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Mistakes Are What It Takes

July 05, 2022 / Oskar Cymerman

“Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one’s self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily.”

— Thomas Szasz

Change How Mistakes Are Looked At

This one will be hard. Jumping off a building without a parachute or at least a bungee cord to learn about gravity is risky. It’s also either crazy, or really stupid, or both, because the risk involved is not reasonable. And while this example seems drastic, it might not be far off from the way many students perceive taking risks - asking questions, volunteering answers, and being wrong - in school.

So how do we change this classroom risk aversion?

Expect and Respect Mistakes

We can create a culture of mistake making in our classrooms by communicating to our students at the beginning of the school year that we expect and want them to make mistakes, because learning is more memorable when we inspect and correct our mistakes.

As teachers, we need to communicate this message frequently, because behavior modification takes time and effort.

In addition, we can be honest about our own mistakes, point them out when we make them, analyze them, and correct them as they happen. I found that students respect me more and I build more authentic relationships when I admit my mess-ups.

Inspect and Correct Mistakes

How does making, inspecting, and correcting our mistakes help us learn better?

We tend to feel embarrassed when we get something wrong in front of our peers, which makes these experiences more memorable than instances in which we guess correctly. And the benefits of such blush moments, evidenced by the sudden rush of blood to our heads and visible on our faces, cannot be understated. Emotions do wanders for the memory-making process of information encoding.

Additionally, we tend to put time into careful processing of mistakes we make as we do not want to be wrong again, especially about the same thing. We want to show we’re smart by improving ourselves and learning from our mistakes. Such processing and reprocessing leads to deeper knowledge. Deeper knowledge is the definition of true learning.

The key for students is to keep trying, knowing they will be wrong at times.

The key for teachers is to make mistakes part of the learning menu (FREE to you). And tips are required.

“If no mistake you have made, losing you are. A different game you should play.”

— Yoda

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categories / Learning
tags / teaching teens, deeper learning, independence, lifelong learning, learning, kids, active learning, teacher resources, instructional resources, classroom strategies, hybrid learning, in-person learning, distance learning, remote learning, teaching strategies, teaching methods

Are Your Students Dual Coding? How To Make Combining Verbal With Visual The Usual

November 20, 2020 / Oskar Cymerman

Dual Coding: Combining Verbal and Visual increases memory, understanding, and retention.

Warning! This is my second article in a row that is full of cheesy and rhymy graphics designed to promote nerdy and sciency research-supported learning strategies. Luckily, the strategies described below work and are different than these methods, which also work. As always, read at your own risk of being slightly entertained and, on my good day, enlightened. Thanks for reading!

“Learning how to learn is life’s most important skill.”

— Tony Buzan

In this and my previous article, I condensed research-based effective learning to six strategies: Active Learning, Teaching, Visualizing, Smart Practice, Chunking, and Mistake Making, which be viewed as a set of micro skills - smaller but integral parts of the macro “Effective Learning” skill.

This article covers Visualizing and deliberate use of Dual Coding to help learners of all walks of life, but especially our students, learn how to learn. If you’d like to read about Active Learning, Smart Practice, and Teaching to Learn click here.

The strategies are universal — they can be used in any subject, field of knowledge, or profession to learn anything. They should be used if the learner is planning to actually learn and not just do the thing where he just crams and passes the test.

And if the teacher wants her students to actually learn and not cram and forget? She must teach them how to learn and apply, use these practices in her classroom, and show them how to learn when on their own. Knowledge is only power if they can apply it and they can’t apply that which they do not have. Let’s show them why dual coding works and how to use it to make sure they have so they can apply.

“We do not see with our eyes. We see with our brains.”

— John Medina

John Medina, the developmental molecular biologist and author of Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School suggests that vision trumps all other senses, because throughout human evolution it has been the most dominant sense that relies on about half of our brain’s resources.

And let’s not start talking about that icky, long-debunked learning styles theory, because it’s a bunch of road apples. Every human being has their own learning style that uses all of the senses to learn. But vision’s the shiz.

