I mentioned to a friend that I was doing a couple of presentations at the STAV conference about using schema, mental frameworks, and collaborative learning. And being who my friend is, Ben Lawless of Lawless Learning, aka a wellspring of educational expertise, said, “You should do the Learning how to Learn Course by Barbara Oakley”. So I did. Over Summer, while turning the compost heap, I was watching the videos on how the brain encodes knowledge and how we maximise our effectiveness in learning. And what chaos has since ensured. It has completely turned my ideas inside out as to what I value in my classroom. I had long been pondering on how to help students get more out of their investment in Chemistry. Every year I have students who work slavishly through the textbook questions and trial exams, but with results which are below their expectations. I can now see some areas where they could make improvements in how they are learn. As the new year has begun, I am trialling strategies in my classroom to help students ‘level up’ in how they learn. Investing more in ensuring students are encoding a deep understanding of the concepts and explicitly teaching them how to do retrieval practice. I now have a million and one different ideas for the classroom, so much so, that I am developing a website purely for students. Ready made flashcards which I have incorporated into an app called LIFT (Lietner Interactive Flashcard Trainer). I have also developed the Triple D app, where students challenge each other to go deeper in their understanding. And similarly the Gold Bank, is for students to develop their skills in deeply encoding knowledge and learning how to write exam ready answers. Sadly the website is not quite ready, the start of the teaching year is always busier than I imagine, but when it is I will let you know.