The Classroom Lie Series: Rereading is not Studying

At home, we’ve been having some conversations with my oldest about college life. She’s a high school junior, so that’s one of the next big steps around the corner. It’s led to many memories of my time in undergrad. As I was researching this classroom lie, I found myself thinking back on the spring of my sophomore year at Indiana University. It was the weekend before finals, and my first test was my US History final. It was a class that I took with several of the guys in my fraternity. We were sitting in the formal having a review session. In front of me were my textbook, my notes, a pen, and a highlighter. At the time, studying looked like re-reading my textbook and/or notes. In retrospect, that likely left me with a false sense of security because I felt I was familiar with the material. Students and teachers (falsely) assume this is a sign of learning.


The lie we’re going to address today is that going over notes and re-reading are effective ways to prepare for a test. But the reality is that some practices have a much stronger correlation with true learning. Re-reading may help a student prepare when they are cramming, but if you check their learning at a later date, it’s likely they will have lost it. So what does the research tell us?

Rodiger & Karpicke (2006) shared in Psychological Science that retrieval practice dramatically outperforms re-reading on delayed tests. The main finding of the study is that if a final test was 2-7 days away, students who had one study session followed by 1-3 no-stakes quizzes were more likely to show greater retention of the learning. The longer you need to remember information, the more powerful the “Testing Effect” is. On the other hand, re-reading is much less effective for long-term memory. In last week’s post, I shared Hermann Ebbinghaus’s work on the forgetting curve.

Based on the work of Hermann Ebbinghaus – learn more at https://elearningindustry.com/forgetting-curve-combat

So if research shows that re-reading is not the best way to study, what should we do instead? There are several effective strategies that we can introduce to our students. One of the most tried-and-true methods is self-quizzing. This can be accomplished by having students create flashcards and using them to review. In teaching this strategy to our students, you might consider showing them how to place a card they got correct and felt confident with to the side, while adding ones they missed or don’t feel confident with to the back of the stack. This way, they can continue practicing the skills they don’t yet feel confident in. Students can go through their flashcards every day or two while learning the skill to build stronger neural pathways for that content. Another strategy that we can show our students is to have them partner up and ask each other the questions from the flashcard. This could be easily replicated with a family member at home.

Another way to build retrieval practice into classroom learning time could be with something like exit tickets at the end of a lesson, a warm-up at the beginning of the next day, or a “brain dump” before reopening notes or a textbook. A guiding question could be “What did we learn yesterday?” that asks students to jot down a main idea or key details from the lesson. 

As an added bonus, when our students engage in low-stakes quizzes given by teachers for review, we help reduce students’ test anxiety by building their confidence in their ability to respond to questions. This feels counterintuitive, because it’s a quiz, but when it is low-stakes and becomes routine for students, research supports it as a high-impact learning tool.

To make the switch from reviewing to retrieving, you might start small. You could have students jot down 1 or 2 things they know or recall about the topic. With time and consistent use, students will become more confident in their knowledge. Another strategy is to plan your spiral review by asking a question from learning yesterday, last week, or last month. If you build a review like this into your planning process, you could add a portion to your lesson plans of a question from this lesson for:

  • Tomorrow 
  • Next week
  • Next month

Then, when it’s time to build your warm-up or review, you pull questions from your past lesson plans.

Here’s an honest caveat: your students will continue to gravitate towards re-reading, highlighting, or underlining because they feel more at ease. But that ease is also why they don’t work as well. When something is easy, you don’t help your brain build the strong neural pathways that support true learning.

One other thing to keep in mind is that retrieval practice works best when students have enough prior knowledge of a skill to attempt to retrieve. Students who are novices at a skill won’t be able to retrieve because they can’t access information that isn’t there. If you are at the beginning of an entirely new unit, you might consider using some retrieval practices from a past unit as review until your students have a base of knowledge.

I’m curious to know, what study strategies do you believe work best for you? What information from this post might have challenged your thinking the most? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

If you’d like more information on these topics, you can check out Roediger & Karpicke’s student here. Or you can check out this landmark review by Dunloski et al. of 10 strategies, which ranks retrieval practice as the highest outcome, and re-reading near the bottom. That study is available here. And if you want to dig deeper into retrieval practices, check out Make it Stick by Brown, Roediger, & McDaniel as an accessible book version of the research. That book is available here.

Next week, we’ll dig into the idea that we must build relationships before we engage in content. This one is challenging even some of my long-standing beliefs. We’ll dig into it here!

The Classroom Lie Series: Learning Styles

If you, like me, attended a traditional education school prior to starting your career in education, you probably spent at least a little time learning about the concept of learning styles. You might recognize the terms visual, auditory, linguistic, or kinesthetic. You may also have been asked to design lessons with different learning styles embedded. If you were like me, you may have even had a poster of the different learning styles in your classroom. Some of us may even still refer to learning styles at times – in fact, the same day I sat down to start writing this post, even after having done some research, I made reference to being a visual learner as I was adding a visual into some notes I was taking.

The lie that we’re trying to dispel today is that students learn better when taught in their preferred learning style. You might have thought, or maybe still believe, that some students learn better anytime they are provided a visual to support the learning, while others learn better when we bring movement into a learning task. But what does the research say?

Decades of controlled studies have failed to find evidence that a teacher’s effort to match a student’s preferred learning style to instructional practices leads to better outcomes. The research suggests that the best instructional learning style is the one that best fits the content being taught. 

In Psychological Science in the Public Interest, Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer, & Bjork (2008) conducted research on the effects of style-based learning. The study ultimately notes that there is little evidence to support the claim that teaching tailored to students’ learning styles improves student outcomes. Despite this, a 2020 review of educators found that almost 90% of teachers believe their instructional methods should match their students’ preferred learning styles. 

