Teaching So Students Remember

The first TESOL workshop I went to was given by Kathy Olson, an educational consultant who reminded me of a veteran elementary school teacher--in a goood way. Her presentation outlined ways for teachers to capitalize on basic brain-research findings.

Naturally, she cited the alarming statistic that most of us forget as much as 80% of what we read and 90% of what we hear within 24 hours. However, she offered lots of ideas for working with this in the classroom.

Her first suggestion was about attention. She is WAY into stimuli, the more intense the better. She points out that students don't learn anything if you don't have their attention...so she recommends music, movement, humor, emotions, costumes, surprise. She points out that most of us love to guess and apparently, we try harder to remember information we've guessed wrong.

Olson recommends visuals, as vision trumps all other senses in the impact it makes on the brain. Even simple things like color can make a measurable difference: colored paper, highlights and of course pictures. (Evidently, groups using illustrated texts performed 36% better than groups using text alone.) She touted the great return you get by accessing prior knowledge. Connecting new information to information already stored in long-term memory enables the brain to process more effectively.

Her main idea is that once you have the students' attention and introduce some new material, it is important to "rehearse" or "manipulate" the information right away. This will move the new input from short term memory--where it will stay for fewer than 24 hours--to long-term memory, where it actually becomes useful to the student.

She offered lots of ideas about ways to do this: paraphrasing, summarizing, personalizing, predicting, repeating, mapping, classifying--especially classifying. The brain loves identifying patterns, charting differences and similarities, connecting ideas to each other or to personal experiences. I tried and failed to attach her powerpoint, but if you're interested, look her up on the web (Kathy Olson and "Teaching So Students Remember").

At times during her presentation, Kathy seemed a little grade school--or perhaps old-school: costumes? Really? However, I overheard a bunch of juniors yesterday fondly reminiscing about the 9th grade lecture Daniel gave dressed as Theodora of the Byzantine Empire. It's true that they remembered the costume better than the lecture, but at least two out of three remembered that there was a Byzantine Empire, with Theodora and Justinian on the throne.

Interactive Lecture

Ben gave me a great article by Rob Weir, published in the April 29 issue of Inside Higher Ed. Weir offers an approach he calls "didaction," a mix of exposition and student participation. The article offers a lot of great ideas for keeping student involvement strong, even in a lecture situation. Some of the best of these include:

• Brainstorm: pepper your lecture with open-ended questions and invite students to offer ideas.

• Ask "affective" questions: students often hesitate to offer "right/wrong" answers, but many are willing to volunteer how something makes them feel or think. This gets them more personally invested in what you are presenting.
  

• Say it in pictures: No one likes to listen as the presenter reads a slide aloud. However, images are engaging...especially when students are asked to comment on them. Maximize moments where you can convey information by summarizing and affirming correct assumptions the students have extracted from images, graphs or maps.

• Story-telling: Students naturally remember stories. Take advantage of opportunities to package information as mini-stories.

• Be controversial/provocative/silly: if you notice that the class is drifting, ask an outrageous question or make an outlandish claim and demand to be corrected.

• Role-play: You can wade into the audience (which alone changes the mood and gets their attention) and ask questions. Ask more than one student--"What were the weaknesses with this point in the treaty?" or "Why does Descartes distrust the evidence of his senses?" This bit of drama can drive the point home.

• Encourage interruptions: Make your presentation an experience students feel free to join in with comments or questions.
  

• End with a question: it's always better not to end your presentation by simply running out of time. It can be effective to end with a puzzle or problem or question...something that previews material to come or that reflects back on what they've already learned.

Thanks to Ben for sharing this article. If anyone else reads/notices/does anything cool, let us know. You can comment or post or just let me know and I'll post.

Reflections on Lecture

Gary and I had a chat today about one of the ways in which lecture works beautifully for students: as synthesis as well as presentation.

Gary proposes that one of the best uses of lecture is to make connections between concepts and information with which the students already have a passing familiarity. When time allows, Gary has found students benefit from encountering the basics of a new unit in section or small groups. This can be an especially rich way to work with primary sources: letters, speeches, newspaper articles. Listening to the lecture then becomes a satisfying experience of connecting the dots as well as gathering information. The students have a chance to see how their teachers are interpreting the complex information that primary sources have to offer.