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 ...

Induce Reflection

In other words, we remember what we spend a little time thinking about.

Predictions make us curious—I wonder whether I will be right?—and curiosity is an emotion that has been recently demonstrated to boost memory when it is heightened prior to exposure to new material.

“The researchers found,” the article notes, “that curious minds showed increased activity in the hippocampus, which is involved in the creation of memories.”

massed versus spaced (or sometimes distributed)

In massed learning, students focus

entirely on one skill or set of material until they ...

in distributed practice, students space out their learning ...

A substantial body of research has demonstrated the power of spaced learning. Benedict Carey wrote in How We Learn that “nothing in learning science comes close in terms of immediate, significant, and reliable improvements to learning” (p. 76).

The more times we practice drawing specific skills or information from our long-term memory, the better we get at it.

By contrast, if we use spaced learning to allow some time for the forgetting of learned material to set in, we are forced to draw material from our longer-term memory when we return to it.

Spacing out learning thus forces us to engage at least partially in memory retrieval.

Embedding new learning in long-term memory requires a process of consolidation, in which memory traces (the brain's representations of new learning) are strengthened,

given meaning, and connected to prior knowledge—a process that unfolds over hours and may take several days.

Rapid-fire practice leans on short-term memory. Durable learning, however, requires time for mental rehearsal… Hence, spaced practice works better. The increased effort to retrieve the learning after a little forgetting has the effect of retriggering consolidation, fu...

However, we can help our students even further if we consider spaced learning as one aspect of interleaving, a broader approach to helping our students learn.

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...

Norden's experiences suggest that a little discomfort during the interleaved learning process can have major payoffs in the long run.

Hence, “a significant advantage of interleaving and variation,” argued the authors of Make It Stick, “is that they help us learn better how to assess context and discriminate between problems, selecting and applying the correct solution from a range of possibilities” (Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel 2014, p. 53).

This explanation for the limits of blocked practice and the benefits of interleaving points to a deep and fundamental challenge that all learners face: transferring learning from the original context in which we encounter it into novel or unfamiliar contexts.

Blocked study or practice deepens our association between a learned skill or concept and the specific context in which we learned it; interleaved learning, by contrast, forces us into frequent transfers of information and skills across contexts, which helps us develop the ability to recognize when a learned skill might apply in a new context.

Cultivating the ability of our students to draw from memory and apply learned concepts or skills to new situations is, as Susan Ambrose and her colleagues argued, the “central goal of education” (Ambrose, Bridges, DiPietro, Lovett, Norman 2010, p. 108). Interleaved learning facilitates that goal more effectively than massed learning.

Blocked study or practice, it seems to me, is an appropriate first step for any learning activity. As Benedict Carey put it, “It's not that repetitive [or massed] practice is bad. We all need a certain amount of it to become familiar with any new skill or material”

More generally, every major assignment should require students to draw—at least a little bit—on information or concepts or skills they have learned in previous units.

Asking questions about previous material (e.g., in the form of the test questions recommended by Weimer 2015) would constitute a very low-level form of interleaving and can be easily supplemented or enhanced by more substantive exercises.

The smallest teaching step would be to find simple ways to space out student exposure to key course material through cumulative quizzes and exams. If you see positive results, you can then work more gradually on how to design an assessment system that creates more fully interleaved learning.

To gain some initial mastery of new content or a novel skill, learners may well need some initial sessions of blocked or massed practice, as the experiment with students learning French pronunciation would suggest (Carpenter and Mueller 2013).

Pausing before you have fully mastered something can feel frustrating, as can be the demand to recall material or practice skills you thought you had mastered but then realize you don't know as well as you had imagined.

Make sure that you speak to your students about the benefits of interleaving, about the nature of your assessments, and about the differences between short- and long-term learning.

Talbert pointed out that good flipped classroom learning requires frequent interaction between the instructor and the students; he described it as “the kind of interactive engagement that a coach might have with his or her players while they practice.

“small disconnected islets” (Orwell 1986, p. 209) in a vast sea of ignorance.

“It was obvious that whatever they knew they had learned in an entirely mechanical manner, and they could only gape in a sort of dull bewilderment when asked to think for themselves” (p. 209).

Experts, they explained, have a much richer “density of connections among the concepts, facts, and skills they know” (Ambrose, Bridges, DiPietro, Lovett, and Norman 2010, p. 49).

My students, by contrast, are novice learners in the field; their knowledge of it, to borrow a phrase from How Learning Works, is “sparse and superficial” (p. 46). Especially at the beginning of a semester, Ambrose et al. explained, students might” absorb the knowledge from each lecture in a course without connecting the information to other lectures or recognizing themes that cut across the course” (p. 49).

The Art of Changing the Brain: Enriching the Practice of Teaching by Exploring the Biology of Learning (Zull 2002),

Ambrose et al. argued that the primary difference between teachers and students lies in the realm of connections: “One important way experts' and novices' knowledge organizations differ is in the number or density of connections among the concepts, facts, and skills they know” (Ambrose, Bridges, DiPietro, Lovett, and Norman 2010, p. 49).

However, just telling them about those connections isn't enough. They have to build up the connected networks in their own brains—with our help.

However, the important point for now is that the partial notes gave students an organized framework that enabled and encouraged them to see and make new connections on their own.

Much has been made of the ways poor or inaccurate prior knowledge can interfere with their new learning; as Zull explains, you can't make existing connections in people's brains disappear (Zull 2002, pp. 105–106). Instead of attempting this futile task, or ignoring their prior knowledge completely, the universally recommended strategy to address this issue is to surface and address their prior knowledge.

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.

As an example of the third suggestion, when I teach a seminar on twenty-first-century British literature and culture, I set aside 30 minutes on the first day of the semester for a knowledge dump in which students respond to the following question: “When I say the word ‘British,’ what are the primary impressions that form in your mind?”

“Tell me what comes to mind when you think of data structures.”

Overall, when it comes to providing students with the material from your slides of your lecture or any other course content, remember that smaller is better; you will help them connect most deeply if you provide only the outline and let them do the rest of the work.

Provide the Framework

Remember that one of the most important ways your knowledge of the course content differs from your students lies in your ability to organize and connect concepts and information in meaningful ways. As you encounter new knowledge in your field, you can remember and work with it because of that organization.

Facilitate Connections The network of connections in your head doesn't transfer wholly into the heads of your students. Providing the frame to your students not only will help them better understand the organization of knowledge in your field but also leaves open the space for them to create the connections in their brains that will fuel deep learning.

Leverage Peer Learning Power