If the research doesn’t support this belief, why does it continue to exist? A 2016 study by the National Council on Teacher Quality found that 67% of teacher preparation programs require learning styles in their lesson planning assignments, and nearly 60% of textbooks continue to advise future teachers to take learning styles into account. Cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham shares:

This is clearly an example of the research-to-practice gap. Sometimes also referred to as the 17-year gap, this idea holds that it takes about 17 years for educational theory to become educational practice. But that gap represents a passive form of adapting to research. When we know better, we should do better. If the research shows that learning styles do not improve outcomes, we have to make a change.

So if learning styles don’t exist, what should we do? Well, first of all, the research shows that we can improve student outcomes by designing the learning modality around what is best suited to the topic. For example, if you were teaching students about plate tectonics, you’d want to include diagrams to help students visualize the process. If you’re teaching phonics and early reading, the combination of auditory and verbal would be a necessity to help build letter-sound correspondence. In physical education, students would need a worked demonstration of a skill – say, practicing throwing techniques – and then a chance to try it on their own. This might involve the teacher modeling the skill, then allowing students to simulate the throwing technique while receiving feedback from the teacher.

There are other, more research-supported, techniques to improve student outcomes. I’ll share a few of those below:

  • Spaced repetition: This would involve reviewing material at increasing intervals over time. This would be like a spiral review or creating flashcards for practice. Spaced repetition suggests that you might review something an hour later, then the next day, then a few days later, then maybe a week later. Each time a skill is reviewed, the neural pathway to that information is strengthened, making the learning more “sticky.”
Based on the work of Hermann Ebbinghaus – learn more at https://elearningindustry.com/forgetting-curve-combat
  • Retrieval practice: Actively recalling information strengthens memory and understanding. Ways to incorporate this would be to have students quiz themselves, use low- or no-stakes quizzes for practice, or have students summarize new learning without looking at notes or resources.
  • Interleaved practice: Mixing different topics or skills into study sessions. In practice, this might mean starting your class with a warm-up that includes a review question from yesterday, last week, and last month. It could also include randomizing the practice questions rather than grouping them by topic.
  • Elaboration: Explaining and describing concepts in detail. You might put this into practice by having a student explain their thinking to others or share their understanding of a concept with a peer. Or you might use follow-up questions like “why does this work?” or “How is this related to something I already know?”

If you’d like to learn more about this topic, one of the best resources for work around learning styles is Daniel Willingham. One option would be to check out his YouTube explainer titled “Learning Styles Don’t Exist” (I shared this below). You could also dig a little deeper by reading his book, “Why Don’t Students Like School?” I’ve added this title to my To-Read List!

What are your beliefs about learning styles? Were you taught about them in your teacher preparation program? What do you think about this research? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Retrieval Practice: Boosting Memory and Student Success

In past posts, I’ve shared a bit about the Cognitive Science Microcredential I earned through the Center for Excellence in Leadership and Learning. Cognitive science is all about understanding how our minds work. The main point of the microcredential is to know how people learn best and then apply that understanding to support the work we do in the classroom. Today, I want to focus on the concept of Retrieval Practice.

What is retrieval practice? Have you heard the phrase? Jot what you think it is on a post-it, or define it out loud for yourself. Once you’ve done that, read on.

If you actually took the time to define retrieval practice, you just participated in a form of it. It’s sometimes also called the testing effect, and it’s any activity that forces you to generate an answer to a question. It can take on many forms, such as using released repository items to practice a skill, reviewing with multiple-choice questions, or something as simple as quizzing a partner as a form of study.

Retrieval practice has been consistently shown to improve students’ retention and recall (with long-term benefits for enhanced performance on summative exams). See the graphic below for some of the research findings:

by @inner_drive, http://www.innerdrive.co.uk

Some of the best research on studying strategies has found some interesting things. First of all, most preferred study methods (rereading, reviewing notes, etc.) are not as effective for authentic learning of the material. Those strategies can be good for cramming, but over time, that information is lost. The truly best options for studying or reviewing are something like participating in practice tests. The research in the What Makes Great Teaching Report states that “having to generate an answer to a question or procedure, or having to retrieve information – even if no feedback is given – leads to better long-term recall than simply studying.”

Why do researchers believe this happens? First, they note that students who have done practice tests or true retrieval practice while studying report that it helped them learn (92%) and made them feel less nervous about summative exams (72%). Another benefit of retrieval practice is that it enhances memory during stressful situations. Too much stress can reduce memory and impair focus, but using retrieval practice consistently reduces that impact because answering questions in a practice situation already stresses you out, reducing the impact during the summative assessment.

Yet another benefit of retrieval practice is that it helps you identify what you do or don’t know. Students (and teachers) have concrete information about what they truly know. By understanding the gaps in knowledge, future review can be more effective.

Possibly the most interesting thing about retrieval practice is that it is so much more powerful than students think. Results from a 2006 study by Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke titled “Test-Enhanced Learning: Taking Memory Tests Improves Long-Term Retention” gave two interesting views of the role of retrieval practice on student learning. See the chart below for results:

What I find most interesting about this data is that a student’s opinion of what would help them learn the material had an inverse relationship with their actual performance on the summative assessment.

The orange bar to the left shows that more students thought that reading and rereading as a study tool would help them the most. However, when looking at the assessment data, students who read the material once and then took practice tests for review had the strongest long-term recall.

This is retrieval practice in action!

So, how can we embed retrieval practice into our formative assessment? There are a few ways we can harness the testing effect to the benefit of our learners:

Past Papers: Past papers are examples of previous quizzes or exams. This could be an alternate version of the assessment provided by your curricular resources, or it could be done by utilizing the released item repository to practice items of similar rigor and level as what will be seen on the summative assessment.

Multiple Choice Questions: Early in the studying process, multiple-choice tests and quizzes can be a valuable way to determine whether students can identify the correct answer from a set of options. This can help you identify the types of questions or problems that students still need support with.

Written Answers: A short written response to a higher-order question can help students craft a fluent response by drawing on the many pieces of information available to them. Answering an essay from multiple sources requires analysis, which improves retention more than simply sharing isolated facts.

Answering Questions Aloud: Replying to a question aloud makes you think about the question and then reflect on the information you have learned to craft a verbal answer. Related research indicates that reading aloud is more beneficial for long-term learning than reading in silence, as it engages more of our senses.

Testing Yourself with Flashcards: Using flashcards for review is a great way to identify what you know and what you still need to review.

Having Someone Ask You Questions: Sharing answers to questions someone asks you helps you discover how well you understand the material.

Based on what you’ve learned here, what are some steps you could take in your classroom in the next couple of weeks to bring retrieval practice into the learning environment? It could be as simple as asking students to “think, pair, share” a description of what your class did yesterday in math as you are leading into your mini-lesson. It could be taking a moment at the end of a lesson to review the key takeaway that students should have. Asking them to stop and jot the most important thing is a great example of retrieval practice at the end of a lesson.

These strategies will solidify learning within your setting, leading to greater growth and mastery! Take a look at the examples of retrieval practice above. What can you bring to your classroom to help students solidify learning in the next week? Make a note of it, and be sure to add it to your practice next week!

Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction (Part 2)

In the last post, I shared a bit about Barak Rosenshine and the work he did to bring together research in cognitive science, master teachers, and cognitive supports. His principles were created to support teachers in bringing research theory into regular classroom practice. In the last post, we briefly discussed the first five of the principles: Begin a lesson with a short review, present new material in small steps, ask a large number of questions, provide models, and guide student practice. In case you missed that last post, you can find it here. In the previous post, I highlighted principles 1-5. Today, I’ll pick up where I left off and highlight principles 6-10.

As a reminder, Barak Rosenshine was a teacher and educational researcher who worked to serve as a bridge between educational research and classroom practice. You can link to one of his original articles here. On this blog, we’ve talked again and again about how we move students from novice to mastery. As a classroom teacher, implementing all of Rosenshine’s principles regularly should lead to higher rates of mastery among students in your classroom.

6) Check for student understanding: Checking for student understanding at each point can help students learn material with fewer areas. Earlier this year, we spent some time in our professional learning digging into the input/output cycle for teachers and students. What this calls for is sharing some learning, then asking some questions to ensure students understand. Then we share some more learning and ask more questions. Research says that frequent checks for understanding were noted in the classrooms of the most effective teachers. These moments of checking for understanding could be as simple as solving problems or answering questions, or as complex as thinking aloud about how they’d solve a problem, plan an essay, or identify the main idea of a paragraph. It could also involve having students explain or defend a position or opinion. 

By implementing regular checks for understanding, we’re able to build knowledge with our learners and adjust if they aren’t getting it. Without checks for understanding, students might have errors, and we’d have no way of knowing. Providing guided practice with checks ensures our students truly understand the material and have a solid foundation.

7) Obtain a high success rate: It is important for students to achieve a high success rate during classroom instruction. When we are doing our check for understanding (see item 6 above), we want to be sure that more than just the majority of students are showing a success rate before moving on to the next task. This could be checked through verbal responses, whiteboards, or turn-and-talk with a neighbor. In a study of elementary classrooms, the most successful teachers had 82% of their students answering correctly. On the other hand, the least successful classrooms had a 73% rate. That’s a really narrow difference, and in some of our classrooms, it may be the difference of one student answering correctly. Other research indicates that an optimal success rate of 80% shows that students are learning the material.

So what might this look like in the classroom? First of all it requires short steps before students are expected to reply to a question, and then several opportunities to practice, with meaningful feedback to the students who are not yet showing understanding. As we know, practice makes perfect. But if you practice something the wrong way, you are solidifying the learning in the wrong way. And sometimes, we might get to independent practice and suddenly realize that our students don’t yet have the skill. That may mean pulling the group back together and going back to guided practice or modeling. When we move forward before we reach at least the 80% mastery, our students who are behind are sure to fall further behind as more gaps appear in their knowledge.

8) Provide scaffolds for difficult tasks: The teacher provides students with temporary supports and scaffolds to assist them when they learn difficult tasks. Ultimately, our teaching goal is to ensure that students learn. For this to happen, sometimes they need support to move towards success. That could include teacher modeling, think-alouds as the teacher solves a problem, tools or checklists, or a model of the task in a completed format to serve as a guide for independent work.

One way we might do this is by providing students with a suggestion for the appropriate graphic organizer. You might be working on finding the main idea and details in a piece of text, so you might remind students how to set up a box-and-bullet graphic organizer on their paper. Additional supports might include a reminder to place the article title at the top, listing the main ideas in each box, or listing a few details under each box. Or in math, you might use partially completed problems, modeling the problem until the last step, slowly stopping the model earlier in the process, until students are doing the entire thing. Another scaffold could be a checklist that students can use at the end of their task to check their work.

