Cancelling copying

Cancelling Copying: Optimising the Teaching of Declarative Knowledge
In teaching, we often default to students writing down information. But what if this common practice works against deep understanding and long-term retention? Drawing on my experience as a classroom teacher and teacher trainer, this workshop explores how to shift from passive copying to richer, more cognitively demanding teaching of factual knowledge.

In this session you will:

• Unpick the limitations of student copying: why it can reduce meaningful thinking and hamper knowledge formation.
• Explore the three “lenses” (Climate, Attention, Cognitive) to see which thinking students are doing — and how copying reduces cognitive load.
• Compare two versions of a mini-lesson teaching factual content and analyse how simple tweaks changed how students engaged and thought.
• Discover practical strategies to reduce copying and replace it with tasks that encourage rehearsal, retrieval, feedback and scaffolded sense-making.
• Reflect on your own lessons and explore the pre-conditions that would need to be established to use these new strategies in an effective way.

Why this matters for middle leaders and classroom practitioners:
In a time-pressured world of dense curriculums and limited lesson time, copying can seem efficient but it often delivers low impact. We’ll explore why taking a little more time to engage students’ thinking can save time later when it comes to retrieval, application and fluency of knowledge.

Who should attend:

• Middle leaders (e.g., heads of department, curriculum leads) looking to sharpen the quality of declarative-knowledge teaching across teams.
• Classroom teachers who feel too much of their lesson time is taken up with copying and want alternatives that lead to better memory and understanding.
• School improvement/CPD leads seeking concrete, low-effort tweaks to share with their staff.

Outcomes you’ll walk away with:

• A clear rationale you can share with colleagues: why reducing copying matters in teaching factual knowledge.
• Exemplifictation of both the issues and solutions.
• Practical tools for designing attention checks and retrieval activities that replace copying and deepen thinking.
• Clear practical strategies that require little to no re-drafting of resources

About your host:

Adam Robbins is an experienced teacher and teacher trainer. He is the author of Middle Leadership Mastery and Unlocking Teacher Development as well as the Managing Editor of CogSciSci, a grassroots organisation aiming to promote the use of cognitive science in the classroom.

Logistics:

• Duration: 60 mins
• One ticket entitles one person to attend the webinar
• Recording available on request by valid ticket holder