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

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:

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.
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.
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.

The Commitment

As a teacher, what do you define your primary purpose as? We all know that a lot goes into supporting our students – we’ve been trained in SEL, Restorative Practices, Crisis Intervention, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and that list could go on. In addition to the training we’ve had, we have supervisory roles; we communicate with families, we manage our classrooms, we document student attendance, we collaborate with our colleagues, and we may even support students by organizing extra-curricular activities. Again, this list of additional duties could go on!

However, I would define our primary purpose as facilitating learning. If I were writing the job description for a teacher, the first bullet point would be “Plan, prepare, and deliver engaging lessons aligned with curriculum standards.” A second bullet point might be “Differentiate instruction to meet the needs of all students and ensure high levels of learning for all.” In addition, it’s important to remember that great teachers deliver the content and inspire curiosity, critical thinking, and a love for lifelong learning.

For a while now, the sign right outside of my office has said the following:

We must all commit as teachers: “If they didn’t learn it, then I didn’t teach it well enough.” Yes, we all want our students to be happy and to have fun. But we also need to ensure that they are learning. This may be a bit of a mindset shift, but that’s what is required for all students to achieve at the levels that we know they are capable of.

How often have you been sitting with someone, maybe in a meeting or even a conversation among friends, and you didn’t feel like you understood what they were discussing? What does that feel like? It has happened to me. My career path has been in education, so get me around a group of teachers or other educators, and I can make small talk all evening. But occasionally, I will be in a social situation where everyone there has been in the business world. They start talking about something relating to their business, and suddenly, I’m stuck in a conversation where I don’t understand what they are discussing or have nothing to add. I almost feel lost. While I can ask questions to learn more, it’s not a great feeling. But it’s essential to remember that for some of our students who haven’t learned what we expect them to know, that is what they feel like when they sit in our classrooms each day. Yes, they may be happy to be with friends, to have chances to socialize, or to go to recess. But should we settle for that being the times they feel happy at school?

If, as teachers, we spend all our time focused on making sure our students are happy, that takes away from our time to ensure that they are learning at the levels we need all students to achieve. I also find that when we worry about making sure they are happy, we will likely find excuses for not achieving where we hope they’d be. Remember that we only have 6 hours daily to help move our students forward.

Like me, I’m sure you have seen those lightbulb moments for students when something truly clicks. What was the facial expression of a student at that moment? It’s typically a massive smile for two reasons: first, they feel proud of themselves, and second, they are happy that they now “get it.” On the other hand, no amount of positive feelings due to SEL or other social justice type work will make them feel good when they realize they don’t get what you are teaching. They’ll feel lost, just like we do in those social situations I mentioned above.

I sometimes worry that we lower our standards for one reason or another. It never comes from wanting to negatively impact our students; I’m sure it comes from wanting to show them that we care. Eventually, our students will realize that they don’t get it, and the odds are that they will not feel good about themselves when that happens.

We must commit to pushing our students to mastery. Each of us must look at each student and think to ourselves that because of the work we are going to do with them, they will learn, they will find success, and that will bring about the greatest happiness of all.

That is the commitment of a teacher.

Orienteering

Some of you may not know this about me, but many of the core memories from my pre- and teen years relate to my time as a Boy Scout. I attended weekly meetings with my troop; we had campouts throughout the year; each summer, we went to a scout camp; and every other year, there was a high adventure trip. Eventually, I worked my way up the ranks from Scout to Eagle, the highest rank available in scouting. One of the things that has to happen for a scout to advance in rank is to earn merit badges.

A merit badge is a chance for a scout to learn about things they are interested in. Topics include sports, crafts, science, trades, business, and future careers. Currently, there are more than 135 merit badges for scouts to earn. One of the most challenging merit badges I earned was the Orienteering merit badge. With that badge, we learned to use a topographic map and a compass to get from one point to the next. We learned the terrain features of the map, translated them to the environment we were in, and used that knowledge to navigate from point to point. Think of it a bit like a scavenger hunt! Orienteering comes from the word orient, which means finding your position or direction.

But Brian, what does this have to do with learning here at school? Well, recently, we started a Cluster of Professional Development around writing, with a particular focus on adding evidence and elaboration to our students’ pieces. We are engaged in this work because data has shown us that students consistently struggle with this area on our state summative assessments. Last year, only 17% of our students showed proficiency in evidence and elaboration.