9) Require and monitor independent practice: Students need extensive, successful, independent practice in order for skills and knowledge to become automatic. Let’s use math facts as our example for this section. We all know that automaticity with math facts is very helpful for our students when they try to solve multi-step problems or complete word problems. When they don’t have automaticity with facts, then they have to stop thinking about the main task of the problem, and use a heavy cognitive load just to work out the addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division. When facts are known automatically, we remove all that cognitive load, and a student’s full brainpower can go to focusing on the problem at hand. To get to automaticity in any skill, there has to be A LOT of practice. Students need independent time to work on skills, but they also need meaningful feedback from their teacher to ensure they are practicing them correctly. We hear the phrase “Practice makes perfect,” but really it should be “Perfect practice makes perfect.”

To ensure that students can practice the skill correctly, we, as teachers, need to make sure that the independent practice we provide aligns with what they did during the guided practice. Most successful teachers provide for extensive successful practice both in the classroom and after class. That means during independent work time, teachers need to circulate, monitor students’ work, and provide short, targeted feedback on how students are doing. One way a teacher might ensure students have a solid grasp of how to do something is by using this monitoring time to ask, “How did you solve that?” By having a student explain their thinking to you or to a peer, you are increasing their depth of knowledge in a task.

10) Engage students in weekly and monthly review: Students need to be involved in extensive practice in order to develop well-connected and automatic knowledge. To move a task from working memory into long-term memory, they must have extensive practice. Each time a student performs a task, it strengthens the neural pathway for that task. If you teach a task today, research suggests that about half of the knowledge is lost by tomorrow – that’s why each lesson should start with a review of what we did yesterday. But each time you engage in a task, you increase that half-life. After the second time, it will still be for 5-7 days. After the second practice, it will stick for about a month. For this reason, spiral review is so important.

To plan for spiral review, when you finish a task, jot yourself a note: “What problem could I have my students do tomorrow to practice this skill?” Then ask what they could do in a week to practice this skill? And finally, ask what they could do in a month to practice this skill. If you do this, you have a warm-up for every day of the school year based on 3 questions: what you did yesterday, what you did a week ago, and what you did a month ago.

By doing this, you help students move knowledge into their long-term memory and strengthen the pathways and associations that allow them to access those memories. The more chances students have to rehearse and review a task, the stronger their understanding of the material becomes. The best way to become an expert at any skill is through practice. More practice equals better performance!

Hopefully, this pair of posts on Rosenshine’s Principles has provided you with the opportunity to reflect on your own instruction. As with anything else, even as adults, we don’t have the cognitive load to take on all these topics at one time. Take some time to reflect on your own practices and your students. Which of these principles do you think would benefit your students most? How could you try to implement them in the coming weeks or months? Then, as you become comfortable with that principle, you can come back to these posts and think about which one to try next.

Share your thoughts in the comments below. I’d love to hear your ideas.

Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction

As many of you know, my go-to strategy for professional development is typically through podcasts or reading, and often it’s a podcast that drives me to read something. One of the podcasts that I like to listen to is called Chalk and Talk. It is hosted by Anna Stokke, a mathematics professor at the University of Winnipeg in Winnipeg, Canada. While the topics can be wide-ranging, it typically comes back to math instruction. You can check out that podcast episode by clicking here.

On this episode, Tom Sherrington, an education consultant, author of Rosenshine’s Principles in Action, co-author of the Teaching Walkthrough series, and a former teacher and school leader with over 30 years of experience, was there to talk about Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction. What struck me about this research is that it is directly related to our work on Explicit Instruction by Anita Archer.

Rosenshine’s Principles serve as an excellent guide to evidence-based teaching. You can read the piece that Rosenshine wrote by clicking here. I’m going to try to distill that 9-page article into something a little more digestible.

Just for some background, Barak Rosenshine was a teacher and educational researcher, and his principles are described as a bridge between educational research and classroom practices. Rosenshine created the principles based on his work with three sources: 1) research in cognitive science, 2) research on master teachers, and 3) research on cognitive supports. If you’d like to know more about each of these areas, check out the first page of the article linked above.

As I’ve shared before, education is ultimately about moving a novice towards mastery by building strong background knowledge. Below, I’ll share a bit about the first 5 of the 10 principles from Rosenshine’s research. Implementing each of these principles consistently should lead to higher mastery rates for our students.

1) Begin a lesson with a short review: Cognitive science tells us that one of the most successful ways to solidify learning is through retrieval practice. This means generating answers to questions. By asking students to answer questions about a previous lesson, you create additional retrieval practice, which leads to automaticity. In math, this might mean beginning a lesson by reviewing a few questions students got wrong during independent practice or homework. In ELA, it might include a daily review of key vocabulary words. Rosenshine’s research supports 5 to 8 minutes each day to review previously covered material and create some retrieval practice opportunities.

But the review at the beginning of the lesson was not limited just to things done yesterday. It would also include a review of the prerequisite skills for the lesson that is planned for today. If we don’t take the moment to review, those neural pathways may not fire as quickly as we’d like, increasing the cognitive load for students.

2) Present new material in small steps with student practice after each step: Too often in teaching, we will teach our whole lesson, which may ask students to accomplish multiple new skills, before any chance at practice. A student’s working memory cannot hold all that information at once, and we will invariably forget some of what we learned at the beginning of the lesson when it’s time for independent practice. Effective teachers recognize this, model the skill, do some guided practice, and then include a little bit of independent practice multiple times within one lesson. This means teachers may have to spend more time moving between modeling, guided practice, and independent practice.

In an ELA classroom, while working on summarizing a paragraph, an effective teacher might model identifying the paragraph’s topic in a think-aloud. Then, there might be guided practice using structured questioning to identify the topic in new paragraphs. Then students would work independently to identify the topic of at least one paragraph. Once practiced, the same gradual release could be used to identify the main idea, and finally, we’d gradually release, identifying the supporting details in paragraphs. Finally, students would practice putting it all together, the topic, main idea, and supporting details, from yet another paragraph. The cycling back and forth between different skills reduces cognitive load.

