The Brain's Teleprompter That Helps Your Child Learns & Remembers 2X Faster (3 Mental Templates + Fourth Layer)

by Thuy Truong, M.A. Ed., 7/10/2025 | TPT Teaching and Coaching

“Memory is like a spiderweb that catches new information. The more it catches, the bigger it grows, and the bigger it grows, the more it catches.” ~Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein (2012)

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As a certified classroom teacher and coach for two decades, I only realize now that I live, breathe, and read schemas in all my students and young adults. When you do something so automatically because of your formal training and pure joy in the task, you lack the perspective to step back and analyze about it. I believe schemas (students' mental blueprints) are one of the things I often immediately pick up after a 15-minute conversation with a student. When I was a university student studying to be certified high school English teacher, I had to journal every single day during my last semester of student teaching right before graduation why a lesson went well with students and why a lesson didn't go so well. The determinating factor was often the schema construction effectiveness to help students assimilate new knowledge with previous learning.

Schema is the mental template one uses to understand, organize, and retain new information by connecting previous learning with current knowledge (Thorndyke & Hayes-Roth, 1979). It's like if your brain has a template for how to digest certain content, then you will learn and remember faster. Schemas are like brain stencils for learning.

For example, if you have a solid mental template of driving the interstate highway consists of always merge on the left and exit on the right, then you have successfully formed a schema. Once you have solidified the schema of interstate highway driving, then you can adapt to almost any interstate highway system in the 50 states because the learned schema promotes the escalation of understanding and memory consolidation with its powerful mental blueprint that has been created previously (Tse et al., 2007). It's truly like the common phrase: If you can figure out one using schema, you can figure out them all.

There are three main schemas in knowledge acquisition and the fourth one is distilled purely from my own professional observation as a licensed educator based on my two decades with students and young adults.

1. Content Schema 

This is a mental template about certain subjects that the student already knows extremely well. To accelerate new knowledge acquisition and create long-lasting impression, you want to connect new learning to subjects that the student has strong familiarity with thus strong preexisting schemas. For example, if a student knows everything about soccer and you are trying to teach time management, you can show the student how many hours a week college soccer students spend on homework, practice, and self-care. Suddenly, time management is very real because the student knows this schema thoroughly and uses it to lock in new knowledge.

Why this works?

When a student can attach a personal association with new learning, they will remember it more and understand it faster (Tse et al., 2007). The solid, previous mental blueprint will facilitate a seamless cementation between old and new content.

2. Textual Schema

This is the mental blueprints for different subtle narratives that students often use and connect in their minds daily to make sense of specific human experiences or situations. To illustrate, if a student writes an overly broad thesis statement, and I said to the student: "Don't be that guy that walks into the shoe store and say I want shoes." The minute I utter this sentence, I activate the student's mental and associative memory that has been engrained into his cognitive fabric from a previous lesson that I had taught. Thus, the student will immediately know I highly recommend him to make his thesis statement more specific because right now it is too broad.

Why this works?

New learning gets encoded more rapidly into the brain when you help the student actively integrate his prior knowledge with new concepts, but the reframe here is through inner dialogues that have been internalized through social constructs. The speed of knowledge transfer is highly dependent on memory association (Thorndyke & Hayes-Roth, 1977). This is made more potent by using a specific but familiar narrative that the student already knows (Van Kesteren, 2013).

3. Linguistic Schema

Every child has a love language; every brain does too. Every single student/individual that I work with has a unique relationship with language in one way or another. How words roll off in their speech or how certain phrases linger in their minds or how a person phrases things. Often, this originates from their hobbies and cognitive function. For instance, one of my students is a huge fan of Jim Carrey. Thus, my intentionality is to link Mr. Carrey's line "I feel it in my neck" in the movie Ace Ventura with the idea that examples in an essay has to be distinctively specific (like aiming for a specific location in archery). I chose this line because I know from experience that most young academic writers struggle with the concept of specificity in academic writing. So whenever my student is producing an essay, I will ablaze the student's mental blueprint by saying: Remember,  "I feel it in my neck." Then, the student will immediately know the deep subtlety in my hint is to produce very specific examples during essay writing.

Why this works?

ADHD literature has illuminated that students with ADHD/LD often have a working memory deficit (Kofler et al., 2008). Therefore, layering schemas during knowledge acquisition to strengthen both memory consolidation and content comprehension thereby helping them remember the concept faster and ultimately completing the academic task in a timely manner too.

4. Artistic/Emotional Schema

This one is my ultimate favorite because of its limitless potential and lyrical joy. This is the fairy dust that turns all the three other schemas into gold. This is the organic and intellectual template that is already deeply rooted in the student's cognitive imagination and adventurous landscape. I call this the student's inner vibe; it's who they are as a person and everything they dream of. If you can enter this sacred land with a student from a genuine standpoint, you will experience the student as a soul, a human being with rainbows of personality. You will also see their mental blueprints all in its glitter and glory; it will become apparent to you as an observant educator/coach.

Some past examples of mine: a student would remember and comprehend the intricate plot twists of a classic novel by keeping a leather bound diary not as herself but as a character in the novel she is reading because that was the student's creative imagination (her vibe as a student, she likes to be introspective by seeing the world through another person's eyes. I had recognized early on that was her academic strength, I knew adding that artistic schema would make her an academic powerhouse. And shine she did!). Another instance would be I showed how a character is stuck inside a rhino to demonstrate to the student that you have to be creative and find your way into an essay no matter how boring the topic. It stuck with the student because he enjoys humor in that way. The student just told me this week it was his favorite lesson of summer 2025!

Why this works?

Research suggests creative academic practices bridge seamlessly the perfect blend of creativity and learning, which is necessary for ADHD academic support. Often times in this education model, students get the golden opportunity to align content with their natural skills while allowing them to practice critical thinking and problem solving (Johnson, 2025).

In my observation, it is a potent mix when all four types of schemas are evenly infused into a single academic session to maximize students' cognition and memory. The layering effect helps cement the velocity at which the speed the brain will integrate new learning with prior knowledge while the psychological/emotional fabrics of the student's mental blueprint will construct new memory links and knowledge creation. To me, it's just activating the magic teleprompter in my students' brains.

If you'd like your child to schema with us and unlock their potential, book a free consultation today here. We look forward to learning more about your child's needs.

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Sources:

Foer, J. (2012). Moonwalking with Einstein: The art and science of remembering everything. Penguin.

Johnson, K. A. (2025). The Creative Classroom: A Phenomenological Study of Engagement in Students with ADHD.

Kofler, M. J., Rapport, M. D., Bolden, J., & Altro, T. A. (2008). Working memory as a core deficit in ADHD: Preliminary findings and implications. The ADHD Report, 16(6), 8-14.

Thorndyke, P. W., & Hayes-Roth, B. (1979). The use of schemata in the acquisition and transfer of knowledge. Cognitive psychology, 11(1), 82-106.

Tse, D., Langston, R. F., Kakeyama, M., Bethus, I., Spooner, P. A., Wood, E. R., ... & Morris, R. G. (2007). Schemas and memory consolidation. Science, 316(5821), 76-82.

Van Kesteren, M. T. R. (2013). Schemas in the brain: Influences of prior knowledge on learning, memory, and education. Sl: sn.