Making Information Visual

Some civilizations have used written symbols to convey what anthropologists consider coherent information for four to five thousand years, but most cultures have only known writing for a few centuries. Our species has been around for two hundred thousand years and for almost the entirety of that time we were not learning through reading and writing.

We used our senses, and because we can see farther than we can hear, or feel, or taste, or smell (thankfully) our vision was the sense that served us best. Along with the other senses, we predominantly used vision to find food so we could feed, to spot predators so we could fight or flee, and to evaluate members of the opposite sex so we could f… breed.

Vision had time to evolve through many millennia. The brain systems that help with decoding text, while promising, are still developing and long-term storage of verbal information is hard. Perhaps the case for using more imagery in learning is best made with the picture superiority effect (PSE), a well-researched phenomenon that shows we remember and retrieve information presented in pictures better than verbal (written and spoken) knowledge.

But doing it is not be as simple as it sounds. Telling students to imagine a concept will not be enough for some, because their spatial capacity — the ability to make, manipulate, and modify visual images in their mind — might not be well developed as a result of its previous underuse. Anyone can close their eyes and conjure a tree, but take a highly abstract concept such as the atom and most students will revert to the age-old, crude, and full of misconceptions “solar system” model. And then chemistry teachers, myself included, wonder: Why oh why do they miss so many easy atom questions on the test?

All kids start out curious. We see this in babies when they gaze in amazement at new faces and objects. Where does this curiosity go and why do some students dread high school science classes and often mask anxiety with indifference? We could blame traditional schooling, but do we truly know? It’s not that simple nor does it do us any good to dwell while teaching. The best course is to show them how to reawaken their imagination.

Imagination awakened — that’s a powerful learning tool. While not in the job description, it is the teacher’s job is to help students use their imagination in the context in which it’s often underutilized — the classroom. The more abstract the concept we teach is, the more important it becomes to create visual reference points, mental imagery that makes it more concrete. At first, we can provide visuals and model how to generate them to our students.

For example… The atom is the simplest building block of matter and one of the most abstract and difficult concepts to correctly understand for students, because it’s unlike anything they’ve ever seen. It’s very small, yet the electrons are very far away from the nucleus — relatively speaking… The nucleus is where pretty much all of the atom’s mass is in the form of protons and neutrons, but it is the smallest part of the atom — relatively speaking… The electrons weigh close to nothing but make up the largest region of the atom we call the electron cloud as the electrons create a sort of an “after image” when they revolve really fast (some calculations have it close to 5,000,000 miles per hour) around the nucleus in the so-called orbitals, which aren’t even paths electrons follow, but rather probabilities of where they can be. Moreover — due to the fact that the electrons are about two thousand times smaller than the protons or neutrons, and they are spaced out, and they are sparse — the electron cloud and the atom itself is comprised of mostly… empty space.

If you don’t teach chemistry, are not a science nerd, or always thought of an atoms as a bunch of balls revolving around a cluster of balls in the middle like planets around the sun, it’s perfectly normal if you’ve developed a migraine reading the above. Scientists don’t completely understand what the atom looks like themselves, and if they tell you they do, they are lying.

I always draw a (very unartistic) football stadium to represent the atom and to aid the student understanding of what it might look like and its scale. I draw the coin the ref flips in the center of the field and ask students to think of it as the nucleus. Then, I draw a few randomly spaced out tiny dots where the stands are and ask my students to imagine they are grains of sand — each ''sitting” in its own seat far away and each representing one electron. Then, I ask them to create this mental image: Remove the stadium, refs, seats, and everything else your mind conjured previously and leave only the coin and the grains of sand suspended in space. Finally, I tell students to animate it: imagine the grains of sand (electrons) revolving around the coin (nucleus) in a three-dimensional space — not like planets around the sun, but rather, the would-be-paths can be horizontal or vertical or skewed in any direction around the nucleus.

The point is to help my students to start seeing things with their mind not just eyes - to use their imagination to draw mental representations of concepts - and to do it often. Ideally, students will learn to create mental images for everything verbal they learn so it is stored in two different but connected parts of the brain, which will then aid recall and understanding. While such practice of converting verbal into visual is natural for some people, other learners must be shown how to do it and given frequent opportunities to better develop their visual-spatial awareness and abilities through deliberate practice.