3) Ask a large number of questions and check the responses of ALL students: Questions force that retrieval practice mentioned earlier. Expecting all students to answer increases the amount of practice for each student, and seeing answers lets you know whether some, most, or all kids know the skill. If we aren’t at a minimum of 80% mastery, we aren’t ready for a new skill yet! Follow-up questions that ask students to explain how they found the answer further strengthen process learning, as opposed to the teacher repeating the steps. This means fewer questions that require just one student to share an answer. When we do that, some students can choose to opt out.

In practice in the classroom, we can increase chances for students to respond and decrease chances for students to opt out by:

  • Using a turn and talk
  • Written 1-2 sentence summary to share with a neighbor
  • Repeat the procedures to a neighbor (have both partners do this!)
  • Raise your hands if you know it (quick check of who knows)
  • Dry-erase board to show an answer
  • Raise their hand if they agree/disagree with the answer given
  • Choral response

4) Provide models: Models and worked examples help students learn the process to solve problems correctly. This happens during the “I do” portion of a lesson. When we have novice learners, we need to just tell them what to do the first time. Too often, teachers seem to jump to “What do you think we should do here?” on the first problem given. This allows incorrect answers and is not a question that guides students to success.

As you move into the “we do” portion of a lesson, in math, you might use worked examples, but ask students to complete the last step, then the last 2 steps, and so forth until they seem to have reached mastery. In reading or writing, this might look like the teacher modeling a skill, then doing the same skill a couple of times together, and finally having students do the thing independently.

Fundamentally, the process to think about is start with a question/prompt, model what to do, use guided practice through a similar prompt/question, and then supervise independent practice with clear academic feedback on the skills.

5) Guide student practice: Successful teachers spend more time guiding student practice of new material. Many of you know that I spent time coaching both basketball and football. During practice, if we were learning a new play, we would start by running it “against air” (no opponent) so my players would know what to do. Once we were consistently doing the right thing without an opponent, I would add a defense to run the play against, but we’d walk through the play a few steps at a time. Then we’d run the play at half speed. Finally, we’d get to the point of running the play at full speed against an opponent. What might that look like in the classroom with an academic skill?

As a teacher, you can facilitate the practice by asking questions directly related to the steps of the new skill. In math, this might mean going over more examples with explanations, using check-for-understanding questions along the way, and then just a few targeted independent practice problems. If students are still having problems with the independent problems, then we go back to some more guided practice. In general, when students have seen more examples, they are better prepared and more engaged in independent work time.

The principles that we put into place as teachers can help create learning environments that reduce cognitive load and increase a student’s ability to reach mastery. Rosenshine’s research indicates that master teachers who achieved successful student learning outcomes were more likely to consistently implement these principles. So, as you reflect on the five principles above, are there things you feel like you do well? Are there areas where you feel that you could improve? I suggest picking one and setting a goal to implement it consistently in your classroom. The more you plan for a new thing, the more natural it becomes to do it without thought

Explicit vs. Constructive

As I’ve shared before, I am absolutely fascinated by learning about how the brain works and how people learn. Recently, I participated in a micro-credentialing course on cognitive science. During this course, I found myself nodding along with much of what I learned because it aligned with what I had seen from students in our classrooms about how they learn. And yet, there are moments when what the research says is good practice is not aligned with the teaching methods being implemented.

And as I spend time in classrooms, I see moments where we live in two different versions of teaching. One is the idea of explicit instruction, and the other is a model called constructive. Let’s make sure we have a clear definition of both before we go further:

Explicit Instruction: A structured, teacher-led approach in which skills and concepts are taught clearly, directly, and systematically. It’s closely related to the work of Barak Rosenshine and his “Principles of Instruction.” Key features include strong modeling and explanation by the teacher, guided practice with frequent checks for understanding, immediate feedback and correction, and, finally, a gradual release of independent responsibility.

Constructive Instruction: An approach where students build (construct) their own understanding through exploration, discussion, and problem-solving. Constructivist learning theory is often supported by researchers such as Paul A. Kirschner. Key features would include student-centered learning, open-ended tasks, collaboration and discussion, and teacher as facilitator.

What I find myself reflecting on is that neither method is always the right one. There are times when students are better served by an explicit approach, and others when constructive methods work best. In fact, I’ve written a little about this line of thinking in a previous post, drawing on ideas from the book Just Tell Them by Zach Groshell. He calls it the Novice-to-Expert Continuum, and I wrote about it in this post.

So how does this relate to what I see in practice? When visiting classrooms, I often see strong explicit instruction during the literacy block. It regularly appears when we’re teaching phonics or introducing writing structure. But what I notice is that, whether the material is new to students or a review of prior learning, I see teachers almost immediately adopting constructivist practices in math. Questions like “What do you think we should do here?” or “How would you solve this?” during the introduction to a lesson might be signs of a constructivist model of instruction.

In a recent post from Barbara Oakley, a professor at Oakland University and co-creator of an online course titled “Learning How to Learn,” the thinking she shared really struck me (you can read the post here). She talked about the idea of what she refers to as “Cognitive realism.” Here’s how she defines that: “…there are facts about how brains encode, consolidate, and retrieve information, that these facts constrain what instructional approaches can succeed, and that our theories about those facts must remain open to revision when evidence says so.”

