The simple way for students to improve their memory of a topic - draw a diagram

Shaun Allison

Shaun Allison is Deputy Head at Durrington High School, a large and successful comprehensive school on the south coast of England. He leads on teaching and learning, CPD and the use of data across the school.

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Website: classteaching.wordpress.com Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Over the last couple of years, Deputy Head and Geography teacher Chris Woodcock has been trying to develop strategies to support and challenge the low ability students he teaches.

Being a content heavy subject, these students struggle to recall the knowledge required to answer exam questions effectively, and as a result, they have been missing out on valuable marks. With this in mind, Chris wanted to develop a quick and easy strategy they could use to improve their recall of information. He has been doing this by using very simple diagrams as visual prompts.

So, having taught a topic, a simple diagram is used to summarise the main ideas. This can be easily memorised and then used to recall the main facts - an example follows:

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