Learning

Lessons from the Olympics

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Welcome back everyone to a new year at Churchill! I hope you all had a great summer. I certainly did, enjoying several trips away with the family and lots of rest and relaxation time. I even got a fair bit of reading done!

summer books

Some of my summer reading! 

I also spent a lot of my summer glued to the coverage of the Rio Olympics, tracking Team GB’s incredible success and binge-watching track cycling, diving and gymnastics amongst many others! It was hugely inspiring, and in this week’s blog I want to share a few of my highlights which I think captured the values we hold to at Churchill.

Care

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Nikki Hamblin of New Zealand comes to Team USA’s Abbey D’Agostino’s aid in the 5,000 metres heats

Athletes train for years for the Olympics, and it can all be over in a heartbeat. In the women’s 5,000 metres heats, New Zealand’s Nikki Hamblin stumbled and fell, taking out the athlete immediately behind her – Abbey D’Agostino from the USA. In the fall, D’Agostino tore her cruciate knee ligament, and in that instant, through no fault of her own, her Olympics was over. Hamblin was distraught at the injury caused to her fellow athlete and stopped to help her up and aid her, limping, around the remaining mile so that they both finished the race. Olympic organisers reinstated both runners to the final, but D’Agostino’s injury meant that she could not take part. However, their sportsmanship and care was recognised in the award of the Pierre de Coubertin medal to both athletes – an honour that has only been handed out 17 times in the history of the games. I found the story really moving: even in the heat of competition, and in the moment that all their hopes were evaporating, their first reaction was not anger or recrimination but care and support for another human being.

Nikki Hamblin And Abbey D'Agostino Portrait Session

Nikki Hamblin and Abbey D’Agostino have been commended for their sportsmanship after they helped each other up to finish the race. (Photo by Chris Graythen/Getty Images)

Inspire

ruby harrold team gb

Ruby Harrold representing Team GB in Gymnastics

I wasn’t fortunate enough to be working at Churchill when Ruby Harrold was a student here, but I felt the rush of support for her from the community through our posts on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.  By the time the Artistic Gymnastics Team Final came round I was bouncing with excitement! To see an ex-Churchill student, who walked our grounds and sat in our classrooms, on the biggest sporting stage of all was a true inspiration. It shows that, with enough hard work and dedication, you can achieve anything.

https://www.instagram.com/p/dVCZkGMvTU/

Ruby is now heading off to the NCAA in America to compete with Louisiana State – we wish her well!

Challenge

There were many amazing moments which showed athletes overcoming huge challenges. There was this moment from the track cycling:

laurine van riessen

Laurine van Riessen (Netherlands) rides up the advertising hoardings to avoid a crash in the women’s keirin qualifying

There was the moment Mo Farah fell over in his qualifying race, then got up to win both his heat and double gold medals:

mo farah medals

Mo Farah: overcoming any challenge!

But for me, the story that encapsulated “challenge” the most was Nick Skelton.

nick skelton

Nick Skelton: gold medallist at 58 years old

Nick Skelton broke his neck in 2000. He had a hip replacement in 2011. His horse, Big Star, tore his lower suspensory in 2014. Careful, meticulous rehabilitation for both horse and rider saw them come back to win showjumping gold in a tense six-way medal jump-off. The tears in his eyes as he stood on the podium told the story of the challenges he and Big Star had overcome to get there: nobody deserved it more.

Achieve

teamgbmedals

Team GB medal tally: 27 gold, 23 silver, 17 bronze

I didn’t think anything could match London 2012, but in Rio Team GB won medal after medal after medal. It soon became clear that the team had got their careful preparations absolutely right: attention to detail, team unity, and investment of lottery funding was paying off. I got completely caught up in a spirit of national euphoria! And, after the games, I reflected on the lessons we could learn as an Academy from the incredible success of Team GB in Rio.

  1. Small changes can make a big difference

The so-called “marginal gains” philosophy has long underpinned British Cycling’s success, and seems to have spread! We should all look for the small changes we can make to help us improve and do better every day.

2. Working together maximises the chance of success

When Laura Trott won her Omnium gold medal, she thanked her nutritionist, her power data analyst, her coach, and the “people at home, the people that you don’t see.” There was a massive team behind her, helping her be the best that she could be. Each of our students should be a Laura Trott, with all the staff at school, family and friends supporting them to achieve their very best.

