Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning

by James M. Lang

Focus prediction activities on the major conceptual material that will maximize their learning in the course.

Provide Fast Feedback Close the loop on every prediction your students make by providing feedback as immediately as possible.

you don't want wrong predictions hanging around in students' heads for very long; the more immediate the correction, the better.

Induce Reflection

Students who made correct predictions can be asked to articulate the principle or concept that helped them get it right; students who made incorrect predictions can repair their understanding by articulating the correct ideas.

At the beginning of the class, unit, or course, give students a brief pretest on the material. For example, give an opening-week pretest that is similar in format to the final exam. Prior to first content exposure, ask students to write down what they already know about that subject matter or to speculate about what they will be learning. When presenting cases, problems, examples, or histories, stop before the conclusion and ask students to predict the outcome. When you are teaching a new cognitive skill (e.g., writing in a new genre), let students try their hand at it (and receive feedback) before they feel ready. Close class by asking students to make predictions about material that will be covered in the next class session.

“The researchers found,” the article notes, “that curious minds showed increased activity in the hippocampus, which is involved in the creation of memories.” Further, the anticipation of receiving an answer to a question about which the subjects were curious stimulated the reward system of the brain, and that system in turn stimulated the hippocampus further:

Consider how you can use the opening or closing minutes of your class or brief questions seeded throughout a lesson to till the soil of your students' minds and prepare a fertile ground for the learning that will follow.

interleaving, and it involves two related activities that promote high levels of long-term retention: (a) spacing out learning sessions over time; and (b) mixing up your practice of skills you are seeking to develop.

for short-term retention, massed practice can be as effective (and sometimes more effective) than distributed practice.

Interleaving refers to the practice of spending some time learning one thing and then pausing to concentrate on learning a second thing before having quite mastered that first thing, and then returning to the first thing, and then moving onto a third thing, and then returning to the second thing, and so forth.

Blocked learning does not require students to make such choices about which learned skill to apply in which context.

Over the course of several experiments, they found consistently that the students who had the opportunity to repeat the pronunciation of familiar words over and over again in blocked fashion outperformed those who learned those pronunciations in interleaved fashion.

it may be more advantageous to start with a blocked schedule and then transition to interleaving”

The argument I am making here is not to eliminate blocked practice but to use interleaving to require students to return continuously, in different contexts, to material they have learned already.

the implication is an obvious one: all major exams in your course should be cumulative.

You can even accomplish this in a less obvious way by giving assignments or asking exam questions that require students to compare current content or skills with previously learned material.

answer three or four large essay questions. After the first exam, one of those questions always requires them to compare an author or event or trend from the current period with one from a previous period.

semester. If you give 10-question multiple-choice quizzes on a weekly basis, set aside two questions for previously learned material.

If you give one-question writing-based quizzes, as I do, ensure that every third or fourth quiz requires students to return to previously learned material.

Open each class session by posting a test question from a previous exam or a potential test question related to previous course content. Give students time to consider and discuss their answers. Close class sessions by asking students to create a test question based on that day's material, and pose that question back to them in future class sessions. Open or close class sessions by asking students to open their notebooks to a previous day's class session and underline the three most important principles from that day; allow a few moments for a brief discussion of what they featured from their notes.

Even a small bit of attention to the distribution of deadlines and spacing of material should help, though.

The smallest teaching step would be to find simple ways to space out student exposure to key course material through cumulative quizzes and exams.

Don't hesitate to dig into a focused problem-solving session or to spend concentrated periods of time introducing new content. Just ensure that students return to that material over and over again throughout the semester, encountering it in multiple contexts

If you provide at least one opportunity for interleaving in every class period, and on every quiz or exam, you should be able to cycle back to major elements of the course several times. To help you accomplish this task, keep your interleaving sessions in class small.

use the opening and closing minutes of class to link students to previous course content or even to point them toward future content.

Reserve a small part of your major exams (and even the minor ones, such as quizzes) for questions or problems that require students to draw on older course content.

Create weekly mini review sessions in which students spend the final 15

minutes of the last class session of the week applying that week's content to some new question or problem.

This applies in the flipped classroom: just because students are busily working away at tasks at their desks doesn't mean they are learning anything.

Your task is to create an environment that facilitates the formation of those connections rather than simply lecturing at them about connections.

you might find that their existing networks distort new information to make it fit with what they already know rather than using it to build up rich and productive new networks.

What Do You Already Know (and What Do You Want to Know?)

Essentially, you want to ask your students to make individual and collective knowledge dumps, telling you everything they know—or think they know—about your subject before you begin teaching them.

At the start of the semester, devote part of one class period to assessing students' current state of knowledge, either through whole-class or group activities or through a written pretest (a strategy that also fits well with what we learned about the learning power of prediction).

At the close of the first class of the semester, after you have introduced the subject matter and the course, ask students to write down three questions they have about the subject matter or three things they would like to learn over the course of the semester. Discuss their responses in the second class.

event. I have had my students create concept maps around the major characters in a single novel or around the appearance of a key theme in multiple novels.

follow the suggestion of How Learning Works and have students make multiple maps with different organizing principles.

If I ask students to create a map of novel characters one day, I might ask them to create one around its themes on a second day and yet another around its images on a third day.

You could, for example, use your course learning management system to start a handful of discussion threads that pair various course elements in different ways and ask each student to contribute a one-sentence thesis to that discussion thread over the course of a 24-hour period;

Provide the Framework

The more familiar the students become with your course content, the less of this you will have to do.

Facilitate Connections

Leverage Peer Learning Power

Rather than trying to squeeze them into five- or ten-minute sessions in class, see if you can allot them more time in single-class sessions at the opening, midway point, or closing of the semester.

As much as possible, offer examples or cases from everyday or common experience but also—and more importantly—give students the opportunity to provide such examples on their own.

Willingham in Why Don't Students Like School, “the only way to develop mental facility [at a cognitive task] is to repeat the target process again and again”

So if you have to complete some cognitive task that requires you to hold three or four elements in your working memory at the same time, practice might enable you to automatize one or two of those, thereby freeing up space for you to bring in other inputs from your long-term memory (e.g., instructions from your teacher) or your environment (e.g., the textbook in front of you).

The student who has a strong mastery of grammar and mechanics, by contrast, can devote his working memory space to those more complex tasks.

Ellen Langer. Decades of Langer's research on cognition and learning are distilled in a brief but wonderful book called The Power of Mindful Learning,