As we began planning for this professional development, one thing we did was examine our standards to truly understand where our students needed to be by the end of each grade level. For our students to reach proficiency by grades 3 or 4, steps have to be in place as foundations for learning in kindergarten, first grade, and second grade (see a recent post, The LEGO Conundrum, for more on this approach).

The analogy I’m thinking of related to orienteering is that our standards are a bit like the end point on a map. But if I took you into the woods, handed you a map and a compass, showed you where you needed to get to on the map, and gave you no other information, would you be able to orienteer your way to that location? I’m guessing that for most of us, the answer is no. Why not? We don’t know where we are starting.

I’ve been chatting with teachers about our current cluster and observing classes in writing tasks. We’re doing a great job of staying focused on where our students need to be. There’s a clear understanding of the success criteria for each grade. However, I’m starting to have concerns that we might need to work a little more on understanding where our students are right now. We need to orient ourselves to the starting point.

Just as you wouldn’t be able to orienteer your way to the endpoint on a map without knowing where you are starting, how can we hope to move our students to the standard if we don’t know where they are right now? We must orient our teaching to our students’ present levels.

You see, we (educators) do a great job of thinking about learning progressions in math. We have also grown in our knowledge of learning progressions in foundational literacy skills. But there is also a learning progression in writing skills. As a classroom teacher working to support my students’ writing growth, I must know more than just where I need to get my students. I need to start with where they are.

If we start by thinking about writing as a progression, we begin first with letter formation and handwriting fluency. Then, we work up to explicit spelling instruction. Next, we support students in building sentences, starting with simple sentences and then using sentence-building charts to add more detail to the sentence structure. From there, we progress to a basic paragraph with a topic sentence and supporting details. Then, we can use graphic organizers, color-coded paragraphs, or paragraph frames to help students in multi-paragraph writing. Over time, we slowly pull back those scaffolds for students to do these parts independently.

But here’s the thing: if I were a second-grade teacher, and I asked my students to create multi-paragraph pieces of writing when they are currently still at the simple sentence level, and I only focus on trying to get them to write multi-paragraph writing, they will break down. They will reach frustration. They will believe they are not a good writer.

In math, we meet students where they are in the progression. We must do the same for our writers. If you are looking for a great resource to support your understanding of writing progressions, check out this fantastic resource from Reading Rockets called “Looking at Writing.” You can work through the progressions, beginning with Pre-K writing through grade 3. There are writing samples, suggestions for the next steps, and ideas for instructional strategies to move students forward in their learning.

Awareness of progression is key to orienting our students toward successful growth.

What are your thoughts? How have you used progressions of learning to support student growth? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

The LEGO Conundrum

Last week, we began a new round of professional development. One of our School Improvement Goals is to increase the number of students proficient in evidence and elaboration in their writing. In our most recent round of ILEARN testing (the test used in our state to check student proficiency in math and ELA in grades 3-8), only slightly more than 17% showed proficiency in this area. Our working theory is that by helping our students expand their sentences, add more details, and ensure that those details stay on topic, we will also see improvement in other areas of the written portion of the test.

But I also know that when I bring together a group of teachers ranging from kindergarten to fourth grade, some may have difficulty connecting to the data they see on the screen because “we don’t teach those standards.” To help get thinking about each person’s critical role in moving our students towards proficiency, we did an activity with one of my all-time favorite toys, LEGO! Each group received a box with a Minifigure inside, and then we put the following directions on the screen:

We asked one person to follow a step in the directions, revealing them one at a time and then passing the Minifigure to the next person. Once all tables had completed their Minifigures, we displayed the question: Which step could you skip and still have a completed Minifigure? The team reached a consensus that there were no steps we could forget and that we still had completed Minifigures.

So then, we showed this:

I know the font is tiny, so don’t feel you need to zoom in. This is a vertical articulation guide for the essential writing standards for grades K-4. At first glance, without even digging into what they say, you might notice that they become more detailed as the grades advance. When we looked at this with our staff, several noted that they built upon one another. Suppose you were to look at the third row related to writing informative pieces—every grade level talks about being on a topic or having a central idea, and every grade level has something about including details, but the requirements and expectations of each grade level become more detailed.