3. There is no success without effort

The hours, days, weeks, months and years of dedicated training that elite athletes put in to achieve their medals shows us what it takes to be successful on the biggest stage. We may not all be the best in the world at what we do, but we need to dedicate ourselves to hard work, perseverance and determination  if we are to achieve success on our own terms. And, at Churchill, we have plenty of examples of just that approach:

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We are celebrating the great achievements of our students in their A-level and GCSE exams this year – achievements that are only possible because of the hours, days, weeks, months and years of dedicated hard work and effort that the students have put in to deserve them. Well done to all of you!

jesse

Jesse Owens won 4 gold medals in the Berlin Olympics in 1936 – and it’s as true today as it was then!

I wish all of our Academy community every success this year!

 

 

What happens on an Inset Day?

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Inset stands for “in-service training”, and all schools have had five inset days each year since they were introduced in 1988. Schools close to students on inset days, but staff attend. Sometimes they can seem a bit mysterious to families and to students, so I thought in my blog this week I’d try to explain what actually happens on these days when the students are away!

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Inset days are designed to provide compulsory training time for teaching staff so that we can continue to improve our practice, keep up to date with changes in education, and ensure that we have appropriate training to deal with the challenges of our job. Here at Churchill, we often involve our support staff in training too, so that all staff have the knowledge and skills they need to do their job to the best of their ability. We supplement our inset days with on-the-job training and provide a range of opportunities throughout the year for all staff to learn, develop and improve, but the inset days give us a real opportunity to get everyone together and spend an extended period of time working on priority issues for the Academy.

Let’s take this coming Monday (27th June) for example. There are five different strands of training happening on the day.

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Whole staff briefing: Strategic Planning

As a new Headteacher I’ve been busy working on the long-term plan for Churchill following the outstanding Ofsted achieved last summer. I’ll be sharing the plan on this blog towards the end of term, but I’ll start the day by briefing staff about our priorities and how we can all work together to achieve them first thing in the morning.

Safeguarding Training

All staff have to be trained to keep children safe in education – it’s the most fundamentally important part of our job. Because it’s so important, we “refresh” this training at least every two years to ensure that all our staff have the latest guidelines and procedures clearly in mind, and know exactly what to do if there are any concerns about children’s safety. This “refresher” training will be taking place for staff who are due to have this additional training.

Workshop to Raise Awareness of Prevent (WRAP) Training

Prevent Strategy

Prevent is the Government’s strategy to counteract the threat of extremism in our society. As a school we have a duty to uphold and enact the Prevent strategy and ensure that all staff are aware of what to look out for and what to do to ensure that we respond to the ideological challenge of terrorism and the threat we face from those who promote it, and to prevent people from being drawn into extremism and terrorism. All staff are required to undertake training in these aspects of the Prevent strategy and we will be providing opportunities on our inset day for this to happen at Churchill.

Pastoral development

Staff will meet in their House teams on this inset day to review and plan the work that needs to be done over the rest of this term, and in preparation for September. This includes planning the Celebration of Success events, ensuring that everything is in place to provide a smooth transition for our new Year 7 students and their families, to look at mentoring for students within the Houses, and to take time to work on particular priorities within each House. At the same time, the Sixth Form pastoral team will be meeting to plan the specialist tutor programme for next year, and ensure that the best opportunities are in place for our new Sixth Form cohort starting in September.

Extended Project Qualification (EPQ) Training

We are extending our provision of the Extended Project Qualification (EPQ) in Year 12 next year, so we are using our inset day to work in partnership with Backwell School to make sure that all staff involved in delivering the EPQ are properly trained by the exam board. We’re really looking forward to the opportunities that EPQ will give our Sixth Formers and we want to make sure we get it right!

Transition Drama Day

At the same time as all this training, our performing arts students and staff will be working hard with our new Year 7 intake on the famous “drama day” ahead of the transition day on Tuesday. There will be lots of fun, learning and confidence building going on! Watch the website for a full report…

Phew!

