Ep. 1: Memory Bricks: Making the Invisible Work of Memory Visible

Jane Mitchell

Welcome to the show. Let's start with two words that have probably been said to nearly every struggling learner at some point. Try harder. It sounds like encouragement. It sounds reasonable. And for a child who has no method for remembering, it's about as useful as telling someone to drive better when nobody has ever shown them where the gears are.

Jane Mitchell

Here's the heart of the problem. Memory happens inside your head. You cannot stand next to somebody with a brilliant memory, watch them very closely, and learn how they do it, because nothing they do is visible. There's no movement to copy. So a child who forgets the spellings, the instructions, the times tables, is often in a position where the working parts are hidden from everybody, including themselves. And when they fail again and again without ever being shown a method, the conclusion they draw is not that nobody taught them. It's that something is wrong with them.

Jane Mitchell

So I want to say something plainly, the way I'd say it to teachers. If nobody has taught you how to remember better yet, it is not your fault. Some children think memory is magic, that people with good memories just look at something, or hear it, and it sticks, without doing anything at all. But in fact a process does happen whenever anyone remembers something. It may be happening below the level of awareness. To improve it, though, it has to become conscious. And that can be taught.

Jane Mitchell

I'm Jane Mitchell, and this is the first of eight episodes based on my manual, Enhancing the Teaching of Memory Using Memory Bricks, published by the Communication and Learning Skills Centre. The method has been around for more than thirty years. Today, I want to give you the whole picture: what the bricks are, who they help, and how the four colour levels are built. We'll go into the theory, the routine, and the strategies in the episodes that follow.

Jane Mitchell

First, the simple definition of memory that the manual uses. It's the ability to take in, store, and retrieve information. Three stages: acquisition, retention, and retrieval. Or if you prefer, encoding, storing, and recalling. Each stage can be improved. And there's a point that matters enormously: you can only remember what you actually acquired in the first place. When retrieval is slow and clumsy, when a child can't find the word, we tend to blame the retrieval. Often the real trouble happened earlier, at the taking in and the holding on.

Jane Mitchell

The manual has a lovely image for this. Someone can have a Rolls Royce in the driveway and not know how to drive it to the full extent of its capabilities. The aim isn't to hand anyone a different engine. It's to help them get better at using the one they've got.

Jane Mitchell

So, the bricks. A Memory Bricks set is ten small coloured wooden bricks. Each brick has a picture on every one of its six faces, and here's the clever bit: all ten bricks in a set are identical. Same six pictures, same arrangement. A full kit has four sets, so forty bricks in all. If you were making your own, which we'll come to in the final episode, that's sixty stickers per set and two hundred and forty for the full kit.

Jane Mitchell

Why identical? Because the teacher can build a short line of bricks, two, three, four, or five, and the learner can build the same line from their own set. The teacher then covers hers up. The learner makes his version from memory. Then the two rows are placed side by side, touching, and compared.

Jane Mitchell

Now notice what's missing. There's no spelling. No arithmetic. No reading comprehension. The pictures are only remotely linked to schoolwork, and that's deliberate. The manual says the aim is to separate the process of memory from the content of the subject being learned. A dyslexic child who has been bruised by spelling tests can sit down with a duck and a telephone and a flower, and nothing about them says test. An adult recovering from a stroke can inspect how their own mind takes in a sequence without the fear of failing at something that used to be easy. For once the question isn't whether you got it right. It's what your mind did with it. And that is the lesson.

Jane Mitchell

So who can use these? The manual sets out the baseline simply. A learner needs to be able to recognise and name the pictures, and to understand the concepts of same and different. That usually arrives around two to three years old. So the bricks can be used preventatively with very young children, before difficulties have a chance to settle in. The manual says they work very effectively with children aged five to twelve, including those with special needs. And it says motivated students and adults, including stroke patients, can improve their memory with them. Both preventative work and remediation.

Jane Mitchell

The kinds of difficulty the manual lists are worth hearing. Poor short term or working memory. Poor visual or auditory memory. Poor sequencing skills. Trouble remembering instructions, what's been read, what's been done, multiplication tables, vocabulary, facts for tests. Which is quite a list. It also describes a fair few tired adults on a Tuesday afternoon.

Jane Mitchell

Now the colours, because this is where the design is clever. The colour tells you the level of challenge, and the difficulty doesn't come from making the row longer. It comes from increasing how much the learner has to notice. The manual calls these information carrying words: the number of things you need to say to tell one picture from another.

Jane Mitchell

Blue is level one, the easiest. Six unrelated everyday objects on each brick. The manual's examples: teddy bear, duck, telephone, chips, flower, lamb. Or apple, spade, car, teddy bear, ball, panda. Nothing repeats, nothing is similar. If you see the duck, you only need to know it's a duck.