She goes on to say that cognitive realists understand there is a time and a place for inquiry, but that explicit instruction is needed to build background knowledge and make inquiry possible later. It also means that different approaches might suit different subjects and different levels of understanding. As with any pyramid, you need a solid base before you can place a stone at the top.

In an elementary classroom, an effective practice might look like this: First, teach sentence structure explicitly; then have students create sentences while providing clear feedback and corrections; and finally, have students experiment with writing styles during the independent practice portion of writing.

So, as a bottom line, let’s think about when one strategy might be better suited than another. The chart below lists some examples of when we might use each instructional model

ExplicitConstructive
Teaching something new (or reviewing something from a previous grade)Promoting deeper thinking
Fixing gapsEncouraging creativity
Building fluencyApplying learning

The reality is that in the most effective classrooms, you get a mixture of both. The teacher will cycle between modeling and guided practice until students show mastery about 80% of the time (this is the explicit instruction), then we might shift to some exploration and application (this is the constructive instruction). Across research, we see that explicit instruction is most effective for initial learning, and then constructive approaches work best after students have a strong foundation.

What would you add to the list above? Are there explicit practices you’d add? What might be a more constructive approach? Does this prompt you to reflect on your own practices? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

What Curt Cignetti Taught Me About Leadership

Let me start by sharing my bona fides for discussing the head coach of Indiana University Football. I was born and raised in Bloomington, IN. Many of my core childhood memories center on being on the IU campus for a wide variety of activities – concerts, musicals, parades, etc. One of my consistent childhood memories was going to the IU Football pancake breakfast, spring game, and press day. Back in the day, crowds were small, and you could watch from the press box. I remember bringing my own football and throwing it around with friends on the field after the game. And most importantly, I remember meeting coaches and players on the field. Somewhere, I’ve got a picture on the field at Memorial Stadium with Coach Lee Corso (he was the IU Football coach from 1973-1982). 

I attended my first IU Football game sometime in the early 1980s. We had seats on the west side of the stadium, and I remember our seats were beneath the press box, right next to the TV camera (at the time, I may have been a bit more interested in the TV camera than the game). I think it was 1985 that our family got season tickets to IU Football. We attended home games consistently until I went to college. I remember traveling with my family to games at Northwestern, Illinois, Ohio State, Kentucky, and several other places. We attended all the bowl games in the 80s. I had student tickets all four years I was at IU, and since moving to Indianapolis, I’ve tried to get to games whenever possible (though not nearly as often as I’d really like).

During those years of season tickets, there were a few high points, and a LOT of low points. I was there in 1987 when IU knocked off Michigan 14-10 in a season they finished 8-3 and then went to the Peach Bowl. I was also there when we lost 52-17 in a miserable showing against Wisconsin. I remember sitting in the rain, snow, sleet, and complaining to my mom about how cold my feet were. I remember sunny days without sunscreen and going home with a sunburn. And I remember lots of beautiful fall days in a stadium that might have been only half full, spending time with my family and hoping for a good outcome.

Every year, when football season comes around, I get excited about the possibilities, but my time as an IU fan has always been layered with sadness by the end of the season. Seeing Curt Cignetti come in and completely change the culture and expectations around IU football in just 2 years has been amazing! 

First, there was the introduction of this coach from James Madison University. This wasn’t too long after JMU had hosted College Gameday, and I vaguely remembered this coach with some great one-liners. Then we got this:

I remember seeing this and saying, “Huh… There’s some swagger to this guy.” As a lifelong fan, I was ready to give him a shot. But after all the losses that we’d had, and the fact that we’d never won more than 8 games in a season in my entire lifetime, it was a measured level of interest. A few weeks later, we got this:

Little did I know that after 2 seasons, I’d see a team that won 27 games while losing only 2 (both to teams that played in the national championship game in January of 2025).

So it’s safe to say that the guy knows something about leading people. As he’s said, he wins. In his time as a head coach, he’s never seen a season with more than 5 losses or a season with fewer than 6 wins.

But what have I noticed about his coaching? One thing that stands out to me is his ability to delegate tasks. If you watch him during a game, you’ll see him on his headset, communicating with the other coaches. When a timeout is called, you see him talking first with his assistant coaches. Afterwards, Coach Cignetti typically steps back and trusts his assistant coaches to talk with the players in their personnel groups, so the guy who coaches linebackers is the one delivering the team message to the linebackers. At key moments, he may step in and speak to a particular player, or even to the entire offensive or defensive team, but ultimately Coach Cignetti sets the vision for the team, adjusts as the game unfolds, and trusts those around him to carry it out.

As a school leader, it’s easy to strive to do it all. There are so many factors to leading a school, from instructional leadership and staff development to school systems, student interactions, safety, facilities, budgeting, staff evaluation, and community & family engagement. There are so many different directions one could be pulled in while leading a school.

One of the things that impresses me the most is the consistency of what he says. Coach Cignetti’s vision is crystal clear. During IU’s run this year, I came across an old interview from about 14 years ago, when Coach Cignetti was the head coach at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. In that interview, I heard Coach saying, “We want to be relentless competitors… 60 minutes, one play at a time… We want to buy into the process of doing things right… We’re playing one play at a time, 6 seconds a play, every play has a life and a history of its own, when that play’s over its on to the next play.” Here’s what is interesting about that… I have heard Coach Cignetti use those exact same phrases to describe his expectations for players in his current position with Indiana University. It’s hard to argue with success. He wins. And that success becomes even more apparent when you can maintain the consistency in a vision.

