Memory is the Residue of Thought
Memory is the residue of thought. That’s where skills and capabilities come from.
The guiding principle behind how instruction is conducted at Kickstart Academy is precisely that. Specifically, what a learner thinks about is what a learner remembers. This includes both facts, ways of doing things and the why behind those procedures.
Turning Thought into Skills and Capabilities
We first came across this principle in Why Don’t Students Like School? by Daniel Willingham, and were very much taken by the simple truth that learners will mostly remember what they spend a lot of time thinking about.
“Thus your memory is not a product of what you want to remember or what you try to remember; it’s a product of what you think about.”
Therefore, to succeed in our intention to help learners build a specific skills, then the majority of cognitive effort in lesson should be expended on important aspects of deploying those skills.
Unfortunately, our first- and second-hand experience highlights a number of common instructional mistakes that detract from learning. These include distractions (some necessary) like installing and configuring software, wrangling with presentation software to figure out how to present content, and various other in-class activities added to “boost engagement”.
We think about how to manage these necessary evils so you do not have to.
And So?
At Kickstart Academy we endeavour to design instruction that supports building the cognitive muscle memory for deploying skills. As a rule, we do this by forcing learners to think by cycling between conveying knowledge and guided practice.
In each cycle of learning, learners operationalise the knowledge that was most recently covered as a skill, and sometimes integrate that skill with previously covered skills. The sequencing and linkages between the individual learning cycles focus on developing skills that collectively amount to one or more capabilities with industry demand.
So if you take a course with us and wonder why there are so many exercises, remember that Memory is the Residue of Thought. We want learners to think about what, how and why they are doing things. That is how skills and capabilities are developed.
