Small Teaching Quotes

“In other words, 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.”
― James M. Lang, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning

“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).”
― James M. Lang, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning

“Remember, though, that self-explanations will be most helpful when the learners receive feedback on their work—so you still might follow up peer activities with a large-group session in which you solicit some explanations and can provide a response.”
― James M. Lang, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning

“This experience I had with predicting the outcome of games and remembering the actual outcomes afterward more firmly than I remembered games about which I had not made predictions reflects a basic principle that memory researchers have been exploring for many years now: making predictions about material that you wish to learn increases your ability to understand that material and retrieve it later.”
― James M. Lang, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning

“I wrote almost every word of this book sitting in a coffee shop about two blocks from my home. Most weekdays I would walk in, find a spot near an electrical outlet, fire up my laptop, and then head to the counter to order my beverage. I am a person of routines when it comes to food and drink, so every day for about 6 months I placed the same order: medium green tea. The coffee shop had its routines as well, which meant that most of the time I was placing my order with the same young woman. Yet in spite of the fact that she saw my smiling face 3 or 4 days a week making the same order, she always looked up at me expectantly when I arrived, as if I had not requested the same thing a hundred times before. She would even ask me the same two questions about my tea order every time: “Hot or cold?” “Honey or lemon?” Hot and No. Every time. As the weeks and months of this stretched on, it became a mild source of amusement to me to see if she would ever remember my order. She never did. Until, that is, I walked in one day and felt a little mischievous. “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. The more times that you practice remembering something, the more capable you become of remembering that thing in the future. Every time I walked into that coffee shop and told the barista my order, she was receiving the information afresh from me; she did not have to draw it from her 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. And because it was such a simple piece of information, one practice was enough to help her remember it for the next time.”
― James M. Lang, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning

“These days, as a result of my encounters with growth–mind-set research, I have modified my feedback vocabulary considerably. Statements like “You are a really talented writer” have been excised from my vocabulary and have been replaced with, “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.”
― James M. Lang, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning

“At the end of the semester, they compared the students' final grades in the course with the mind-set attitudes they had expressed on the first day of the semester The result: “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.”
― James M. Lang, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning

“Results showed that a self-transcendent purpose for learning increased the tendency to attempt to learn deeply from tedious academic tasks…Students spent twice as long on their review questions when they had just written about how truly understanding the subject area could allow them to contribute to the world beyond the self, compared to controls.”
― James M. Lang, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning

“A particularly fascinating new line of research in this area can refine our small teaching work ever further, since it suggests that not all senses of purpose are equal—and that the most powerful forms of purposefulness arise when students see the ability of their learning to make the world a better place.”
― James M. Lang, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning

“We don't want to whip up emotions in the classroom randomly, though; some emotions seem particularly helpful for deepening learning. A second line of research in this area, then, suggests that we focus on infusing learning with a sense of purpose, and especially self-transcendent purpose.”
― James M. Lang, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning

“For a presentation assignment, you might pick a day 2 weeks in advance of the actual presentations and ask students to bring their laptops to class. In the final 10 minutes of a class in which you present some new material to them, ask them to pair up and work together on the creation of a single slide designed to teach an audience about Concept A. In the following class sessions, allot the final 10 minutes of each class to asking a handful of students to stand up and give a 2-minute presentation of the slide they created. Better yet, as in the writing example, make it the final 15 minutes and spend the first 5 of those reminding them that reading text directly from slides can produce something called the redundancy effect, which can reduce learning, but that too much difference between what's on the slide and what they say also has been shown to reduce learning. So they should be searching for what Michelle Miller described as the “‘Goldilocks’ principle with respect to the discrepancy between the narration and the visually presented slide”—they should clearly reference and highlight the key components of what they have put on the slide, but not simply read it out directly (Miller 2014, p. 154). Giving students the opportunity to create several practice slides and then to work on speaking those slides to an audience would go a long way toward improving the majority of student presentations I have seen.”
― James M. Lang, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning

“An excellent illustration of this notion comes from another intriguing experiment conducted on psychology students. In this case students were given, in advance of class, either a complete set of notes on the lecture for the day or a partial set of notes—one that consisted of “headings and titles of definitions and concepts, which required students to add information to complete the notes” (Cornelius & Owen-DeSchryver 2008, p. 8). So the students who received the full notes had the knowledge network for the day handed to them prior to class (through the course learning management system); the students who received the partial notes received only the frame of that knowledge network, and had to fill in the rest on their own. The students in both conditions performed comparably on the first two examinations for the course. On the third and final examinations, however, as the amount of course material increased and required deeper understanding, the students in the partial-notes condition outperformed their full-note peers. Especially relevant for the argument that connections improve comprehension, the students in the partial-notes condition outperformed their peers on conceptual questions on the final exam. As the authors explained, “On a [final] test that required knowledge of a large number of concepts, rote memorization was not feasible, so students who encoded the information by actively taking notes throughout the semester may have performed better because they had experienced better conceptual understanding” (p. 10). This experiment has obvious implications for classroom teaching, or even the creation of reading guides or lecture notes for an online courses. 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.”
― James M. Lang, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning

“But I can't leave this paragraph without highlighting these results one last time: 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.”
― James M. Lang, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning