Teach like a champion 3.0: 63 techniques that put students on the path to college - Lemov Doug 2021
Notes
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1. 1. The first Forgetting Curve was drawn by Hermann Ebbinghaus in 1885, tracing the rate at which he remembered (or failed to remember) nonsense syllables. The findings have been replicated in principle but how quickly forgetting happens in any specific case depends on who is trying to remember what and under what conditions. Still the principle endures across settings: forgetting starts right away and is always at work. Repetition matters.
2. 2. Paul A. Kirschner, John Sweller, and Richard E. Clark, “Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching,” Educational Psychologist 41, no. 2 (2006): 75—86, doi: 10.1207/s15326985ep4102_1.
3. 3. You might be wondering How many times do I have to review a concept to get it into long-term memory? There's no clear answer—a lot depends on who is learning what, when—but in his long-term study of student learning, The Hidden Lives of Learners, Graham Nuthall found that he and his colleagues could predict with 80—85 percent accuracy whether a student in a given class would learn something they did not previously know, based on whether they had encountered the full concept three different times during class. Given that students are sometimes not paying full attention or do not get the whole concept and that facility and speed of access continue to increase and improve one's ability to perceive and connect, there may be an argument for more than three repetitions for many concepts, even if Nuthall is correct.
4. 4. Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel elaborate on elaboration in Make It Stick: “Elaboration is the process of giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know. The more you can explain about the way your new learning relates to your prior knowledge, the stronger your grasp of the new learning will be and the more connections you create that will help you remember it later” (p. 5).
5. 5. Factual knowledge enhances cognitive processes like problem solving and reasoning. The richer the knowledge base, the more smoothly and effectively these cognitive processes—the very ones that teachers target—operate. https://www.aft.org/periodical/american-educator/spring-2006/how-knowledge-helps.
6. 6. “What you know determines what you see,” write Karl Hendrick and Paul Kirschner; it is the knowledge you have deeply encoded in long-term memory and can access simply and easily in the blink of an eye that allows you to see more—literally and figuratively.
7. 7. For this reason I don't personally use the term “aggressive monitoring” as it can unintentionally reinforce this transactional feel in application. “Active Observation” is a bit more neutral to me but if you prefer “aggressive monitoring” that's fine. It's a common term and there's an argument for using lingua franca.
8. 8. She also does a nice job of double-checking on Juliana by asking her to rework the original problem while others start in on a new problem. This is a demonstration of the effort Dani has put into building a Culture of Error that results in students feeling psychological safety. See technique 12 for more on how teachers like Dani do this.
9. 9. The idea that both Hilary and Jessica use a ticket metaphor for their Affirmative Checking is coincidental and actually fairly atypical.
10. 10. New Yorker, April 8, 2013, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/08/every-good-boy-does-fine.
11. 11. You can see examples of this in two clips from Jon Bogard's classroom from this chapter. Note the snaps of support “India” gets in the video Jon Bogard: Back to Your Notes from the technique Own and Track and in the support various students get in the clip Jon Bogard: Go to IP.
12. 12. If you're interested, I discuss the science of this extensively in my book The Coach's Guide to Teaching. This video of one of the world's best soccer players, Cristiano Ronaldo, wearing eye-tracking glasses is a fascinating study in how important looking is to problem solving.
13. 13. As I note in Chapter Five, Dylan Wiliam has applied this idea to the idea of self-assessment. Giving students work samples to compare to their own is far more effective than using a rubric. https://teachlikeachampion.com/blog/dylan-wiliam-advises-forget-rubric-use-work-samples-instead/.
14. 14. We transcribed the student's notes because they were only partially legible to others.