Attention seems to be the top priority for information processing. I plan to help keep my students' attention focused by varying the activities within any given class period. Lectures get boring quickly, and so I plan to use a more discussion based model. Roughly every 10 minutes, the mode of teaching or activity should change. So, we can switch from discussion, to writing, to pair share, to role playing, to visual presentation, and so on to keep students from falling into torpor. Another good strategy for attention is to draw on prior knowledge and interests. In a lesson I gave recently on "The Hero's Journey" I used The Lord of the Rings and students were able to connect the steps of the hero's journey to a book/movie they were all familiar with. I had all eyes open, all students participating. It was awesome.
Along with breaking the lesson up, giving students a chance to rehearse the information helps keep it in their working memory, which increases the likelihood of it getting encoded to long term memory. Simple "say back" rote memorization can help. But better yet is pair share, where students need to put info into their own words because a deeper level of processing is required to summarize or paraphrase than to simply repeat. Even short writing activities can help students process the information, keeping it in working memory. Some students may prefer pair share over writing or vice versa, depending on their learning style, so I plan to offer both each day.
Then, for deeper encoding, I would like to give students a chance to apply what they've learned in a new context, on their own. So, for example, they might be putting the semi-colon into action in a homework writing assignment after we've worked on it in class. Or they might practice writing a paragraph with a logical fallacy, and without it, to help really encode that knowledge and be able to draw it from their brain and use it.
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