The analogy we made as we discussed this is that we think of the writing process as a stairstep. Each grade level has a target level of proficiency. If one grade level does not hit their proficiency level, the work of the following grades becomes more challenging because they have to play “catch-up” with their students.

The State of Indiana has provided rubrics that are written based on the academic standards, and they are broken down into the different categories that students are assessed on during the writing portion of the ILEARN assessment. They include three focus areas – organization, evidence and elaboration, and conventions. So, we started by looking at the rubric section based on evidence and elaboration (our goal area). Unfortunately, since the ILEARN rubric only includes grades 3-8, we didn’t have a clear rubric for grades K-2 in this area. So, our leadership team had done some prework. We dug into the standards and rubrics from grades three & four and then walked the rubrics back, referencing what was included in the standards in each grade level, to create a simple bullet-pointed rubric for all grades K-4.

What we came up with was something that looked like this:

Next, we sent each grade level team to dig into their standards, the academic frameworks put together by the state, and the prework our lead team had done. We then took time to define success criteria. We asked ourselves, “What should my students’ writing look like to show they have met proficiency in the areas we’ve identified?” To ensure we clearly understood what proficient writing should look like, we utilized the Vermont Writing Collaborative writing samples, which had been scored based on common core standards. These standards are very close to the ones that we use in Indiana. My favorite thing about these samples is that when you look at the scored samples, there is information on the page about why they fall into the category they did on the rubric. Then, the person who scored it wrote a short section called “Final Thoughts,” which helped us better understand what to look for to show proficiency on the standard.

Moving forward, we will use these rubrics and success criteria to identify where our students currently fall in evidence and evaluation on a cold write (a piece of writing that our students have not had any direct instruction or support to write) and then plan instructional strategies that will support their needs. It was important to us to look at cold writes instead of a piece that the students may have been working on as part of a current unit because that will give us an idea of what our students can do entirely on their own without any direct teaching to support the writing process.

Much like building a LEGO, the writing process is a step-by-step learning process so that students may grow in the vertical articulation of the standard. No step can be missed for our students to get to proficiency. The scores on the ILEARN assessment are often tied to the classroom or grade level that took the assessment. I want our teachers to be fully aware that without the foundational steps that must happen in kindergarten, first grade, and second grade, our students will never get to proficiency in grades three & four. Those scores represent our work to build a student as a writer. If you skip a page in your LEGO instructions, you will encounter problems later in the build. At the same time, if we miss a step in building proficient writers, our students will struggle as they age.

What are your thoughts? Have you, like me, ever been leading a professional development and felt like some weren’t fully engaged because the data “wasn’t from their grade level?” Have you ever been the one who disengaged? How might you think differently about your role moving forward? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

The Novice to Expert Continuum

I’ve recently been reading the book Just Tell Them: The Power of Explanations and Explicit Teaching by Zach Groshell. I see it as something of the convergence of the work from John Sweller on Cognitive Load Theory and the work from Anita Archer on Explicit Instruction. I’ve been really enjoying the book, and I highly recommend it as a way to reflect on how you explain your instruction to your students. Plus, it’s a speedy read!

I often think of people as either novices or experts, almost as if they are binary. But what I hadn’t thought about carefully enough that Groshell calls attention to is that the transition from novice to expert really exists along a continuum. The reminder about the needs of learners based on where they are in the learning process was probably one of the greatest aha moments for me. Let’s dig into that a little bit.

As a former science teacher, I will use an example of something that I often felt all of my students came to me as something of a novice at: using the triple beam balance to measure the mass of objects. We would learn this skill early in the year because many of the labs we would do throughout the year would require using the balance and getting accurate mass measurements. In case you’ve forgotten what a triple beam balance looks like, the ones we used in my classroom were practically identical to this:

When we learned to use the triple beam balance, I would often take one of our balances, show our students how to “zero” the balance, and then take a random object to find the mass. To build background knowledge, we’d talk about how many people had ever used a scale that you had to move the weights (when I was in the classroom, most doctor’s offices still had that type of scale, not the digital ones that are everywhere now). Then, I’d explain how the balance is similar.

