How does it feel when you conduct a review with your students only to find out that they can’t remember most of what was taught in the previous class? Frustrating right? I totally understand.

But hey, you’re doing a great job and there’s no need to get hard on yourself. All you need is a few practices to help you ensure that your students not only understand what was taught but can also remember every detail. These practices are what I’ll be sharing with you today. Without further ado, let’s get right into it!

1. Use storytelling:

Storytelling is one of the oldest forms of teaching. Due to its effectiveness, it has been used time and time again, and has produced results because everyone loves a great story. Storytelling is effective in the classroom because it helps students to understand new or complicated topics. It helps students to remember better by linking what was taught with the story that was told. Storytelling also makes learning fun and interesting.

To use storytelling in the classroom, ensure that your story relates to what is being taught and can help students to have a better understanding.

2. Use attractive visuals:

Visuals aid memory.

There is a Chinese quote that says, “I hear, I forget. I see, I remember.” This quote holds true especially in our world today. In fact, researchers at the University of Iowa have discovered that when it comes to memory, we don’t remember things we hear nearly as well as things we see or touch.

Well, that’s just how the brain is wired! I’m sure you’d rather remember an image than a line of text that you come across on the road. So to help your students remember lessons learnt, kindly ensure to include pictures in your slides (for online classes) and if it’s a physical class, you can use pictures as part of your teaching materials.

3. Use Mnemonics:

Mnemonics are words, poems, or sentences that help you remember facts or large amounts of information.

ROYGBIV is a mnemonic for the colors of the rainbow (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet) and “Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally” (PEMDAS) is another mnemonic for the order of operations in Mathematics (Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction)

To help your students remember facts, laws, formulas, and other important information, you can create a mnemonic. A poem would work too! Mnemonics helps students remember things because it helps them break complex and large amounts of information into smaller chunks.

4. Ask questions:

Sounds old, but it’s gold!

Spontaneous questions while you teach is a good way to help your tutees train their memory. This is how the trick works – When your tutees know that you’d ask questions spontaneously while a class is going on, they’ll tend to pay more attention to what you’re saying and to remember it as well.

You shouldn’t stop there, anyway. At the end of a class, you should also ask more questions, or better still ask for a summary of what you have just taught.

5. Practice:

Now, beyond asking questions before, during, and after a class, you should also ensure that you give out assignments and conduct tests regularly for your tutees. It’s necessary for you to do these things because they help your tutees to practice what they’re learning. If there’s no system in place to ensure continuous practice, students would definitely forget what they are taught.

On the other hand, when students know that assignments would be given and tests would be conducted (before the end of term exam) they’d pay more attention and even work towards remembering things on their own.

Conclusion

Finally, you’ve discovered easy ways to help your students remember what you teach. But it shouldn’t end at reading through these practices. You have to make conscious efforts to practice them and see what works for your students so you can stick to it. First, identify which of these practices that you’ll be trying out first.

So which one is it going to be? Type it in the comments section!

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