Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning

by James M. Lang

“Much of what we've been doing as teachers and students isn't serving us well, but some comparatively simple changes could make a big difference”. (9) Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

More fundamentally, sudden and dramatic transformation to one's teaching is hard work and can prove a tough sell to instructors with so many time-consuming responsibilities.

My reflections on this dilemma led me to consider whether I should incorporate into my workshops more activities that instructors could turn around and use in their classrooms the next morning or the next week without an extensive overhaul of their teaching—the pedagogical equivalents, in other words, of small ball. With that prospect in mind, I dove into the literature of teaching and learning in higher education with new eyes, seeking small-ball recommendations that were both easy to implement and well supported by the research.

But nothing made me more interested and excited than the small successes I experienced when I incorporated some of the strategies I had learned about into my own classroom. Over the course of that fall semester, as I both worked on my own teaching and spoke with other instructors about these ideas, I became convinced of the seemingly paradoxical notion that fundamental pedagogical improvement was possible through incremental change—in the same way that winning the World Series was possible through stealing bases and hitting sacrifice fly balls.

This newfound conviction ultimately gave rise to the notion of small teaching, an approach that seeks to spark positive change in higher education through small but powerful modifications to our course design and teaching practices.

Small teaching as a fully developed strategy draws from the deep well of research on learning and higher education to create a deliberate, structured, and incremental ap...

The past several decades have brought us a growing body of research on how human beings learn, and a new generation of scholars in those fields has begun to translate findings from the laboratories of memory and cognition researchers to the higher education classrooms of today. Their findings increasingly suggest the potency of small shift...

The activities outlined in this book, taken as a whole, fulfill these directives: with a little bit of creative thinking, they can translate into every conceivable type of teaching environment in higher education, from lectures in cavernous classrooms to discussions in small seminar rooms, from fully face-to-face to fully online courses and every blended shade between. They stem from very basic principles of how human beings learn and hence cross both discipline and content type—whether you are teaching students to memorize facts or formulae, to develop their speaking skills, or to solve complex problems. Not every instructor in every discipline in every teaching context will find a space for all of the small teaching activities outlined here, but every reader should find opportunities to use at least some of them. You can implement them tomorrow morning, next week on Friday, in the design of your next quiz or test, and even—as we shall see in the final part of the book—in the next e-mail you send to your students.

Yet such activities, which may first find their way into your classroom as a means of filling an empty 10 minutes at the end of class or an unplanned course session, have the power to produce as much or more learning than your anxiously overprepared lecture. For me, this represents the real power and promise of small teaching.

We have excellent evidence of the learning power of small teaching activities—in study after study, as you will see in the chapters that follow, small teaching activities have been proven to raise student performance on learning tasks by the equivalent of a full letter grade or higher.

Introduction: You will usually find here examples of how the particular learning phenomenon described in that chapter might appear in everyday life.

In Theory: This section delves into the research that supports the recommendations of the chapter and includes descriptions of experiments from laboratories and classrooms as well as brief descriptions of key findings or principles from the cognitive sciences.

Models: Four or five detailed models are described in each chapter—fully fleshed-out examples of how instructors could incorporate a small teaching approach into their course design, classroom...

Principles: I hope and expect that instructors will not simply follow the models but also will take the overall strategy and develop their own new models. The principles provide guidanc...

Quick Small Teaching: One-sentence reminders of the simplest means of putting the small teaching strategy of that chapter into practice; flip through or return to these when you have 15 minutes before clas...

Conclusion: A final reflection on the main theory or strat...

Imagine the media storm that erupted in 1956 upon the publication of an educational book with the attention-grabbing title of Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals, Handbook I: Cognitive Domain. The author of this spine tingler was psychologist Benjamin Bloom, who sought to articulate a set of objectives that teachers could use to guide their instructional activities.

The taxonomy that Bloom created contains six major categories: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation.

So some instructors seem to believe that the learning of facts or concepts, or helping students remember facts and concepts—or even procedures or basic skills—falls beneath them; they are interested only in higher order activities like critical thinking or making judgments or creating new knowledge. College instructors seem especially prone to this desire to hop over the bottom layer of the pyramid—or, more charitably, to assume either that elementary and secondary education should have helped students learn how to remember things or that students should master knowledge outside of class and thus that class time can be exclusively devoted to higher cognitive activities.

One of our first and most important tasks as teachers is to help students develop a rich body of knowledge in our content areas—without doing so, we handicap considerably their ability to engage in cognitive activities like thinking and evaluating and creating. As cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham argued, you can't think creatively about information unless you have information in your head to think about. “Research from cognitive science has shown,” he explained, “that the sorts of skills that teachers want for their students—such as the ability to analyze and think critically—require extensive factual knowledge” (Willingham 2009, p. 25).

“Thinking well requires knowing facts, and that's true not simply because you need something to think about. The very processes that teachers care most about—critical thinking processes such as reasoning and problem-solving—are intimately intertwined with factual knowledge that is stored in long-term memory (not just found in the environment)” (Willingham 2009, p. 28).

Taking advantage of these easy opportunities to help students remember course material will ensure that students can engage more deeply and meaningfully in the complex learning tasks to which you want to devote more of your time and energy—and to which we give more full consideration in Part

“Can I help you?” she said. “Can you guess?” I replied. She looked up as if seeing me for the first time, and she smiled sheepishly. “Oh gosh,” she said. “Why am I blanking?” “It's OK,” I said. “No problem. Medium green tea. Hot, nothing in it.” The next time I showed up at the coffee shop was a couple of days later. I walked in, found my spot, fired up the laptop, and approached my forgetful friend at the counter. To my astonishment, she pointed at me with a smile and said: “Medium green tea, hot, no honey or lemon?” This little story illustrates perfectly a learning phenomenon called the retrieval effect (and sometimes also called the testing effect). Put as simply as possible, the retrieval effect means that if you want to retrieve knowledge from your memory, you have to practice retrieving knowledge from your memory.

