Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning

by James M. Lang

Susan Ambrose and her colleagues argued in How Learning Works

subjective value and expectancies (2010, p. 69). The extent to which the learning or the subject matter seems important to the individual learner represents its subjective value; the extent to which the learner feels as if her work and practice will lead to a positive outcome represents the learner's expectancies. Both of these elements must be present for motivation to be high.

The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion, a powerful new analysis of how emotions impact learning in and outside our classrooms, especially in higher education.

First, and most generally, emotions can help us capture the attention of our students. “Activating [student] emotions,” Cavanagh wrote, “results in a number of cascading effects in the body and brain, all of which are designed to maximize cognitive and physical performance and make memories stronger” (p. 14).

How We Learn, Benedict Carey

“Boring but Important,” which explored what types of purposefulness most inspired learners to persist in learning repetitive or challenging yet essential tasks for future learning or academic success (Yeager, Henderson, Paunesku, Walton, D'Mello, Spitzer, and Duckworth 2014).

self-transcendent purpose produced the strongest driver for students to persist through challenging academic tasks. Self-transcendent motivation contrasts with self-oriented motivation, which describes a desire to have a great career or enhance one's knowledge or abilities. Self-transcendent motivation describes a desire to help other people, to change the world in some positive way, to make a difference.

As long as we are thinking about how to infuse our student learning with purpose, we may be getting the largest possible bang for our buck if we can help them recognize the power of their learning to make a difference to the world: in doing so we are both helping direct their attention and giving them the motivation to persist through learning challenges.

Third and finally, emotions are social—which helps explain one aspect of the experience I had with my daughter. When I became interested in learning her recital song, she became interested in learning it, too.

The most concrete way this contagion has been analyzed in the classroom relates to the enthusiasm of the teacher and the effect that strong enthusiasm can have on student learning. For example, Cavanagh pointed to a study in which researchers measured markers of enthusiasm among teachers of secondary students in a Swiss school and found a startling correlation between those markers and the experiences of the students in the classroom: “The enthusiasm of the educators statistically predicted their students' ratings of enjoyment and perceived value in the subject matter” (Cavanagh 2016, p. 64).

The emotions that we demonstrate to students, especially our positive emotions connected to the subject matter we are teaching, can create a strong positive boost to student motivation.

I find this stuff fascinating, and I think you will too. Let's wonder together about it. I can't think of a better way to begin (or pre-begin) a learning experience with your students.

The small teaching recommendation here is simply to be more deliberate about your use of stories. Take your best story and open with it. Then make sure that you are regularly renewing and recapturing the attention of your students with a story every now and then.

frame a class as a story: “Organizing a lesson plan like a story is an effective way to help students comprehend and remember” (p. 67). For example, you might open class with the first half of a story, one that should leave your students puzzled and wondering what comes next. Then launch into the class, explaining that they will now need some information or ideas or theories to better understand how to resolve that puzzle. At the close of class, finish the story. Another way to think about this would be to open the class with a question, one that the class period will help the students answer.

small but regular reminders that invoke purpose, they were speaking the language of small teaching. Such reminders about the larger purpose of your course can and should appear in any of the following ways:

On your syllabus.

On individual assignments.

On the board, real or virtual.

In the opening and closing minutes of class

The small teaching recommendation here simply involves allowing the enthusiasm that you felt when you were first studying your discipline—or that you show to your peers and colleagues when you are talking about your favorite features of your discipline—show in your classroom as well.

The personality that appears when I am talking to a colleague in the hallway about the most recent book from my favorite novelist should find its way into my classroom. That can happen in lots of small ways; it takes only a deliberate decision to open that side of yourself to your students in as many class periods as possible. You'll have your dull and uninspiring days, as we all do. But take a few minutes before you head over to class each day to just pause and reconnect with whatever you find most fascinating about that day's material, and let it rise to the surface of your mind—allowing it to remain there throughout class.

whenever you are tempted to come down hard on a student for any reason whatsoever, take a couple of minutes to speculate on the possibility that something in the background of that student's life has triggered emotions that are interfering with their motivation or their learning. Just a few moments of reflection on that possibility should be enough to moderate your tone and ensure that you are offering a response that will not send that student deeper into a spiral of negative or distracting emotions, thus potentially preventing future learning from happening in your course.