What I think Coach Cignetti has taught me is that if you set a vision, maintain focus on it, and put the right people in the right places to do their jobs, you have taken the initial steps toward successfully leading people. In an interview after the game, Coach Cignetti said, “If you keep your nose to the grindstone and work hard, and you’ve got the right people, anything’s possible.” He went on to say that with the right people, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” This is so true in school leadership, too. When you have the right people in the right positions, a leader can set the vision, maintain focus, and trust those around them to do the work they were hired to do.

So, as you think about how you lead, in whatever realm of leadership you exist, I think there are two key things: Surround yourself with people who are good at what they do, set a rock-solid vision for your role, and trust them to do what they do best. Be consistent in your goals, and deliver your message to the smart, hardworking people around you. You’ll find success in what you do.

The Input/Output Cycle

In a recent round of professional learning, we dug into what Zach Groshell calls the alternating principle, or the input/output cycle. Before that learning, we shared a chapter from the book Just Tell Them with our teachers. In that chapter, Groshell shares that “While students need guidance during knowledge acquisition, they can also become overloaded if presented with too much information at once.” This relates to the concepts of Cognitive Load Theory, which I’ve shared before.

Groshell goes on to share that effective explainers manage attention, behavior, and cognitive load by breaking their presentations down into smaller chunks. If you have watched any of the matches of the Australian Open, you know that in a tennis match, there is a quick back and forth between the two players. That’s how it should be during the early stages of learning a new skill. Groshell uses Direct Instruction programs as an example: when implemented successfully, students should respond at approximately 9-12 responses per minute.

The key takeaway here is that effective explanation is not about what you, as the teacher, can tell your students. It has more to do with the dialogue you build with your students. Teachers and students should take turns. There should be a brisk alternation between providing information and asking students to respond through formats such as choral response, turn-and-talk, and cold-calling.

Recently, I’ve been popping into classrooms to observe the input/output cycle informally. There are a few things I have noticed:

  • In classrooms where the input/output cycle is 5 or more per minute, student engagement is higher. It’s that “Perky Pace” that we’ve learned about from Anita Archer in the past. More inputs and outputs per minute lead to greater academic engagement, which in turn increases learning.
  • When there is more time between inputs (such as walking around to check each student’s answer on their whiteboard), students are less engaged and have more time to talk (remember the phrase from Archer – “Avoid the void, or they will fill it.”). To speed up that process, can you stand at the front and have students hold up their whiteboards? Then you can scan the answers and provide feedback more quickly, reducing the time between input and output.

Research shows that interspersing clear, concise teacher input with frequent student output is an important part of effective instruction (Pomerance et al., Learning about Learning, 2016). As you plan your lessons, make sure to include frequent inputs and outputs, and consider how you’ll have students share their work (choral response, cold call, turn-and-talk, mini whiteboard, etc.).

By implementing the alternating principle in your classroom, you can increase engagement, which in turn is linked to higher student learning. What is something you might try next week based on your learning here? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

The Bottleneck

This fall, The Center of Excellence in Leadership of Learning at the University of Indianapolis is offering a Science of Learning Micro-Credential. When I saw information about it over the summer, I immediately signed up. I have long been fascinated by the human brain’s learning process. That makes sense, as I was reminded in a recent professional development session, because learning is the top value I selected when reading “Dare to Lead” by Brené Brown.

This Micro-Credential has an engaging format, comprising a total of 8 asynchronous modules and 4 synchronous learning opportunities. InnerDrive, a mindset coaching company based in the United Kingdom, presents the asynchronous learning. The company works closely with education. The first module of learning focused on Cognitive Load Theory, which I have previously written about (you can find those posts here, here, and here).

If you haven’t learned about Cognitive Load Theory, it’s based on the idea that our working memory has a limited capacity (for most people, approximately 4-7 pieces of information), while our long-term memory is very large – potentially even unlimited. During the first asynchronous module, InnerDrive presented an interview with Zach Groshell. He is a teacher, instructional coach, educational consultant, and author. I’ve referenced him and his book Just Tell Them in past posts.

He describes Cognitive Load Theory and the process of moving information from working memory to long-term memory as a bottleneck. If we define learning as creating a change in long-term memory, then our job as educators is to determine how to address that bottleneck.

Credit: Scott H. Young, Cognitive Load Theory and its Applications for Learning

Research tells us that there are several ways to address the concept of the bottleneck:

  1. Break learning into smaller bits: If you chunk information, you’re able to take complex ideas into smaller and more digestible steps. That might include starting with simple examples and then gradually adding complexity. Alternatively, you might use a worked example where you show step-by-step most of the problem, leaving students to complete the last portion on their own. Or you might scaffold learning by providing support like a sentence starter or graphic organizer, and you fade the scaffolds over time.
  2. Remember that busy does not equal learning: As I mentioned earlier, learning is about making a lasting change to long-term memory. One of the realities of education is that sometimes we focus more on what students are doing than what they are learning. Cognitive science tells us that utilizing retrieval practice, promoting connections between topics of learning, utilizing spaced practice, and creating opportunities for students to utilize self-explanation out loud or in writing.
  3. Success drives motivation: All humans gravitate towards assistance and support. When we feel successful in a learning environment, we strive to learn more. I don’t know about you, but I love to utilize YouTube as a learning tool. I can’t tell you how many of my YouTube searches involve fixing something. The other day, I was told that one of my brake lights had gone out on my truck. I spent about 5 minutes trying to figure out how to access the brake light, and finally pulled out my phone, watched a 30-second clip, and had the brake light replaced in under 2 minutes. Because of that success, I feel comfortable trying to learn more through a video format again. As teachers, it’s essential to find ways to help our students achieve success within the classroom setting. That maintains their motivation in the learning environment.

Understanding how the human brain learns is a key part of supporting students. We need to focus on the key points of learning. It’s what we’re here for!

AMRAP – As Many Reps as Possible

My computer has a sticker that says, “Wake Up and Work Out.” I live by that mindset. If I get up and work out before doing anything else, I’ve banked at least one win for the day. That means even if everything else goes crazy (like the recent day when our internet service was out almost ALL day, on a day we were supposed to be doing our state assessment), I have something to feel good about while dealing with the stress of the day.

If you don’t work out consistently, you may not be familiar with all the acronyms used in various workout designs. From HIIT and LISS to EMOM and AMRAP, you might need a cheat sheet to comprehend the terminology. However, today, I want to concentrate on the concept of AMRAP, and I assure you I will relate it back to education.

AMRAP stands for “as many reps as possible” or “as many rounds as possible.” This is a workout structure where you set a timer and either complete as many reps as possible of a specific exercise or as many rounds as possible of a series of exercises. AMRAP is a high-intensity workout that many use to boost cardiovascular fitness, but it can also lead to increases in strength and muscular endurance, high calorie burn, and more.

So, how does that relate to education? There is a quote that is often attributed to Confucius: “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” This quote is on my mind because I’ve been reading a lot of writing and studies about cognitive psychology. What’s that, you ask? In the book Do I Have Your Attention? by Blake Harvard, he says that cognitive psychology “offers insights into how people learn and what makes for more effective and efficient learning.” Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark suggest that “learning is a change in long-term memory.”

I recently wrote a post on cognitive load theory, one of John Sweller’s key works. In Cognitive Load Theory, he explains that the brain can only hold a small amount of information in working memory. This limitation is a bottleneck, affecting what can be transferred from working memory into long-term memory. You see, information in working memory typically remains there for about 30 seconds, but as teachers, we want our students to retain that information for much longer than that. So, how do we transfer information from working memory to a student’s long-term memory? I wish I could tell you that this would happen automatically, but I’d be lying if I did. Our memory requires processing power to store information in long-term memory. As teachers, some strategies require our students to engage with the information presented in the classroom. Usually, that involves them applying the information in some way. Maybe they are identifying the correct vocabulary term or practicing some sample problems from the math skill.

The connection between working memory and long-term memory resembles a line with arrows pointing in both directions. When we are exposed to something new, it initially resides in our working memory. As we engage with that skill, it transitions into long-term memory; however, initially, there is no strong connection between working memory and long-term memory. Imagine a new trail in the woods that has not been frequently traveled. Yet, the more we are asked to utilize that information stored in long-term memory, the stronger the connection becomes. Picture a wide, paved trail ready for use by many people. For our students, the more we encourage them to remember and accurately apply information in class or on homework, the stronger their memories develop, making it easier to retrieve that information later.

Cognitive psychology suggests that creating a wide trail between working and long-term memory involves the elaborate rehearsal of information. This process is known as retrieval practice. The easiest way to explain it is that we ask our students, in some manner, to retrieve information from their memory. Students need to use their brains to recognize or recall information and then apply it appropriately. Cognitive psychology indicates that, as a study skill, retrieval practice is a more powerful learning tool than rereading text, notes, or highlighting.

Sometimes this retrieval practice happens immediately. Imagine that you introduce a vocabulary word that is written on the board: “This word is compulsory. What word?” Then you might do something to teach the meaning of the word: “When something is required and you must do it, it is compulsory. So if something is required and you must do it, it is ________.” At the blank, you would signal students to fill in the blank. Then, you might give examples and non-examples of the word, asking students to give a thumbs up or thumbs down to let you know if compulsory is being used correctly. Finally, you might close this activity by checking for understanding: “Many things become compulsory. What is something you can think of that is compulsory?” This activity requires students to retrieve information based on your instruction immediately.

This work does a great job of creating that initial weak path. However, to strengthen that path, we need to use a strategy called “spaced practice.” With spaced practice, we have our students revisit key ideas repeatedly over multiple days. In Do I Have Your Attention?, Harvard suggests a couple of strategies that involve spaced practice. One way is through an activity that closely resembles something many teachers use – it’s a variation on the exit ticket, called an entrance ticket. It could be part of your “warm-up” at the beginning of a lesson, but it should include a retrieval practice activity from yesterday’s lesson or from your current unit at the start of today’s lesson. By doing this, you create a window of time for your students to forget a little. They then must pause and reflect on what was covered in class the previous day, which establishes a stronger connection between working memory and the location of that information in long-term memory.

Harvard also employs a spaced practice activity called “Last Lesson, Last Week, Last Month.” In this, your warm-up will include a question from yesterday’s lesson, as well as one from a lesson last week and one from a lesson last month. This spaced practice helps students not only strengthen the connections between working and long-term memory but also encourages them to recognize how what they studied last week or last month contributes to their current understanding. This is especially true in math class, but can be true in other subjects as well.

For both of these spaced practice activities, I would encourage students to first try to answer from memory, then highlight their answer in one color. Next, I’d let them refer to their notes or book to modify and improve the answer, then highlight that new answer in a different color. Finally, they could consult with a peer to see if that feedback could help them refine their answer and highlight that in a third color. Ultimately, they should have the best possible answer, while also recognizing what they knew entirely on their own. The questions that required support from the book or a peer to arrive at a solid answer indicate concepts they need to study and develop further. At the elementary level, we might also use this as a formative assessment to determine which students need more teacher support on specific topics.

By creating situations where our students can repeatedly practice the essential skills we have identified, we help them strengthen the pathways between working memory and long-term memory, allowing for better recall of that information or skill the next time they need it. Students get as many reps as possible, strengthening the connection between working and long-term memory, allowing them to access those skills more easily every time they need to.