Creating Education That Sticks

 

How do spiders learn to do this?

With all of the issues related to schools being closed and conducting classes online, there is a question about how effective these classes can be.  This post will talk about the education process.  I will cover how to do it effectively in an online setting in a future post.  Classes need to follow some principles of a good education.  These include:

·         Building on existing knowledge, experiences, and other classes

·         Reflect on experiences

·         Teaching models, frameworks, and concepts

·         Limit lesson to include 5-7 topics that you would like the student to grasp

·         Providing practice that includes critical thinking

 

Existing Knowledge, Experiences, and Other Classes

Were you ever told to write about anything you wanted and sat there staring at a blank screen or page?  But if someone hands you a topic sentence and you can explain what it means or expand on the topic it is much easier.  Similarly, if a student is receiving a totally new concept without having a context, they generally have a lot more difficulty in grasping the concept than if it relates to something they already have some knowledge about.  There are several ways of to accomplish that.

·         Have the students think of a specific topic about which they have knowledge (their favorite teacher)

·         Create an experience for everyone (show a video)

·         Link to other classes ("Recall from your cardiac class that cardiac cells have a property called automaticity…")

 

Reflect On Experiences

Through a structured reflection, students can begin to think more deeply about a topic.  Let's take the example from above regarding their favorite teacher.  Asking for the characteristics that made that teacher their favorite gets them to think more deeply about the characteristics that make good teachers.  

 

Models, Frameworks and Concepts

There may be some courses that have rules or facts associated with them.  Science, history, and language arts for instance.  These rules and facts may be important to the overall mastery of the topic, however, having a deeper knowledge of the framework will assist in putting the information to use in other contexts.  Students need to be able to move from one example to another and determine if the new issue fits into that model or not.  Models allow us to simplify thinking and (I would argue more importantly) apply that thinking to other topics.  For example, using an analogy about a baseball team to talk about the different roles that people play on a resuscitation team can get the point across about needing to be highly skilled in a particular area, as well as knowledgeable about other areas without having to be an expert in all areas.

 

Limit Learning to 5-7 topics

There have been many studies about how many items the human mind can retain.  For short-term memory, 3-5 is ideal.  (Think about phone numbers XXX-XXX-XXXX.)  Longer-term 5-7 is generally shown as the maximum for most of the population.  So if there are 15 items that need to be retained in order to get the overall concept, it will need to be broken up into smaller chunks.  I have heard several educators talk about needing to get all of the information into a single course.  To me, this does not make a lot of sense.  If students will not retain the information at a high volume, then forcing it on them is not going to help the situation.  If the goal is to get them to know the topic, put it in a package that they can understand.  What good is it to give them 15 items if they are only going to remember 7?  And which 7 are they going to remember?  If you give them 5 items that they can incorporate into their knowledge and that they are able to use, that becomes the Existing Knowledge for the next set of items.

 

Provide Practice

Just giving information does not ensure its retention.  There has to be a structured practice that allows the student to utilize the concept in various situations, learn from what works and what does not work, and apply the concepts in different contexts.  The key idea here is to have the students exercise this new muscle that they have been given to make it stronger.  In medicine, there is an adage of "see one, do one, teach one."  Each of these steps helps the student become more familiar and comfortable with the topic.  While it may take more than one "doing" time before they are ready to teach, the idea is that they will be questioning if there is an easier way, is this the best use case, are there other techniques that can be used, etc.

 

By following these 5-steps, students will be able to increase their knowledge incrementally and avoid the frustration of feeling like they are drinking from a fire hose.