You can tell stories, show film clips or images, make jokes, or do any number of things that will briefly activate the emotions of your students and prepare them to learn. You can leverage the power of emotions to heighten the cognitive capacities of your students at the opening, midway point, or closing of a course or a class period. Psychologist Michelle Miller, the author of Minds Online, encouraged instructors to ask themselves the following two questions: “What is the emotional heart of the material I am teaching? And how can I foreground this emotional center to my students?

Make It Social Use the contagious nature of emotions to your advantage.

Show Enthusiasm First, care about your course material. If you are not excited by what you are teaching, and if you do not care deeply about it, don't expect your students to care about it either. But they won't know that you care deeply about it unless you are willing to show that to them, however that might seem best to you.

Second, care about your students' learning. That means acknowledging that they are full human beings, not cognition machines, and the noncognitive parts of them sometimes will distract them from learning tasks. Let that awareness hover in your mind as you interact with students who are not performing as you think they should, and allow it to govern the tone—not necessarily the content—of your response to them.

Get to class early every day and spend a few minutes getting to know your students, learning about their lives and their interests, and creating a positive social atmosphere in the room.

Open individual class or learning sessions (and even readings) by eliciting student emotions: give them something to wonder about, tell them a story, present them with a shocking fact or statistic. Capture their attention and prepare their brains for learning. Consider how practitioners in your field, or the skills you are teaching them, help make a positive difference in the world; remind them continually, from the opening of the course, about the possibility that their learning can do the same. Keep the overarching purpose of any class period or learning activity in view while students are working. Use the board or frequent oral reminders. Show enthusiasm for your discipline, for individual texts or problems or units, and for your hope that they will find them as fascinating as you do.

For example, the children who had been praised for their natural abilities “enjoyed the tasks less than did the children praised for effort” (p. 37). More disturbingly, “children praised for intelligence were less likely to want to persist on the problems than children praised for effort” (p. 37).

What helps explain findings like this is a deeper lesson that the children seemed to be learning about the nature of intelligence and about the connection between their intellectual ability and their performance on the problem sets.

If children tie their beliefs about intelligence to particular performances, it means that they will attribute poor performance—such as a low score on an exam—to low or deficient intelligence. In other words, rather than seeing a low exam score as the result of not enough studying, a bad day, or some other understandable reason, they will think, “I did not do a good job on this exam. I must be stupid.”

praise for effort, instead of praise for ability, will motivate children to work harder and persist in the face of challenges and will even increase their enjoyment of learning-oriented tasks.

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (2008). People have either a fixed or growth mind-set when it comes to their attitudes and beliefs about learning and intelligence.

it's essential to pause and note that the growth mind-set better reflects what neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists tell us about our brains and our capacities for growth and learning: we can improve our intelligence through hard work and effort, and we can make ourselves smarter. We can get better at math, or writing, or whatever else we want to learn.

series of studies conducted by Laura Kray and Michael Haselhuhn on the mind-sets of students in an MBA course on negotiating (Kray and Haselhuhn, 2007). In one of their experiments, they measured students' mind-sets at the beginning of the course by asking them the extent to which they agreed with statements like, “Good negotiators are born that way” or “All people can change even their most basic negotiation qualities” (p. 64).

“The more malleable students believed negotiating ability to be on the first day of class, the higher their final course grade 15 weeks later” (p. 61). The students who saw negotiating skills as something capable of improvement actually did improve their negotiating skills more substantively than those who believed them to be stable. Their attitude toward learning, at least in part, expanded or limited their actual learning.

“Entity theorists blamed their failure on low ability yet explained away their success by attributing it to luck. Emotionally, they felt more distressed about their academic performance and were less likely to feel determined and inspired, despite performing as well as Incremental theorists”

As a group, entity theorists in this particular experiment came in to college with an overall higher record of academic achievement than the incremental theorists based on measures like SAT or ACT scores. Yet, despite their weaker record of prior academic achievement, the college grades of the incremental theorists as a group reached up to match those of the entity theorists. The growth–mind-set students had improved their potential and performance over the course of their 4 years, whereas the fixed–mind-set students had remained stable.

