never ends: “If you are going to speak for long periods of time, consider building in pauses to allow students to take notes and make sense as you go.” Wow. That is insightful. Thanks. There is so much gut-wrenchingly, painfully obvious tosh in this £11 article (not a book) that I had to physically stop myself several times from hurling it across the room. How can this be 5, 4, 3, 2 stars? Please, fellow reviewers, quote your evidence. I challenge you. My rant continues: “Leveraging (good word) starting stimuli can be useful when we need to quickly change our student’s (students’?) focus of attention. We can provoke this reaction by clapping hands, blowing whistles or ringing bells.” Really?? Pardon me, but holy crap! I will clap my hands more often. More? Go on then: “We can reduce the complexity of any task by breaking it down into its constituent components, and giving our students smaller pieces of the puzzle to tackle.” OK, if I was a naive NQT, or lacked all common sense, this would count as good advice; but that’s an insult to NQTs. Lastly, and most painful of all, comes this gem from Peps on ‘How to store live information during a lesson’: “Capture thinking in class discussions, by writing student contributions on the board as they are given.” Ugh. Kill me now. Are you for real? Reminding qualified teachers to write contributions on the board? I cannot tell you how angry I am that I was tricked into buying this ‘thing’. I do realise that I am ranting here, and I have a lot to get off my chest, but where is the quality? What do others see with their 5 stars that I cannot begin to? Please do enlighten me. Do not, repeat, do not buy this. Avoid at all cost.
September 25, 2023
A (very) short book, designed to enable teachers to improve the outcome of their teaching, by ensuring students maximise their memory of it. But the breadth and brevity of the book ended up making it rather cursory in places.
For example, it referred to the Matthew Effect, as the ‘reaction engine of education.’ But the Matthew Effect itself was not really analysed. Named from the eponymous gospel, the Matthew Effect is the observation that the rich get richer whilst the poor get poorer. This has been observed in reading, where better readers learn everything better. But how is it relevant to education in general? How is it relevant to a Geography teacher? And in what sense is it true that ‘its our job as teachers to catalyse it?’ The book was frustratingly vague on detail like that.
The science of memory is complicated, so it is good that the book simplifies matters. However, in places it tended to oversimplification. For example, we are told that ‘Great teachers don’t just manage what students do in the classroom, they manage what they think.’ (16%). Yes. But surely no (competent) teacher has thought differently since the golden era of behaviourism… which was at least fifty years ago.
The author notes that education is ultimately an interaction between Working Memory (WM) and Long Term memory (LTM). So, the book’s focus is upon WM because it is the threshold to LTM.
To maximise WM, the author gives us nine principles, which aim to ‘harness’ it, ‘direct’ it and ‘amplify’ its impact.
Harnessing WM means eradicating distractions and interruptions. It means simplifying matters by ensuring clarity, brevity, orderliness and relevance. The author is particularly focused upon strategies to ensure ‘attention’ by ‘filtering, following and reacting,’ especially a ‘set’n’stress approach which sets students’ attention explicitly and then stresses what they should be doing to ensure no drifting off task (36%). This makes sense in principle, but what does it look like in practice, especially at different age levels, and in different subject specialisms. Once again, the devil is in the detail, but there wasn’t much detail beyond common sense generalisations.
Where the author did give examples, they were mainly mathematics examples, and that was the case throughout the book. This was so much so that I wondered if this was originally intended as a book for Maths teachers?
One of the questions which many teachers have pondered over the years is whether it is better to plan learning in a spiral ‘spaced learning’ curriculum, or is it better to stay with a topic ‘over-learning’ it, by doing endless repetitive examples, as the text books of yesteryear used to do? Which approach is the best for memory? I think the author’s discussion of ‘spaced learning’ indicates that that was his preferred model, but there was no analysis comparing and contrasting different approaches with cited evidence to confirm the matter.
As the book progressed, its technical scaffolding of what it was saying was clear and apposite, but some of its principles referred to longer term curriculum issues, rather than just the day-by-day of classroom practice. It was at that point where examples referring to specific curriculum models (such as IB or GCSE, etc) would have been helpful, rather than just generalisations.
Overall, this felt like the scaffolding, or essay plan, for a larger more detailed work, which had the potential to be very interesting. However, in this short format of the current book, it just seemed to lack a breadth of examples and detail appropriate to the breadth of the profession.
For example, it referred to the Matthew Effect, as the ‘reaction engine of education.’ But the Matthew Effect itself was not really analysed. Named from the eponymous gospel, the Matthew Effect is the observation that the rich get richer whilst the poor get poorer. This has been observed in reading, where better readers learn everything better. But how is it relevant to education in general? How is it relevant to a Geography teacher? And in what sense is it true that ‘its our job as teachers to catalyse it?’ The book was frustratingly vague on detail like that.
The science of memory is complicated, so it is good that the book simplifies matters. However, in places it tended to oversimplification. For example, we are told that ‘Great teachers don’t just manage what students do in the classroom, they manage what they think.’ (16%). Yes. But surely no (competent) teacher has thought differently since the golden era of behaviourism… which was at least fifty years ago.
The author notes that education is ultimately an interaction between Working Memory (WM) and Long Term memory (LTM). So, the book’s focus is upon WM because it is the threshold to LTM.
To maximise WM, the author gives us nine principles, which aim to ‘harness’ it, ‘direct’ it and ‘amplify’ its impact.