She was doing the student equivalent of staring at her notes over and over again—a practice that cognitive psychologists will tell you is just about the most ineffective study strategy students can undertake. When I made one very small change to our interaction by “testing” her to remember my order—even though she didn't get it right—she had to practice, for the first time, drawing that piece of information from her memory.

The more times any of us practice remembering something we are trying to learn, the more firmly we lodge it in our memories for the long term.

“On Memory,” that “exercise in repeatedly recalling a thing strengthens the memory” (cited in Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel 2014, p. 28).

With his use of the words exercise and strengthen he also initiated a long tradition, now frequently repeated in articles on the retrieval effect in the popular press, of thinking about the brain like a muscle.

The retrieval effect is also sometimes called the testing effect as a way to help teachers recognize its significance for student learning in their classrooms.

The problem with using the phrase the testing effect is that many of us have a very limited understanding of what the word test means—it recalls for us anxious students biting their pencil erasers as they sweat their way through a multiple-choice final exam.

The most recent, real-world experiments designed to illustrate the power of the retrieval effect have come from the Memory Lab of Henry L. Roediger at Washington University in St. Louis, which comprises the work of multiple researchers exploring the educational implications of their work on learning, cognition, and memory. As Roediger and his co-authors report in Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, in 2006 researchers from the Memory Lab began working with a middle school in Columbia, Missouri, to see whether they could leverage the power of the retrieval effect in order to improve student learning (Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel 2014).

“The kids scored a full grade level higher on the material that had been quizzed than on the material that had not been quizzed” (Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel 2014, p. 35).

However, I like an elegant demonstration of it by Roediger and Butler (2007) because it helps confirm what many readers might suspect: that not all types of testing are equal.

But this study helps us draw out some nuances. First, the students who performed the best were the ones who had to put the most active thought into their answers through short-answer questions.

“Memory is the residue of thought” (Willingham, 2009, p. 54). Those short-answer questions required students to formulate answers in their own words, and hence to spend more time answering than the multiple-choice questions.

“There's wide consensus among memory researchers that long-term memory is essentially unlimited” (Miller 2014, p. 94). However, that unlimited storage capacity can be as much of a problem as a long-term memory with smaller storage capacity. In an earlier essay on what college teachers should know about memory, Miller explained that “in long-term-memory the limiting factor is not storage capacity, but rather the ability to find what you need when you need it. 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). So the challenge for students, or for any of us, is not jamming facts and information down into our long-term memories but instead drawing those facts and information out when we need them or when they will help us in some way.

Small teaching can come to the rescue here, as it can help instructors envision how to incorporate retrieval practice into bite-sized moments such as the opening and closing minutes of class and into small exercises in online or blended courses.

The quickest method for cultivating retrieval practice in class takes the form of asking questions, either orally or in writing, about material that either you or the students have covered already.

If you wish to formalize this type of activity, you could follow the lead of Annie Blazer: she begins each class with a single student providing a 3–5-minute summary of the previous class, and each student does this at least once per semester (Blazer 2014, p. 344).

I posed a question, gave them 5 or 10 minutes to write a response, and then opened up the floor for discussion. But I also used them as a form of low-level quizzing, just to ensure that students were reading. Every question requires students to do a little bit of remembering and a little bit of thinking.

Over the course of my 15 years of full-time teaching, I have come to recognize that these small writing exercises constitute the best method I have for supporting student learning in my courses—even if, as with most positive teaching experiences I have had, I stumbled upon this strategy through dumb luck or for the wrong reasons.

focus on the key concepts that you want students to take away from the class session, and favor writing over oral questions whenever feasible.

As we shall see in the next chapter, wrong answers made on activities like this will not necessarily harm student learning as long as they are not allowed to persist uncorrected. Ensure that this does not happen by finding ways to address their responses as soon as possible after the exercise.

You will have to remind them that you are not conducting a scavenger hunt for answers or a race to see who can find the answer most quickly. You are helping them remember information, and this will benefit them only if they take the time to draw the information from their brains and not their notebooks.

Retrieval practice will help your students retain foundational material, which they are most likely to encounter in introductory or entry-level courses in your field. Hence when you are considering how to incorporate retrieval into your teaching repertoire, look first to the lower-level classes you are teaching. The following principles can help guide you through the use of the models above or through the creation of alternative retrieval exercises tailored to your courses.

Require Thinking Remember Willingham's axiom that we remember what we think about? Help your students remember by giving them something to think about. Your retrieval practice might sometimes take the form of simple memory exercises—after all, we likely all have certain key facts or basic information that we want students to have mastered.

Close class by asking students to write down the most important concept from that day and one question or confusion that still remains in their minds (i.e., the minute paper).

Think about retrieval practice as I have been arguing for it here: as an activity that lends itself perfectly to small teaching and therefore doesn't require you to devote huge amounts time or energy to it. If you consider it in that light and push yourself to implement regular quizzing or retrieval practice, you will likely find that your students are grateful for it by the end of the semester.

making predictions about material that you wish to learn increases your ability to understand that material and retrieve it later.

pause–predict–ponder.

After the class the researchers looked at two different measures to see whether the pause–predict–ponder exercises had improved student mastery of intercultural competence: student scores on tests of cultural knowledge, and their more general cultural thinking or reasoning skills through their discussion board posts.