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March 17 - April 17, 2019
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 approach to changing our courses for the better.
First, they had to have some foundation in the learning sciences.
Second, these learning principles had to have a positive impact in real-world educational environments—higher education whenever possible.
Finally, I had to observe the principles directly myself somehow, either from my own experiences as a teacher or learner or from direct observation of other teaching and learning environments.
the 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 any of us practice remembering something we are trying to learn, the more firmly we lodge it in our memories for the long term.
a brief (and ungraded) multiple-choice quiz at the beginning and end of class and one additional quiz before the exam raised the grades of the students by a full letter grade.
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.
This research suggests that “covert retrieval practice is as good as overt practice in benefitting later retention…both methods produce a robust testing effect” (Pyc, Agarwal, and Roediger 2014, p. 80).
focus on the key concepts that you want students to take away from the class session, and favor writing over oral questions whenever feasible.
making predictions about material that you wish to learn increases your ability to understand that material and retrieve it later.
even though the vocabulary has changed slightly here—from prediction to pretesting—the cognitive activity is similar: asking learners to give answers to questions or anticipate outcomes about which they do not yet have sufficient information or understanding.
Their film clips would pause at key moments, ask them to make a prediction about what was about to unfold, and then require them to ponder what actually happened once the clip had finished: the authors described their three-part sequence with the catchy phrase pause–predict–ponder.
predictive activities prepare your mind for learning by driving you to seek connections that will help you make an accurate prediction.
As Bjork pointed out, “Taking a practice test and getting answers wrong seems to improve subsequent study, because the test adjusts our thinking in some way to the kind of material we need to know” (Carey 2014b).
“Wrong guesses,” Carey wrote, “expose our fluency illusions, our false impression that we ‘know’ the capital of Eritrea because we just saw it or once studied it… Pretesting operates as a sort of fluency vaccine” (Carey 2014b).
Illusions of fluency represent one of the foremost challenges we face in helping students learn subject matter deeply.
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.
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.
“Prior knowledge plays a critical role in learning,” explain Susan Ambrose and Marsha Lovett, “which means that…faculty members need to assess the content, beliefs and skills students bring with them into courses and…use that information as both a foundation for new learning as well as an opportunity to intervene when content knowledge is inaccurate or insufficient” (Ambrose & Lovett 2014, p. 16).
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.
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.
You should expect that over a 20- or 30- or 40-year teaching career you will have moments when you feel stuck in a pedagogical rut.
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?
“What really matters in college,” they argue, “is who meets whom, and when” (p. 16).
As cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham put it, “The human mind seems exquisitely tuned to understand and remember stories—so much so that psychologists sometimes refer to stories as ‘psychologically privileged,’ meaning that they are treated differently in memory than other types of material” ( Willingham 2014, pp. 66–67).
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.
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?” (Miller 2014, p. 112).
These types of results confirmed Dweck and Mueller's hypothesis: 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.
the researchers use the more technical terms for mind-set: incremental theorists for people with the growth mind-set and entity theorists for those with a fixed mind-set.)
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.
The point is that making the offer sends a message about the type of classroom you run: in this course, you are communicating to them that you care more about their learning than you do about their specific performance on this particular assignment. If the performance did not match your expectations, try again. What matters is that you learn from it.
