Making Memory Personal
I have always thought that memorization or data was the best way for me to remember things. To this day, I know that I passed my RICA test by memorizing a one sheet (front and back so does that make it two?) color coded notes with academic words. And I actually remember some of the stages from my notes. But what if those who struggle with memory from our students to us teachers could grow our memory skills through true connection. Before you eye roll me (or maybe you already have) think about it. Are you more willing to listen, learn, and want to grow with people you have a true connection with that offers trust and safety? I know that I am much more willing to fail at home with my husband as eye witness than in a work conference I’m leading. I still fail in both and try to own it but I feel much more open to learning new things when talking with my friends than with someone I don’t trust quite yet. In this post I will explain how I personally believe that we can help memory and rewire our brains and students brains through story stewardship and cognitive task analysis.
What is Story Stewardship?
Brene Brown defines Story Stewardship as: being curious and building narrative trust as people tell us about their experience of being in their own shoes. If you haven’t heard of Brene Brown before she is an amazing researcher storyteller who believes that: “stories are data with soul". I think what a lot of people get wrong when teaching and story stewardship is that they instinctively want to question/ not believe others. It really is about learning about the person, believing them, and asking clarifying questions to fully understand their stories. As a teacher I think it is easy to assume things about our students, put our narratives on them, and really fall short in buidling trusting relationships with them. I’ll give you an example of how I messed this up once (I have messed this up a thousands times fyi):
I had a student, lets call him John. John was a very smart 4th grader. But, I found out fairly quickly he was reading at about a kinder/1st grade level. I was surprised because in my opinion he had the skills to read at his level. So I started to focus on foundational skills from sight words, letter sounds, syllable types, etc. Well I noticed fairly quickly that this seemed to irritate John. To be honest he had expressed to me multiple times that his home life was a bit hectic and that he wasn’t able to focus on reading at home, we had many conversations about this. But I continued to believe that we needed to really break down reading and focus on elementary foundational reading skills. He continued to not love it and one day completely broke down and refused to do some reading tasks. I was so lost so I decided we were just going to read-whatever he wanted- no matter if he could read it or not. This is all we did weekly and then he began to love it so much he would visit during lunch or when he had down time in class and he wasn’t missing academic time to visit me and just read. He caught up to 3rd grade in 6 months. He loved reading and I realized that he had been telling me the whole time that he wanted someone to read to- I being the teacher thought I needed to do all my data and lists but what he actually needed was just someone to read to. I also learned that I could do all of my data and lists and incorporate it on the fly with his reading. If he came across a word family he didn’t know we’d pause and I’d explain it, give more examples, we’d create notes and then we’d keep reading. It was amazing and it wouldn’t have happened if I had stopped putting my weird teacher assumptions on him and stopped and just listened to his stories and what he really needed to fall in love with reading.
What is Cognitive Task Analysis?
Cognitive Task Analysis consists of cognitive activities including: decision-making, problem-solving, memory, attention and judgement and help teach students how to think and solve problems (Cognitive Task Analysis, 2023). Now I know that the website I used for the definition is not very supported. But, I really liked the definition. Visible Learning Meta of Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA) is research based and well supported showing that CTA is rated high with a mean effect size of 1.09. In other words, it is a teaching strategy that is most liked to accelerate our students learning. I definitely want to go much deeper into what my process looks like for this but for now TeachnThrive does an amazing deep dive on this here.
Why Using Story Stewardship and Cognitive Task Analysis Together can Help with our Students Memory:
I am going to preface this section by saying that both separate are research based but has not been studied together with correlation (that I know of). This connection instead is from my own experience throughout the years as an Education Specialist. I have personally learned that when we truly connect and understand our students stories that they share with us we can then be able to to guide them within their cognitive task analysis and learn about their own thinking patterns and processes to solve problems. I’ll give you an example:
I had a student Jason. He was extremely socially aware, outgoing, and amazing at hiding his academic struggles to where it took til the 3rd grade for his teacher to realize he couldn’t read, and I mean he couldn’t read at all. I was really curious as to how this happened and once I got to know him I realized he did a stunning job at using visual resources. I used my story stewardship skills to believe him when he said he couldn’t read and built trust that when he told me something I wasn’t going to question how he felt, instead I asked clarifying questions about him to deeper understand how he felt. Once I was able to build that rapport with him, I was then able to deeper understand his amazing strengths and use cognitive task analysis to teach him how to use it while we filled the foundational gaps. He had never been allowed to take a comprehension book test so I let him. I knew he struggled with reading so instead we first read the book with visuals and you best believe he passed with 100% accuracy without reading the book at all. It was amazing how his confidence skyrocketed. Of course I knew we were going to work up to reading the words too but allowing him to use his skills to complete tasks independently at his level and that was at his grade level gave him so much confidence and made learning fun!
I will definitely be doing a deeper dive into how relationship and cognitive tasks can help with memory through my own personal experiences but for today I hope this post gave you some ideas of how we can help memory and rewire our brains through story stewardship and cognitive task analysis.
Until next time,
Happy Learning