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The First Rule of Thoughtful Learning

The first rule of thoughtful learning as I see it is that, short of abuse, pretty much any pedagical technique is sometimes appropriate. The...

Sunday, August 5, 2018

A New Class

August is here and I am about to start teaching a new class, the same Math for Life Scientists that I have taught for the last four summers. This year, I want to deliberately implement thoughtful learning. Here are my plans, pristine before their collision with reality.

  • I'm going to pause more. It turns out that the "what just happened?" processing time I started using last fall based on intuition is actually a technique called the "pause procedure" with a fairly solid research base dating back to the 1970s. (See, for example, this and this.) In the original studies, students were just asked to compare their notes with a neighbor's, although some instructors assign more complex tasks. Since time is an absolute requirement for thoughtful learning, the pause procedure fits this approach perfectly. I plan to mostly use pauses to have students compare notes or discuss confusing points, as in the original studies, and explicitly ask them to come up with questions.
  • I'm going to avoid multiple choice questions and the use of peer discussion as a fallback when no one answers a question. These strategies resulted in the least participatory classes I ever taught and had no discernible effect on student learning. There's (probably) nothing wrong with peer discussion, but only if it's planned from the start. Otherwise, it rewards nonparticipation. If students are truly stumped by one of my questions, I can scaffold.
  • I'm going to do even more retrieval practice, especially asking students to write summaries at the end of class. If it's not too much trouble, I might try the three-step "brain, notes, other students" color-coded approach, but that might be too much to fit into an already packed summer schedule.
  • Finally, I'm going to try to give students more interesting conceptual questions to think about during class and breaks. This means explicitly asking them to not read the book before it's assigned. That shouldn't be a hard sell.
 We'll see how this goes.

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