To allow everyone to see the process, I’d place the balance on my document projector and use it like a camera to project the steps on the screen for all to see. First, I’d take my object and place it on the pan. Then, I’d explain that you start by moving the 100 g mass. Once it gets to the point where the balance goes down, you go back to the previous notch. Then, you move to the 10 g mass. Once the balance goes down, you go to the previous notch. Finally, you slide the 1 g marker until the balance is zeroed or the marker on the right points to the 0 mark. That would tell us that the object’s mass is the same as the mass we moved on the balance’s three beams. We would then add up the 100 g mass, the 10 g mass, and the 1 g mass rounded to the nearest tenth of a g. We’d do a couple more examples with objects I had on or around my desk. I might have students say what step to do next, but I was still moving the masses on the balance, although they could see it on the screen.

After a few samples, I’d have one member of the table group come and get a balance with a few objects on a tray to bring back to their table. Then, I’d set them free. And that is where I made my mistake. Invariably, table groups would have a hard time. One group would have an issue, so I’d have to answer those questions. While I was helping that group, other groups would have problems, but with nobody to help, learning would break down, and engagement would break down. The different groups were entirely disengaged when I finished with the first or second group. Potentially, there were behavior issues. Kids were frustrated because they “couldn’t get it.” I would see kids from across the room doing things in the wrong order but couldn’t do anything about it because I was stuck at this table helping this group.

In retrospect, I see the error of my ways. I went directly from the “I do” modeling portion of my lesson to the “You do” portion. I skipped the “We do” portion and jumped directly from the novice to the expert stage, but my students weren’t yet experts. Insert face palm emoji here!

If I could go back, I’d do the task differently. I’d still model the task in the “I do” stage the same way. Nothing seems wrong there. However, I need to strengthen the “We do” portion of the lesson. To do that, each tray would have identical objects. That way, I would know they had the same mass. This would allow me to do a completion problem, where a portion of the task is shown to them, and then they need to finish the final step to find the answer. For the triple beam balance, I’d show them (and have them follow along on their own balance) what to do with the 100 g mass, then the 10 g mass, and then have them use the 1 g mass to find the result. We’d use something like a whiteboard to write our answers, then use a “3… 2… 1… show me” to quickly check how people did. I’d be able to see if any groups were way off that needed additional support, if we were ready to pull back on support as a class, etc. Over time, I’d fade the support, adding more steps they would complete on their own, eventually getting to the point that students were working in their groups, finding the mass of objects they selected around the room, and then having me check their work.

Chances are, this process would take more than one day to play out, but by following a similar process, I’d build a stronger understanding of the task at hand. What I found in my old methods was that I often had to reteach the triple beam balance every time we used it because the methods I used never got my students to master it in the first place. By taking a little more time the first time and ensuring we all get to mastery, we might not have to spend as much time on a reteach the next time we pull out the triple beam balances.

Do you ever find that with something you teach, you have to reteach every time you come back to it? Maybe you need to rethink the gradual release of the task in your teaching to get your students to mastery in the first place.

This is a sign of our rush to get to letting the students “do the work.” And trust me, I get it! We want them to be able to do it! But what is the cost of letting them do it if they cannot do it correctly? They might practice incorrectly and solidify their understanding of an incorrect method, making your job harder to reteach. Or they might become frustrated and just start to believe “I’m not a ____ person” (fill in the blank with the appropriate subject area). By remembering this concept of the novice to expert continuum, slowly fading our support, and providing models that students can go back to, they are better able to figure it out.

My favorite suggestion from this section of Groshell’s book was the idea of a completion problem. Imagine math class with a problem that takes 4 steps to solve. In a completion problem, you model steps 1 through 3 for your students and then ask them to do step 4 on their own. After you have mastered that step, you fade the support by modeling steps 1 and 2, asking the students to do steps 3 and 4 independently. With mastery, you fade to only modeling the first step. Eventually, you get to the point where you do not complete any of the steps because your students know how to do the entire process. When we explicitly teach math (or anything), it becomes easy for our students. If you have students take pictures of these models, or you take pictures on your own and then put them on Canvas for your students, they now have a resource they can return to any time they need to remember how it’s done. I loved this idea – I often modeled problems. I frequently asked students to tell me what to do. But I never went to the level of thought that Groshell went to here. I hope it’s an aha for you too!

So, what is a takeaway for you? What might you try to do differently in your classroom due to this post? How will you think of your students a little differently now that you know about the idea of the novice to expert continuum? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

The View from 518

Tag: Education