Thinking Skills - Collective Memory

Overview:

A collective memory exercise requires a group of pupils to work together to reproduce an image, diagram or graph. Pupils in each group take it in turns to look at the source held by the teacher for a few seconds only. They must each remember key information to allow the group to successfully reproduce the source.

Thinking skills objectives:

Make sure you have a thinking skill objective for the lesson
Tell pupils what the objective is at the beginning of the lesson and refer to it throughout.

Thinking Skills you can develop through a Collective Memory lesson are:

Reasoning
Information Processing
Evaluation

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Task management:

A: Groupings.

A group of 3 or 4 pupils works well
Make sure that they are sitting on the same table
Make sure groups have everything they need, paper, pencil, rubber, coloured pencils etc.

B: Sources:

Don’t be afraid to include text as well as images in your source.
It can be a good idea to leave some areas of the source blank and to allow pupils to decide what should fit in the gaps.
Make sure your source is large enough to be seen by all pupils who will come up at once, if you have a teaching assistant in your class they could take responsibility for holding a second version.

C. Role of the teacher during the task:

Monitor timings carefully, do pupils have the right amount of time to finish their drawing?
You could stop groups after a couple of turns and ask them what strategies they are using? Give them a minute or two to plan how to progress further with the task
Listen to all your groups for examples of thinking to use in the metacognitive plenary later.

D. Timings:

This will vary according to the task, group structure and complexity of the source.
Try to give pupils between 10 and 20 seconds to look at the source.
Allow each pupil two to three turns at looking at the source.
The whole task can take up to 30 minutes.

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Metacognitive plenary:

In the metacognitive plenary you need to include questions like:

How did you start this task?
Did you change your strategy?
What helped you to succeed?
What did you find difficult about this task? Why?
How did you try to remember the information? Did it work?
Did you all work in the same way? Why do you think this is?
How would you do this differently another time? Why?
How would this way of thinking help you in another subject?

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Assessment and learning:

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Sources and adding challenge:

You can add challenge to a Collective Memory exercise in a number of ways:

By producing a source which has a pattern; once the pattern is spotted the exercise becomes more about reasoning than memory.
By leaving areas blank, pupils will then have to use the information they do have to fill in the gaps.
By producing a source which is complex and includes both text and images.

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Examples of lessons

Click on the subject button for a list of materials. Each lesson will have a brief summary of how the teacher intended it to be used and copyright free resources. In some instances the teacher concerned has indicated where the resource used might be found.

Have you prepared a thinking skills lesson that has worked well for you and that you are prepared to share?

If so please complete the attached form [Word 35KB]

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