As I head into the second half of the year, I find myself, like many other reflecting on past practise, what I have learnt and will take forward into this term. We were lucky enough to have an inset with Oliver Caviglioli last year on dual coding, I am sure you have heard something about it on Twitter. As always these are the mere ramblings of a teacher on the search for ways to support children with their learning in the classroom, I am by no way claiming to have all the answers. I hope you find this useful, please leave a comment below.
Dual Coding Theory is not new but has recently gained a lot of attention and is widely implemented. At its core the idea is that you talk over pictures – icons to be precise and those with minimalist colour-even better. This enables children to process and comprehend the information more effectively – allowing them to file it away nicely, ready to retrieve later, which is what we all want – this is learning.
According to Oliver, when you talk over images children are getting the best of both worlds; the images are processed through their visual channel as your words entering their auditory channel Children have around 3-4 working memory blocks to take onboard new information in any one session, once these are full they effectively loose the new information so it is vital to keep it simple and effective.
Simple icons exhibit the least demand on working memory (a clear image is easy to decipher). This alongside aligning everything to the left (including text and titles) because our brains are wired to read left to right, provides the best learning environment.
Dual Coding Theory lends itself to those children that struggle the most, Oliver stipulates that by providing children with your schemas (a representation of a plan or theory in the form of an outline or model) it lays it all on the table explicitly – there are no secrets. There is a vast number of schemas – I have included an exceprt from Oliver Caviglioli’s books Dual Coding With Teachers below. I highly recommend reading the book, you can purchase it here.
Last year I took Y5 on our annual Easter trip to the church, the presenters were brilliant! Talking over images and the use of videos really engaged the pupils and later when asked, enabled them to easily recall facts and information they learnt on the trip and further relate them to topics and vocabulary we have since looked at. When children link text to imagery, they can recall the information easier at a later date.
We have tried to implement these ideas across all subjects. We follow Rosehnshine’s principal of instruction for our lesson templates in our shared planning. Our slides look like this across the school in all subjects where applicable:
- Title slide
- Review
- Vocabulary
- New learning
- Worked example
- Guided practice
- Independent learning
- Metacognition
Combining dual coding with our slides was fairly easy. I switched to PowerPoint so that I can add notes for teacher to read and simply display a schema, icon, image or video on the screen for the children to see. As a result, our slides are clear and concise. All children are able to access the content and take part in the lesson. As per Oli’s advice, I reveal my schema (not always accurately I am sure!) to the class and explain that they should make notes, following this we then use these notes to form a written answer. There are lots of simple icons available at https://thenounproject.com
Below is an example of a grammar review slide using Dual Coding Theory – it is clear (I hope) to see that the images depict the pronouns she, he, you and they or them, this will be supported with the teacher talking about pronouns and what the images stand for. The gridlines can be viewed in PowerPoint to help you line everything up neatly – they don’t show in slideshow setting. It is more aesthetically pleasing that a text-heavy slide.
A technique to further support recall, that Oliver demonstrated during our inset session was the draw, trace and tell. Once drawn, using the index finger on the dominant hand to point to each image and recall the fact, name or information aloud to a paired-partner enables the information to be remembered and recalled at a later day. It really works! As you can see below.
It is still a work in progress but I have found it highly effective in reading lessons; children create images depicting the key points in a given extract. At a later date, the children use these images to write a paragraph summarising the chapter. Summarising is something I have found children really struggled with and this has helped them a lot! It is also great for information heavy topics such as history and science.
Here is a slide for a Y6 history lesson on The Battle of Britain, I will display this while explaining that WWII occurred from 1939-1945 when Hitler invaded Poland. These are key facts drawn from our knowledge organiser.
After a few more similar slides and discussion with some questioning to assess understanding (children draw, trace and tell), I will show this sequential schema, depicting how you can order notes, followed by a short paragraph drawing information from notes.
How do you use Dual Coding Theory? What will you be taking into the new term?
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