As you can see, it’s going to be a busy day! It’s a great opportunity to make sure that all our staff have the best and most up-to-date training to care for and deliver the best possible education to the students at the Academy. And, for our staff at least, it’s definitely not a day off!

Practice makes perfect

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I love a good trick shot, and these trick shots captured by five-year-old Riley Dashwoood are very cool. The over-the-shoulder-DVD-into-the-tray is particularly impressive! What I love about the video description, however, is that it outlines how the shots were achieved. “Trick shot kid = persistence,” it says, followed by the attempts: 

How to get a trick shot (source)

When edited together into a cute 30 second montage, the trick shots look amazing! But below the line, we see that it took a long long time to get that montage together. Throwing a toothbrush over your shoulder 136 times? No wonder she looks happy when it finally goes in! 

Needless to say, Riley has spawned many imitators. This week I enjoyed this viral video as it popped up on my Twitter feed. Niall Brady was attempting to do a trick shot where he throws a spoon over his shoulder into a mug on the kitchen side. He made one attempt every day. It took him nearly a year:

There was certainly a big grin on my face as Niall enjoyed his moment of triumph, but I couldn’t help wondering – how many attempts would it take him to do it again? And how much practice would it take until he could do it consistently, time after time, almost without fail?

The fact is, if we want to get really good at something it’s not useful just to do it over and over again. Simple repetition does not necessarily help us to become experts. Take a tennis serve, a golf swing, or musical scales: if you’re using bad technique, practising them over and over again will only embed the bad habits and make them harder to break. What matters is the focus of that practice – the focus on developing the technique, on improving it, on making it better and better each time; the focus on what is called “high leverage practice” which makes an impact on performance. 

There are some great examples of this in sport. Take David Beckham, practising free kicks again and again on the training ground so he can deliver when it counts on the pitch: 

Although, watching that back, it’s amazing how many free kicks England got in that game – and how many he missed! 

Alternatively, take this incredible catch in the NFL in America from another Beckham – Odell Beckham Jr: 

The commentator says “you have to be kidding me! That is impossible. That is impossible.” And it does seem superhuman – until you realise that Odell Beckham Jr., like his English namesake, spends hours on the training pitch perfecting exactly that kind of catch, so he can do it seemingly with ease when it counts on the pitch. 

What we see here it that it isn’t about a one-off fluke, but careful deliberate practice which enables talent to shine when the moment arises. If you asked Niall Brady to throw a spoon over his shoulder into a cup on demand, he’d probably fail. Throw an American football at Odell Beckham Jr., however, and he’d probably catch it, even with one hand tied behind his back. 

The same principle is applied to the inspiring GiveIt100 site, which invites people to share a short video every day as they practice a new skill for 100 days. There are some great examples on the site, including this one of a guitarist: 

My final “practice makes perfect” video shows Jonny Wilkinson practising “stress kicks” in the south of France. “It’s very important,” Jonny says, “to make it more difficult…in training than it ever could be in a game.” That way, he’s ready in stressful situations, in the heat of the moment, to deliver crucial kicks – because he’s trained for it. 

We can apply the same principle to all of our learning. If we’re going to get really good at things, it’s not enough just to turn up to school every day and sit in the classroom, going through the motions, coasting along. That’s the equivalent of throwing a spoon over your shoulder every day for a year. You might get lucky once or twice, but you haven’t really mastered anything. But if you apply yourself every day, focus your practice, push and challenge yourself to do better…when the whistle blows for the big game, you’ll be ready. 

Happy practising!
In case you were wondering: 

The Learning Brain

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Our brains are amazing! The average human brain weighs about three pounds, looks like a big grey wrinkly sponge, and generates enough electricity to light a bulb, or even to charge an iPhone.  The brain controls everything from breathing and blinking to our emotions and memories, through firing electrical signals between brain cells – or neurons – across tiny gaps called synapses. We have approximately 100 billion neurons in our brain, all interconnected by synapses. Because each neuron is connected to lots of other neurons, there are approximately 1 quadrillion synapses – that’s 1,000,000,000,000,000 synapses! This is equal to about a half-billion synapses per cubic millimetre. No wonder our brains are so sophisticated!

Despite all that complexity, the video above is a really clear and simple introduction to how our brains work – and how they learn most effectively. There are all sorts of great tips in there to help us all be better learners. Have a watch and see if you can put it into practice!