Companies with growth mind-sets, according to one presentation of the research, (a) support more collaboration; (b) encourage innovation and creativity; (c) support employees when they try new things and take measured risk; (d) show fewer unethical behaviors (e.g., cheating, cutting corners); and (e) are overall, more supportive of their employees. In sum, they found that “employees thrive in companies that endorse a growth mindset”.

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.

When I first read Dweck's work, I thought back with horror on all of the times that I had written comments or given oral feedback to students including statements like, “You are a really talented writer!” I meant well, I promise. My intention in those cases was to encourage students whom I saw as possible English majors or even future writers with some praise that would make them feel special and would encourage them to want to write more. Now I recognize how statements like this don't do much for instilling that growth mind-set, and here would be a great place to note that 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.

“Excellent work—you took the strategies we have been working on in class and deployed them beautifully in here,” or, “You have obviously worked very hard at your writing, and it shows in this essay.

The easiest way to check your mind-set talk is to review your syllabus, assignment sheets, and other written communication with students and ensure that all of these instill the conviction that students can succeed in your course through hard work, effort, and perseverance.

“I think that if you will put in a good effort next semester, you will be absolutely amazed by how much you can learn about financial accounting.” When students actually arrive at the course in the fall and are handed the syllabus, that initial growth talk is echoed by many more such statements on the syllabus. “You will often hear me say: HOURS EQUAL POINTS,” begins one paragraph of the syllabus. “If you don't choose to invest time, you will not do well…You have a lot of ability; if you are willing to invest the time, you will learn an amazing amount and be extremely pleased with what you accomplish” (Hoyle 2012).

First, Hoyle does not limit the growth-minded advice he gives to his students to his own perspective; he also asks students who have earned As in the course to write a letter to future students outlining how they managed it. Hoyle has compiled the best of these comments into a single document that he hands out to each fresh new crop of students. When you look it over, you can see how his choice of comments continues to enforce the power of the growth mind-set in his course:

Provide early success opportunities through assignment sequencing or assessment design. Consider offering some reward for effort or improvement in the course, either through the weighting of your assessments (heavier toward the latter half) or through a portion of the grade set aside for that purpose. Provide examples of initial failures or setbacks in your own intellectual journey or in those of famous or recognizable figures in your field to demonstrate that such failures can be overcome. Give feedback to students in growth language; convey the message that they are capable of improvement, and offer specific instructions on how to achieve the improvement.

Ask top students to write letters to future students about how they succeeded in the course; select and pass along the ones that highlight the power of effort and perseverance. Include a “Tips for Success in This Course” section on your syllabus, and refer to it throughout the semester.

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.

our activities extended the work of students out of the confines of our classroom and into a more public space: LeBlanc's students are giving loans to real people, not connected with the college, and my students are writing for the entire campus audience. My intuitive sense is that if you can find an activity that will require students to prepare or showcase their work for a public audience, this will help them see connections between your discipline and your course and the world around them. This can help boost motivation by invoking larger, more public purposes for their course work.

The field of teaching and learning in higher education has been growing exponentially in recent years, with many dozens of new books appearing every year. Keep your eye on the higher education catalogues of Jossey-Bass, Harvard University Press, the University of Chicago Press, and Stylus for major new titles in the field. What the Best College Teachers Do (Bain, 2004). Ken Bain's elegantly written analysis of highly effective college teachers remains for me the first book that all college teachers, new and experienced, should read at some point during their careers. Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Brown, Roedger, and McDaniel, 2014). The most authoritative, expertly researched, and well-written book available on how people learn and what it means for us as teachers (and learners). How Learning Works: 7 Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching (Ambrose, Bridges, DiPietro, Lovett, and Norman, 2010). The title says it all. Aimed at college and university instructors, a clear and well-researched overview of what college teachers should know about topics like motivation, feedback, and student intellectual development. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (Dweck, 2006). If you were interested in the research presented in Chapter 8 on the growth mind-set, this is the book for you. This is Dweck's overview of the role mind-set plays in shaping many aspects of our lives. Why Don't Students Like School (Willingham, 2008). Although Willingham's book articula...