Teachers often assume students think along silently when others answer. A new study shows that unless they're actively engaged, they might not be learning much.
And the work done on classroom communication and the advantages of teachers building in wait time to their questioning routines ie asking a question and then pausing before calling on a student to answer aka ‘thinking time’
Fantastic post Carl. It brought back so many memories of my early years as a RAF educator. We had it repeatedly drummed into us to use pose, pause, pounce followed by reiteration of the answer to reinforce, as one method to confirm learning had taken place. As you highlight you have to ensure you engage everyone and avoid choosing the keen few in the room to answer every time. We also used 4-part verbal reasoning questions to help students to recall information. Great Fun.
My personal experience in learning/ memory arts is that the "thinking the answer" covert/ silent form of retrieval practice and its effectiveness is highly dependent on the encoding process. If I am combining the method of loci with a sensory image or mnemonic it seems to me two paradoxical things happen during "thinking the answer":
1. there can be an emotional valence that occurs when I think the answer...AN INTENSITY!
2. there can be an EASE that makes retrieval practice more available and available in different contexts- (I can retrieve while driving my car and multitasking, I can retrieve in a dark room with the full powers of my attention trained on the material)
What I'm curious about is how much the quality of retrieval practice is dependent upon the methodology of the encoding process. If we are just doing the method of "retrieval practice" from our "natural memory" without an encoding method, it feels a bit like searching for a needle in a haystack by trying to do a "using your eyes technique" vs. looking for the needle in your sewing kit above the closet by feeling an embodied emotional relationship to the needle. It feels like science of learning folks who write about the implications of research for classroom teachers are often isolating "retrieval practice" in a way that undersells the importance of emotions, images, embodiment in encoding information- am I missing something with that? Anesthetized retrieval practice that is dislocated from vibrant and emotional memory arts seems like a way to do "rote learning" as opposed to embodied learning. I'd love to hear what science of learning folks here think about this.
One of the techniques I use with my students in 7th and 8th grade U.S. history is interspersing multiple choice questions throughout complex texts that get at the meaning of passages. ALL the students answer the questions. Then they ALL receive the correct answers. They know it's not for a grade, so they don't freak out. Sometimes it will be a whole class thing; other times it's a "do on your own, but make sure I check your answer to #4 before you move on to the writing piece. It's an easy way to quickly check for understanding of the text in a big classroom before students go on to more analytic work.
I've been urging teachers to use sentence-level activities as checks for understanding for a while, so I found this write-up of the research very validating! I've argued that if you have students write in response to a question, you're reaching every student, not just the one you call on. It's nice to know, although not surprising, that writing the answer rather than just thinking about it also has cognitive benefits. Writing seems like a more realistic option than having every student in the classroom try to orally communicate their answer.
One approach, in addition to the questioning routine suggested in the post, would be to give students carefully constructed sentence-level activities that require them to focus on a key point in the material. There are lots of possible activities described in the book The Writing Revolution, of which I'm co-author.
Hi Carl
Are you familiar with dialogic teaching?
And the work done on classroom communication and the advantages of teachers building in wait time to their questioning routines ie asking a question and then pausing before calling on a student to answer aka ‘thinking time’
Fantastic post Carl. It brought back so many memories of my early years as a RAF educator. We had it repeatedly drummed into us to use pose, pause, pounce followed by reiteration of the answer to reinforce, as one method to confirm learning had taken place. As you highlight you have to ensure you engage everyone and avoid choosing the keen few in the room to answer every time. We also used 4-part verbal reasoning questions to help students to recall information. Great Fun.
My personal experience in learning/ memory arts is that the "thinking the answer" covert/ silent form of retrieval practice and its effectiveness is highly dependent on the encoding process. If I am combining the method of loci with a sensory image or mnemonic it seems to me two paradoxical things happen during "thinking the answer":
1. there can be an emotional valence that occurs when I think the answer...AN INTENSITY!
2. there can be an EASE that makes retrieval practice more available and available in different contexts- (I can retrieve while driving my car and multitasking, I can retrieve in a dark room with the full powers of my attention trained on the material)
What I'm curious about is how much the quality of retrieval practice is dependent upon the methodology of the encoding process. If we are just doing the method of "retrieval practice" from our "natural memory" without an encoding method, it feels a bit like searching for a needle in a haystack by trying to do a "using your eyes technique" vs. looking for the needle in your sewing kit above the closet by feeling an embodied emotional relationship to the needle. It feels like science of learning folks who write about the implications of research for classroom teachers are often isolating "retrieval practice" in a way that undersells the importance of emotions, images, embodiment in encoding information- am I missing something with that? Anesthetized retrieval practice that is dislocated from vibrant and emotional memory arts seems like a way to do "rote learning" as opposed to embodied learning. I'd love to hear what science of learning folks here think about this.
This is so helpful! (And confirms why thinking Spanish in my head is not improving my acquisition of the language of the language as much as conjugating verbs out loud.) https://laurenbrownoned.substack.com/p/what-im-learning-about-learning-from
One of the techniques I use with my students in 7th and 8th grade U.S. history is interspersing multiple choice questions throughout complex texts that get at the meaning of passages. ALL the students answer the questions. Then they ALL receive the correct answers. They know it's not for a grade, so they don't freak out. Sometimes it will be a whole class thing; other times it's a "do on your own, but make sure I check your answer to #4 before you move on to the writing piece. It's an easy way to quickly check for understanding of the text in a big classroom before students go on to more analytic work.
I've been urging teachers to use sentence-level activities as checks for understanding for a while, so I found this write-up of the research very validating! I've argued that if you have students write in response to a question, you're reaching every student, not just the one you call on. It's nice to know, although not surprising, that writing the answer rather than just thinking about it also has cognitive benefits. Writing seems like a more realistic option than having every student in the classroom try to orally communicate their answer.
One approach, in addition to the questioning routine suggested in the post, would be to give students carefully constructed sentence-level activities that require them to focus on a key point in the material. There are lots of possible activities described in the book The Writing Revolution, of which I'm co-author.