How to grow your brain

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I’ve been a fan of the Khan Academy for a long time now. The website was set up by Salman “Sal” Khan after he began tutoring his cousin, and has developed into an international organisation with the aim of providing a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere. There are tutorial videos on a mind-boggling array of topics – great for revision or just for pushing yourself and understanding something new. 

What’s particularly great, though, is the philosophy behind the Khan Academy – You Can Learn Anything. Khan explains: 

Most people are held back not by their innate ability, but by their mindset. They think intelligence is fixed, but it isn’t. Your brain is like a muscle. The more you use it and struggle, the more it grows. New research shows we can take control of our ability to learn. We can all become better learners. We just need to build our brains in the right way.

Khan Academy

Helpfully, the Academy has provided a couple of videos explaining exactly how the brain grows when we learn something new. Here’s the short version: 

And for those with a real appetite for it, here’s the detail: 

Finally, Sal Khan himself met with Carol Dweck to explore the ideas behind a growth mindset approach: 

Remember: if you set your mind to it, you can learn anything. 

Anything is possible

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John F Kennedy, September 12th 1962

 
On September 12th 1962, John F Kennedy stood up at Rice Stadium near Houston in Texas and declared his intention to put a man on the moon before the decade was out. I’ve always found this speech inspiring as Kennedy set out the goal without understanding how it was to be achieved. As he said at the time: 

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.

John F Kennedy, Rice Stadium, September 12th 1962

I love this kind of ambitious thinking. The kind of thinking that sets the goal and then works out how to do it, or even if it is possible. The kind of thinking that is about challenging yourself to push beyond what others think is possible. Of course, hindsight gives Kennedy’s words even more resonance, as we know that on 20th July 1969 Neil Armstrong stepped down from Apollo 11’s Lunar Module as the first human being to set foot on the surface of another world.  

Neil Armstrong reflected in Buzz Aldrin’s visor on the surface of the moon in 1969

 

Would we still admire Kennedy’s words if the lunar missions had been unsuccessful? Is it only success that makes the ambition so inspiring? I don’t think so. Setting ourselves ambitious goals and pushing ourselves beyond what we believe be to possible is the only sure way to make progress. Even if we fail, we will have learned much from trying and come so much further than we would have done otherwise. 

Michelangelo didn’t paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel beacuse it was easy

 

Taking the easy option is ultimately unsatisfying. If you get a set a questions to do and you find them all easy and get 100% right, you won’t have learned very much. You will have wasted your time. If you really have to work at it, and it’s so difficult that you make a couple of mistakes, then you’ll have learned something. Taking on hard challenges if how we grow. 

It’s little wonder, then, that Google adopted “moonshot thinking” as part of its Project X approach to developing new products. They’re currently working on self-driving cars and balloon powered Internet. Are these things impossible? I’m sure that even a few years ago to working 3D photographic maps of the whole world were impossible, but we use them every day – and we have them for Mars and the Moon as well. 

Moonshot thinking in action – climbing the “unclimbable” Dawn Wall of El Capitan

 Climbers Kevin Jorgeson and Tommy Caldwell remind us that, if you set your mind to it, anything is possible. Eight years of planning and nineteen days of climbing saw them ascend the Dawn Wall of El Capitan in January 2015 using nothing but their fingers and feet to climb with.

The pair suffered bruising falls, when their grip slipped, and they would bounce off the mountain face. Only their safety ropes saved them from further harm. At one point on the climb, Jorgeson had posted online: “As disappointing as this is, I’m learning new levels of patience, perseverance and desire. I’m not giving up. I will rest. I will try again. I will succeed.”

If you set your mind to it, you can accomplish incredible things – things that we don’t currently believe are possible. What will you achieve? 

Assembly: Concentration

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This assembly owes much to a presentation on the brain given by Bradley from Inner Drive (@Inner_Drive) at #GrowEx last year, and this excellent TED talk by Peter Doolittle (@pdoopdoo) on working memory shared by Huntington Learning Hub (@HuntingtonLHub). It’s well worth a watch:

The PowerPoint slides are shared at the bottom of this post.

We start with a test of working memory (see the video for this test). I am going to ask you to remember five words just by holding them in your mind. Here are the five words:

  1. Tree
  2. Motorway
  3. Mirror
  4. Saturn
  5. Electrode

Whilst you are remembering those five words, I am going to set you three challenges.

  1. What is 23 x 8?
  2. On your left hand, use your thumb to count your fingers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, then back again 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.
  3. Now in your head recite the last five letters of the English alphabet backwards.

How many of the five words that I asked you to remember do you still have in your memory? Does anyone still have all five?

The reason why many of you will have forgotten some of the words that I told you only a minute or so ago, is that the capacity of our working memory is limited. It can only hold so much information at any one time. Daniel Willingham provides a simplified model of the brain here:

A simple diagram of the mind (source)

A simple diagram of the mind (source)

In our test, the Environment (me) provided some information which was fed into your working memory. You didn’t do much with that information, and immediately afterwards I distracted you with three more activities which demanded space in your working memory. Little wonder, then, that when I asked you to return to the original information (the five words I asked you to remember), some or all of it had been pushed out of your mind without ever having made it into your long-term memory.

focus-and-concentration

There are some more demonstrations that will help us understand why sustained concentration on the task in hand is important. The first is to do with focus, and multitasking. You might think that you are really good at multitasking, and that you can easily do two, three or more things at once. Where some of those things are automatic – walking and talking, for example – that is probably true. However, your working memory can only focus on one cognitively demanding task at a time. In that way, it’s like focusing a lens – you can only focus on one thing at a time.

You can only focus on one thing at a time

You can only focus on one thing at a time (when in doubt, reach for the cat gifs)

Let’s take this optical illusion as an example. In the picture, the man’s face can be seen looking to the right, or looking straight ahead. See if you can see both!

Looking to the right, or looking straight ahead? Both - but not at the same time.

Looking to the right, or looking straight ahead? Both – but not at the same time.

Now try to see both at the same time. Your brain switches from one to the other – it will only let you hold one interpretation of the picture in your head at one time. This is what happens when you try to multi-task. Your working memory actually switches from one task to the other. This is called context switching, and you may be able to do this quickly (there is some evidence that women are better at it than men), but you are not multitasking. You can’t.

Finally, here’s a demonstration of context switching in action. I need a volunteer from the audience to take this box of multicoloured balls, and arrange them in rows of four in the order of the colours of the rainbow. At the same time, they will be solving some Mental Maths Questions from the KS2 Maths SAT Buster book.

I know this challenge well, because Bradley used me as his volunteer at #GrowEx when conducting the same experiment. Essentially, your brain can either focus on arranging the balls, or on doing the maths – but not both. As I was trying to arrange the balls, I got simple questions wrong. When I thought about the maths, my hands stopped moving. My working memory would not allow me to do both things at the same time. I felt embarrassed, but I shouldn’t have; I was simply demonstrating a human characteristic. Our brains cannot do two cognitively demanding things simultaneously.

Let’s think about how we can apply what we’ve seen today to the classroom. The first thing is that it only takes is a small distraction for information that you have just learned to evaporate. If you are getting to grips with a new concept in your lessons and you then think about the piece of gossip you meant to tell your neighbour, your chances of transferring the new concept to your long term memory are dramatically reduced. Distractions are compelling – it’s very easy to be like Dug from Up: 

Distractions can take your mind off the task at hand

Distractions can take your mind off the task at hand

And don’t kid yourself that you can do two things at once; you can’t. Once you’re distracted, the damage is done.

Put simply:

  1. Concentrate on the task at hand
  2. Focus on the learning
  3. Apply and use what you have learned straight away if you want to stand any chance of remembering it.

And, by the way, 23 x 8 = 184.

Good luck!

Here is the PowerPoint, though the gifs don’t work in this slideshare version. Click on this link for the full version: Concentration.

Concentration phoster

How to revise: techniques that work

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loverevision

We love revision…right?

Revision – it really matters. But, with the best will in the world, it’s not the most exciting way to spend your time. The process itself requires you to look back at work you’ve already done – to “re-vision” it – to try and remember it and commit it to memory. There’s nothing “new” in it. But the trick to making it effective is to get your brain working as hard as it can be.