Harnessing WM means eradicating distractions and interruptions. It means simplifying matters by ensuring clarity, brevity, orderliness and relevance. The author is particularly focused upon strategies to ensure ‘attention’ by ‘filtering, following and reacting,’ especially a ‘set’n’stress approach which sets students’ attention explicitly and then stresses what they should be doing to ensure no drifting off task (36%). This makes sense in principle, but what does it look like in practice, especially at different age levels, and in different subject specialisms. Once again, the devil is in the detail, but there wasn’t much detail beyond common sense generalisations.
Where the author did give examples, they were mainly mathematics examples, and that was the case throughout the book. This was so much so that I wondered if this was originally intended as a book for Maths teachers?
One of the questions which many teachers have pondered over the years is whether it is better to plan learning in a spiral ‘spaced learning’ curriculum, or is it better to stay with a topic ‘over-learning’ it, by doing endless repetitive examples, as the text books of yesteryear used to do? Which approach is the best for memory? I think the author’s discussion of ‘spaced learning’ indicates that that was his preferred model, but there was no analysis comparing and contrasting different approaches with cited evidence to confirm the matter.
As the book progressed, its technical scaffolding of what it was saying was clear and apposite, but some of its principles referred to longer term curriculum issues, rather than just the day-by-day of classroom practice. It was at that point where examples referring to specific curriculum models (such as IB or GCSE, etc) would have been helpful, rather than just generalisations.
Overall, this felt like the scaffolding, or essay plan, for a larger more detailed work, which had the potential to be very interesting. However, in this short format of the current book, it just seemed to lack a breadth of examples and detail appropriate to the breadth of the profession.
July 28, 2019
Maybe 4 stars if you’re new to the game or a maths teacher (all the examples are maths) but to be honest this book is simply a gathering of lots of stuff many teachers/schools already know, especially if you’re school is quite research based. The short, concise format is good but, unless you can get this discounted, doesn’t justify the price.
November 23, 2020
A fairly useful compendium of the standard pedagogy that most decent teaching courses should now provide as a minimum.
It's a quick read, clearly written. Nothing original or mind-blowing, but nothing contentious either. All good, common sense.
Will be useful as a source to refer to in PGCE/PGDE essays and provides a nice springboard into other, more rigorous, texts.
It's a quick read, clearly written. Nothing original or mind-blowing, but nothing contentious either. All good, common sense.
Will be useful as a source to refer to in PGCE/PGDE essays and provides a nice springboard into other, more rigorous, texts.
February 9, 2019
This book is short. There is little text on each of the few pages. I am glad I could borrow it from a library. However, I appreciated this clarity, particular as other authors may have made the mistake of padding it out with redundant example.
I also found this book very useful. While more experienced teachers would take the contents of this book for granted, I took a lot from it. I finished it within a day, even while taking comprehensive notes throughout. I appreciated the application of cognitive science principles to develop an evidence-based guide to teaching. While reading it, my brain was buzzing with greater understanding of teaching and learning. It definitely put into words some thoughts I had knocking around in my head.
I plan on reading Peps Mccrea's other book on lesson planning and hope it is similarly useful.
I also found this book very useful. While more experienced teachers would take the contents of this book for granted, I took a lot from it. I finished it within a day, even while taking comprehensive notes throughout. I appreciated the application of cognitive science principles to develop an evidence-based guide to teaching. While reading it, my brain was buzzing with greater understanding of teaching and learning. It definitely put into words some thoughts I had knocking around in my head.
I plan on reading Peps Mccrea's other book on lesson planning and hope it is similarly useful.
November 20, 2020
An excellent introduction on how to teach so students learn. The book is just over 100 pages, so you can breeze through it in a weekend. Then, if you want to dig in, check out the suggested readings at the end of each chapter. He drew from both books, studies, and research summaries. Most of the research summaries and studies you should be able to find for free on the internet.
This is a helpful, practical introduction.
This is a helpful, practical introduction.
October 22, 2020
The best short book on teaching you could hope to read.
I'd recommend this book to any teacher looking to improve their practice. Peps writes in such an accessible, economic style that misinterpretation is practically impossible.
An excellent addition to any staff CPD library.
I'd recommend this book to any teacher looking to improve their practice. Peps writes in such an accessible, economic style that misinterpretation is practically impossible.
An excellent addition to any staff CPD library.
December 26, 2017
Extremely useful distillation of key ideas and research behind the ways in which we can embed knowledge and support student learning.
January 19, 2018
A very useful summary.
July 29, 2020
Lots of useful ideas to improve your teaching
Lots of useful ideas to improve your teaching. Very easy read with clear explanations that you can use straight away in the classroom.
Lots of useful ideas to improve your teaching. Very easy read with clear explanations that you can use straight away in the classroom.
October 5, 2021
Wonderfully quick read. Simple ideas that are easily implemented. Biggest takeaway: plan on reviewing what you learn at decreasing intervals.
December 29, 2022
intense stuff
Not a word wasted. Packed full of suggestions and explanations based on the science of how we learn. Links to further reading to further develop our understanding
Not a word wasted. Packed full of suggestions and explanations based on the science of how we learn. Links to further reading to further develop our understanding
May 1, 2017
A concise book providing scalable models for leveraging memory in the classroom, thereby allowing you as a teacher to best "manage student thinking" and, as a result, student learning. Don't buy this book expecting to discover countless and clear examples of methods you can directly implement in your classroom; much of what's explored is in the high abstract, but it is still a valuable purchase if you're looking for a succinct summary of memory in the classroom.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews