The Science of Learning and Effective Teaching Strategies

How should the research about the science of learning inform the way we teach?

How do we help students learn the most important skills and knowledge we hope they leave our classrooms possessing and able to use?

How can we make learning enjoyable while at the same time designing experiences that challenge students to struggle in the way we know deep learning requires?

Building on previous sessions in this course, we're going to present a variety of teaching strategies and mindsets based on the science of learning.

We hope these strategies will help further your understanding of these important questions.

We'll begin by doing a brief review of a few of the important principles of learning we discussed in previous sessions.

We'll help contextualize it using our simple multi-store model of how memory works.

One of the key ideas we discussed is that, to make memories that stick, our students need to think to learn.

This is a truism of learning.

Students remember what they've been thinking about.

As the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham says, "Memory is the residue of thought." In terms of our memory model, this means creating a dialog between working memory and long-term memory.

The more we get students to cognitively process what it is we want them to learn, especially if we spread out the learning over time, the more likely they'll be able to recall and use it later.

This is because thinking in this way will link the newly learned to what's already stored in our memory.

Not only do we want to create a memory residue that remains, we also want it to be embedded meaningfully in the prior knowledge that students posses.

As teachers, we help advance learning by what we have the students do to learn.

This also means that learning shouldn't be too easy, as much as we'd like to make it so.

Struggle, and even confusion, are important for making lasting memories.

We talked earlier about how to challenge students while at the same time assuring them we believe they can succeed.

The scaffolding and support we provide them both cognitively and emotionally are there for a key.

We also emphasized that an important mindset for students' success is believing they can increase their ability with effort and hard work.

And recall we emphasized that the quality of their hard work counts.

It's crucial that their effort be effective in moving their learning forward.

Hard work alone is not enough.

This is why giving students feedback is so important.

However, research shows that much of the feedback provided in schools is not very effective in helping students learn.

We all want our young learners to close the gap between where we want them to be and where they are with regard to important skills and knowledge, but how we close that understanding gap is not always easy for the diverse array of kids we teach.

In the next session we'll talk about important aspects of effective feedback that are needed to move student learning forward.

As a preview, one important but often neglected feedback principle we'll focus on is this: the only thing that matters about feedback is what the students do with it.