The reason for this is best summed up by cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham. Willingham says:

Whatever you think about, that’s what you remember. Memory is the residue of thought. 

In other words, you need your brain to really be processing the information you are trying to revise, if you want to stand any chance of remembering it.

What doesn’t work?

There are a few techniques that seem effective – but actually aren’t. These include:

  • Highlighting
  • Re-reading
  • Summarising
highlighting

Highlighting: expectation vs reality

These techniques allow information to pass through your brain without much thinking. Covering pages of A4 with beautifully highlighted patches might make you feel like you’ve achieved something, but it won’t actually help you to remember the information. These are low challenge activities, and therefore low impact

What does work?

Practice Testing

This technique is pretty straightforward – keep testing yourself (or each other) on what you have got to learn.  This technique has been shown to have the highest impact in terms of supporting student learning.  Some ways in which you can do this easily:

  • Create some flashcards, with questions on one side and answers on the other – and keep testing yourself.
  • Work through past exam papers – many can be acquired through exam board websites.
  • Simply quiz each other (or yourself) on key bits of information.
  • Create ‘fill the gap’ exercises for you and a friend to complete.
  • Create multiple choice quizzes for friends to complete.

Distributed Practice

forgetting curve

The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve – if you revisit newly learned information, you remember more of it

Rather than cramming all of your revision for each subject into one block, it’s better to space it out – from now, through to the exams.  Why is this better?  Bizarrely, because it gives you some forgetting time.  This means that when you come back to it a few weeks later, you will have to think harder, which actually helps you to remember it.  Furthermore, the more frequently you come back to a topic, the better you remember it.

Elaborate Interrogation

One  of the best things that you can do (either to yourself or with a friend) to support your revision is to ask why an idea or concept is true – and then answer that why question.  For example:

  • In science, increasing the temperature can increase the rate of a chemical reaction….why?
  • In geography, the leisure industry in British seaside towns like Porthcawl in South Wales has deteriorated in the last 4 decades….why?
  • In history, the 1929 American stock exchange collapsed.  This supported Hitler’s rise to power….why?

So, rather than just try to learn facts or ideas, ask yourself why they are true.

Self explanation

Rather than looking at different topics from a subject in isolation, try to think about how this new information is related to what you know already.  This is where mind- maps might come in useful – but the process of producing the mind map is probably more useful than the finished product.  So, think about a key central idea (the middle of the mind map) and then how new material, builds on the existing knowledge in the middle.

Alongside this, when you solve a problem e.g. in maths, explain to someone the steps you took to solve the problem.  This can be applied to a whole range of subjects.

Interleaved revision

When you are revising a subject, the temptation is to do it in ‘blocks’ of topics.  Like this:

revisionblocked

The problem with this is, is that it doesn’t support the importance of repetition – which is so important to learning (see distributed practice above!)  So rather than revising in ‘topic blocks’ it’s better to chunk these topics up in your revision programme and interleave them:

revisioninterleaved

This means that you keep coming back to the topics.  So, instead of doing a one hour block of revision on topic 1, do 15 minutes on topic 1, then 15 minutes on topic 2, then the same for topic 3 and 4. The next day, do the same. On day three – just to spice it up and stop your brain getting into a rut – mix up the topics!

Have a break

Your brain can only work effectively for so long. Scientists differ on this – some say our attention span is around 20 minutes, whilst others say we can work for longer. My advice is to revise in blocks of around 45 minutes, giving yourself a 15 minute break in each hour to recharge. Make sure you get some fresh air, relax and switch off. You don’t want to underachieve because you haven’t done enough revision – but equally, you need to stay healthy and happy if you’re going to do your best, so don’t overdo it!

Resources

There are lots of resources out there to help you revise. Here are just a few:

Good luck!

 

With thanks to Shaun Allison for the inspiration  and some of the images for this blog. Read Shaun’s original post here.

Can I listen to music while I work?

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This week I met Lara, Holly and Melissa, three students in Year 8 who wanted me to let them listen to music whilst they revised for their exams. They wrote me a very polite letter, and they’d even discussed it with their classmates to gather a petition. They felt that listening to music when they were working helped them relax, focus, and shut out distractions. So, they asked, would I relax the rules and let them have their headphones in?

