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| Buildings at the waterfront, Back Bay. Photography. Britannica ImageQuest, Encyclopædia Britannica, 25 May 2016. quest.eb.com/search/165_3342401/1/165_3342401/cite. Accessed 13 Dec 2019. |
Over the weekend of Nov. 22-24 I attended the Learning and the Brain Conference called, Learning How to Learn: Applying Learning Sciences for Deeper Reasoning, Retention, and Reflection in Boston. Every year scientists and school personnel come together to learn about what is new in brain research and cognitive science and talk about how to translate the findings for real world teaching situations. I have been fortunate to attend a few of these gatherings and I always come back with learning strategies I can implement immediately, and I also appreciate the opportunity it gives me to reflect on my teaching practices. This year was no different.
One of the highlights of the conference was Barbara Oakley's keynote address. She studies the relationship between neuroscience and social behavior. Just a couple of weeks prior to this conference I participated in the ISM training which focused on how to design lessons that focus on learning strategies that help students make deeper connections to new ideas. In her presentation entitled Learning How to Learn: Helping Students Succeed in School, Ms. Oakley presented research that supports many of these same teaching strategies such as chunking information, providing movement breaks, or lighter load tasks to give kids a break after periods of deep focus. She also touched on the importance of using direct instruction as well as providing opportunities for student inquiry.
I was surprised that what I found most thought-provoking about her lecture was the research she presented about retrieval practice--an idea I had thought of as a basic concept. Through her research she determined that recalling information is the best way of transferring information from short-term to long-term memory. She emphasized the need for teachers to provide multiple opportunities in class for students to recall information that they have forgotten and not to just rely on quizzes and tests as points of retrieval.
Pooja Agarwal, author of Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning, supported this idea and said straight out, "Retrieval practice is a learning strategy, not an assessment strategy". In fact, using it solely as an assessment practice can lead to anxiety for students, because it doesn't happen frequently, it is high-stakes, and the answers are correct or incorrect. She advocates for high frequency low-stakes retrieval practices such as entry and exit tickets, think-pair-share, and a closing question like "list two things you learned today". Another suggestion I loved was to ask kids, "What is the one thing you would like to remember about this class ten years from now? ".
I found the other workshops equally inspiring. Topics included teaching critical thinking, new understandings about teenage brains, and creating cultures of inquiry and deep thinking. I thank the Miller Fellowship for allowing me the opportunity to attend this amazing conference. Since I have returned from Learning and the Brain, I have looked at my teaching more closely and am left pondering the idea of reflection during the inquiry process as a form of retrieval. I think that when teachers encourage kids to reflect on their work throughout their research process, it functions as regular retrieval practice. This informs students of what they have learned and points them in the direction of what's next, helping them to consider where they might still have unanswered questions or holes in their knowledge. Stay tuned I will follow up this post with how I implement these new wonderings into my own practice in a future article.