Jane Mitchell

Green, level two, keeps everything inside one topic. One brick might show grapes, strawberry, pineapple, cherries, apple, and orange. Another, stationery: ink, pen, Sellotape, stapler, globe, compass. Now the pictures belong together, so you can't get by on a vague sense of fruit. You have to hold on to which fruit. And the manual points out there's a bonus, because a topic set gives you something to practise sorting with.

Jane Mitchell

Red, level three, starts to repeat pictures that differ in one significant feature, most often which way they face. A frog leaping to the right, a frog leaping to the left. A bird facing right, a bird facing left. A rabbit facing right, a rabbit facing left. Now the learner has to notice not just what it is, but how it appears.

Jane Mitchell

And yellow, level four, the hardest. Several features can vary at once. The manual's example is a set of ducklings: fuzzy or smooth, facing left or right, beak open or beak closed. Or flower heads: red or pink, pointed or rounded petals, with a yellow, orange, or red middle. By this point, remembering that it's a small green animal won't do. The task has moved from broad recognition to precise noticing.

Jane Mitchell

I want to be careful about the adult side of this, because it matters. The manual tells us I've taught adult stroke patients, but it doesn't record named case studies or medical histories, and I'm not going to invent one. So let me offer something as an illustration, not a case file. Picture an adult, months after a stroke, handed a worksheet with cartoon animals on it, the kind you'd give a four year old. Most of us would feel it as an insult. Whatever that person is struggling with, being treated like a child makes it worse, and engagement drops.

Jane Mitchell

Now put a row of small wooden bricks in front of that same person. Teacher builds a line. Cover it. Now you build it. Then lay them side by side and look for differences. That's not a childish exercise. It's a puzzle. A spatial, sequencing puzzle with a clear rule and an honest answer. And the sequencing skills it works on are exactly the ones recovery is trying to rebuild. The person keeps their adult dignity, and the thinking still gets trained. That's why the manual lists them among those who can benefit, and why it isn't babyish busywork.

Jane Mitchell

Let me come back to the wood, because it isn't decoration. The manual talks about how people take in information: some prefer to look at material, some to hear it, and some to be physically involved with it and do something with it. That's the kinaesthetic way. The kinaesthetic learner fidgets, plays with a pen, moves in the chair while learning. The ultimate aim is flexibility, being able to take in information however it arrives. But in practice most of us have a favourite route.

Jane Mitchell

Bricks give you more than one route in. You pick one up. You turn it. You line it up with another. The manual says that for some children, touching the bricks and handling them while the information goes in actually increases memory. A flat card or a screen invites you to stare. A brick invites you to do something, and the doing leaves an anchor. Not magic, just more doors into the same room.

Jane Mitchell

One more piece of design. Because the bricks are identical, a learner can prove to himself, at the start, that every brick has the same pictures. That also checks the skill the whole method depends on, finding the matching picture on his own brick. Then the teacher can gently ask, do you think you could remember this if I cover it up? That's a softer door than announcing that he must now remember.

Jane Mitchell

And now a rule I can't leave out. These are bricks, but they are not toys. They're teaching tools, and they must always be used under adult supervision. The stickers can be peeled off if a child isn't supervised, and once that happens the whole idea of identical bricks falls apart. But there's a second reason for the adult, and it's the bigger one. The discussion after the build is where the learning happens. A child alone with a box of bricks is playing. A child with an adult who asks, how did you try to remember that, is learning how his own mind works. The manual says the teacher takes the role of mediator, not answer giver.

Jane Mitchell

Notice what the teacher does not say. When the two rows differ, she doesn't say, that's wrong. She asks, are there any differences between the two rows? The number of bricks remembered isn't the crucial point. The strategy is. The manual says there is no correct or incorrect here, especially for a learner who already has poor self esteem. We'll look at that routine properly in a later episode.

Jane Mitchell

So here's what I'd like you to carry out of this first episode. We tend to treat memory as a gift: some people have it, some don't, and our job is to grade the result. Right or wrong, five out of ten, try again. But if memory isn't a fixed gift, if it's a set of things people do, acquiring, holding, retrieving, then grading the recall is like marking someone's driving by checking where they ended up, without ever asking how they steered.

Jane Mitchell

What changes when we stop grading what came out, and start teaching what goes on inside? What might a child do differently once she can say, I looked at it carefully, I told myself a little story, I forgot the last brick? Once the invisible becomes visible, it can be improved. That's what the next episode is about. Join me, and bring a curious mind.