640px-earpods_derecho

Will listening to music help us concentrate?

There’s been some quite interesting research in this area. Scientists have studied how listening to music can change our performance in different types of tasks. Under some conditions, music actually improves our performance, while in other situations music makes it worse.

One study from America looked at how listening to music had an impact on surgeons’ performance in the operating theatre. This study found that listening to music made them more relaxed and they performed with more accuracy, especially if it was music they liked.

Another study, by British researcher Nick Perham, found that playing music you like can lift your mood and increase your motivation — if you listen to it before getting down to work. But it serves as a distraction from cognitively demanding tasks like learning new material or trying to memorise information.

This is a very important distinction. Surgeons in operating theatres are performing operations that they have practised many times before, and therefore they are performing things they have already learned. It’s the same principle as the research that found that music can make rote or routine tasks (like folding laundry or filing papers) less boring and more enjoyable. Runners who listen to music go faster. Music can lift us when we’re doing things that don’t require us to think too hard about them, or things that we have practised many times before.

musical-notes

Listening to music interferes with concentration when we’re trying to read or retain information, and makes us less effective learners

That’s not what lessons and revision are about however. Learning is what Nick Perham would call a “cognitively demanding task.” In one of his more recent studies, Perham says, he found that reading while listening to music, especially music with lyrics, impairs comprehension.

“You’ve got…information that you’re trying to use when you’re reading a book, and you’ve got…information from the lyrics,” Perham says. “If you can understand the lyrics, it doesn’t matter whether you like it or not, it will impair your performance of reading comprehension.”

What basically happens is that your brain will switch between the music and what you’re trying to learn or revise, and that switching distracts you from the learning process. If you’re going to be an effective learner, your brain needs to focus fully on what you are trying to learn. No distractions.

So, sorry Lara, Holly, Melissa and friends: the rule stays! If you’re learning or revising – turn the music off.

Links:

Why “I can’t do it” won’t do

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Edison

Thomas Edison, inventor of the phonograph, motion picture camera, and the light bulb – he knew a thing or two about persistence (image source)

What are the biggest barriers to learning? Of course, there are many difficulties and problems which face us all when we are learning something new. We may not have the resources available; we might not have the right environment in which to learn; we might not have the skills or prior knowledge we need to grasp the concept. However, I think the biggest barrier to learning is our own attitude – the tendency to give up when it gets difficult, to throw up our hands and say “I can’t do it!”

I remember interviewing a student (let’s call her Emma*)  for a place in the sixth form a few years ago. Her mum was with her and she was really struggling in Maths. “I can’t do Maths,” she said. Her mum turned to her and said, “don’t worry, I can’t do Maths either.” Needless to say, Emma didn’t get the grade she needed in Maths to get into the sixth form. I’m sure her mum was trying to help, to offer some comfort to her daughter who was struggling with some difficult concepts. But the notion that not being able to do Maths is somehow okay gave Emma permission to believe that she genuinely couldn’t do Maths – and this wasn’t the case. Anyone can do Maths. Everyone can do Maths. But you need to work at it, and you need to believe you can do it.

Imagine for a moment if Emma had been struggling with reading. Would her mum have turned to her with the same comfort? “Don’t worry, I can’t read either.” This just wouldn’t happen, and we need to have the same attitude to all our learning.
voice-paint3

Luckily, there is a solution – and it’s one simple word. That word is YET. Adding the word “yet” to  the end of a “giving up” phrase is a simple way of reminding us that learning is a process.

  • I can’t do it…YET
  • I don’t understand it…YET
  • I’m no good at painting…YET
  • I tried question 4 and I couldn’t do it…YET
  • I’m not a Maths person…YET

The only way we can guarantee failure is if we give up. Until then, everything we’re doing is learning. What “YET” does is it says that this is a skill which is acquired over time. It’s not something you’re necessarily going to get instantly. There’s a learning curve, and to be successful we need to stay on that curve.

Even Sesame Street have tuned into the power of YET with a catchy tune from Janelle Monae. Enjoy…

You didn’t do it right now, but keep trying, you’ll learn how

You just didn’t get it yet, but you’ll get it soon I bet

That’s the power of yet. 

*Names have been changed.