Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning

by James M. Lang

Without any information readily available to us in our brains, we tend to see new facts (from our Google searches) in isolated, noncontextual ways that lead to shallow thinking. Facts are related to other facts, and the more of those relationships we can see, the more we will prove capable of critical analysis and creative thinking.

The depiction of Bloom's taxonomy as a pyramid actually does acknowledge this important principle; one cannot get to the top levels of creative and critical thinking, after all, without a broad and solid foundation of knowledge beneath them.

retrieval effect means that if you want to retrieve knowledge from your memory, you have to practice retrieving knowledge from your memory. The more times that you practice remembering something, the more capable you become of remembering that thing in the future.

Long-term memory is rather like having a vast amount of closet space—it is easy to store many items, but it is difficult to retrieve the needed item in a timely fashion” (Miller 2011, p. 119).

taking a few seconds to predict the answer before learning it, even when the prediction is incorrect, seemed to increase subsequent retention of learned material. This was true even when that prediction time substitutes for—rather than supplements—more conventional forms of studying.

Pretests or predictive activities alert the students to what the teacher sees as important for them to know and direct their study to those areas.

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. In short, it involves the process of both spacing and mixing learning activities—the spacing happening by virtue of the mixing.

“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). And this is important, as they note, because

real-world performance contexts require this skill: in life, as on final exams, “problems and opportunities come at us unpredictably, out of sequence. For our learning to have practical value, we must be adept at discerning ‘What kind of problem is this?’ so we can select and apply an appropriate solution”

In the initial learning phase, blocked study or practice is not a bad thing—and for some types of learning tasks it might even be a necessary thing.

Blocking on its own is not a problem; blocking without interleaving—otherwise known as cramming—produces wonderful short-term retention but will leave our students without the long-term retention that will enable them to extend their learning beyond the final exam.

The flipped classroom does not automatically provide…outstanding learning experiences. What it provides is space and time for instructors to design learning activities and then carry them out, by relocating the transfer of information to outside the classroom. But then the instructor has the responsibility of using that space and time effectively. And sometimes that doesn't work. [Italics in original] (Talbert 2014)

I still remember a Renaissance literature course I took as an undergraduate in which the instructor put us in small groups with instructions to discuss key passages of whatever text we were studying that day. I loathed those sessions, saw them as pointless, and can assure you I learned nothing from them. Looking back now, through the lens of many years of teaching and reading about teaching and learning in higher education, I can see multiple problems with the way those sessions worked: we had no real task to complete, beyond the vague injunction to discuss the passages; the teacher offered no guidance or supervision while we worked and instead did something inscrutable up at the front of the room; and although a connection may have existed, she did not articulate for us any connection between what we were doing in those group sessions and what we did on our essays or exams.

good flipped classroom learning requires frequent interaction between the instructor and the students;

Asking students to activate what they already know about a subject before they learn it more deeply helps light up the connections that they already have (just as prediction activities can do) and will give you a better understanding of where you might need to start in terms of your presentation of new material.

The small teaching strategy to be recommended in this chapter lies at the heart of this section and the heart of the book as a whole: Whatever cognitive skills you are seeking to instill in your students, and that you will be assessing for a grade, the students should have time to practice in class.

First, the learner must be willing to shift and develop the categories that will guide her through a cognitive task. If the learner is using theory A to guide her through a problem-solving session and finds herself stuck in a dead end, she should have the ability to recognize that theory A might need modification or even need chucking out and replacing with theory B. A mindful learner cannot simply plug and chug formulae, in other words.

that learners benefit from explaining out loud (to themselves or others) what they are doing during the completion of a learning task

The best self-explanation techniques prompt learners to articulate not only what they are doing but also why they are doing it, and that second requirement helps ensure that students can't simply connect the dots to make a picture: they must tie their doing to their knowing.

Second, the Good learners frequently monitored comprehension. In other words, they stated whether or not they understood what they were reading and were not shy about

admitting when they were stuck. “Good students,” they suggested, “realize that they do not understand more often than the Poor students” (p. 172). Most important, when the Good students recognized and articulated gaps in their understanding, they sought to correct them.

However you need to adapt it to your specific course, the small teaching strategy here entails requiring students who are solving problems to consider a list of possible principles that will guide their work and occasionally to pause and identify the principle that will determine their next step.

In this chapter, then, we shift the question from the usual one that teachers ask about student motivation—how can I foster internal or intrinsic motivation in my students?—to one that acknowledges the reality and power of emotions in the classroom: How can I elicit and work with the emotions already present in the room to give students frequent motivational boosts throughout the semester?

In the opening and closing minutes of class. Use those coveted time periods to remind students where they have been, where you are now, where you are going, and—most important—why.

To promote a growth mind-set, begin by designing an assessment system that rewards intellectual growth in your students. The very simplest way to do this is to allow students the opportunity to practice and take risks, fail and get feedback, and then try again without having their grades suffer for it.

fixed mind-sets hamper students with high valuations of their intelligence as much as they do for students with low valuations of their intelligence. When students believe they are naturally smart and they perceive that quality as a fixed one, they may shy away from challenging tasks because they fear that failure will prove them wrong and that everyone—including themselves—will see that they are not as smart as they thought they were.

big teaching: large-scale, revolutionary, innovative types of courses that completely break from the mold of traditional college and university teaching and that represent the opposite end of the spectrum from small teaching.

An outstanding source of pathways to big (and small) teaching is the ABLConnect database at Harvard University (http://ablconnect.harvard.edu), which serves as a gathering place of research, examples, and ideas for pedagogical innovation in higher education. ABLConnect distinguishes between two types of learning activities collected within its searchable database: active learning, a term with which you are likely familiar and that would cover just about every teaching strategy described in this book; and activity-based learning, which “involves fieldwork, public service, community-based research and internships in conjunction with in-class work” (ABLConnect).

it should go without saying that the service activity connects to some integral component of the course. In this way the students are learning content and developing skills both in their preparation for their service, in the practicing of it, and in their analysis of it and reflections on it afterward.

The service work cannot simply be an add-on to the regular course content, vaguely tied to it but not linked to it in any substantive way.