Dual Coding

The mental model of the atom I created in my own mind for myself is something I share with my chemistry students to tie the insanely abstract to something more tangible. But there’s more to it…

The Dual Coding Theory (DCT) explains two ways of storing memories in the human brain — verbal (text, speech, hearing) and non-verbal (focusing on images). The benefit of having two separate systems of information encoding is that our mind can hold information related to one concept in two different regions of the brain. During initial processing, neurons in different regions of the brain “fire and wire” together connecting the verbal and the visual representations of the same concept. Through repeated processing, these neural pathways thicken (myelination) leading to more elaborate recall, faster application, and deeper understanding of the concept. It’s like having two different people continually discussing a concept and learning from each other by bringing two different ways of looking at the same thing into their interactions.

Thus, it serves our students well to learn to effectively visualize written or spoken information — it might not be easy, but is always possible. Visualization is a skill that must be practiced, because images enhance recall of verbal material. When a concept elicits an image, it has a higher chance of being retained in our memory and can be recalled more easily.

It does not matter if the images are created through deliberate action and not conjured automatically by the brain — they are just as effective, because the learner’s brain forms two distinct neural memory and processing pathways for the information. But because many students do not spontaneously generate mental images to support their learning, teachers should include plenty of visuals when teaching. Additionally, teachers can provide image-generation practice by creating classroom activities that call on students to physically draw or digitally create pictorial representations of the concepts they are learning.

The point is… students don’t have to be Leo-flippin’-Da-Vinci to take full advantage of dual coding. We can help them develop the ability to visualize so they can internalize. Seeing with their brains not just eyes will help them be more wise. Learning how to learn best will help them capitalize on many opportunities and win the ultimate prize - a meaningful life.

Dual Coding: Combing Verbal With Visual Key Takeaways:

Visual learning is more potent as evidenced by picture superiority effect (PSE) but is at the same time underutilized in many classrooms.
Information retention, understanding, and recall is increased when it’s dual-coded.
Ability to visualize isn’t always automatic but it is a skill that can be developed with practice.

References:

Medina, John. Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School. Pear Press; Second edition (April 22, 2014).

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3 Strategies to Help Students Learn More Effectively

November 13, 2020 / Oskar Cymerman

Warning! This article is full of cheesy and rhymy graphics designed to promote nerdy and sciency research-supported learning strategies. It is my hope they are also catchy, because coercing our students just ain’t the way. Read at your own risk of being slightly entertained and mildly amused.

“Learning is not attained by chance. It must be sought for with ardor and attended with diligence.”

— Abigail Adams

I’ve been working on a way to show the “neuroscience of learning” to students in a more approachable, memorable, and useful way recently. Coveting to combine compactness with completeness I condensed research-based effective learning to six strategies: Active Learning, Teaching, Visualizing, Smart Practice, Chunking, and Mistake Making, which be viewed as a set of micro skills - smaller but integral parts of the macro “Effective Learning” skill.

Along with their descriptors, which include other best practices such as retrieval, interleaving, elaboration, and dual coding, these six strategies can be practiced in the classroom to help students learn more effectively and outside of it to help them study with more intention.

They can be used in any subject, field of knowledge, or profession to learn anything. In fact, if knowing how to approach new learning strategically, and how to develop an understanding of new concepts efficiently, and how to transfer information from working to long term memory effectively are the only three skills our students leave high school with, then we have done our job.

Of course, the absurdity of the above statement is only dwarfed by its impossibility, because if students indeed leave high school knowing how to do these three things, then they’ve left it with a lot more know how and many more skills.

And if they know how to learn… the outer space is the limit. Let’s take a look at what we, the teachers can do to help them lift off.

1. Promote Active Learning

“Being a student is easy. Learning requires actual work.”

— William Crawford

Learn Actively to Remember and Understand Effectively

The key to learning how to learn actively is not explaining and showing students how to use active learning, but using active learning purposefully in the classroom to show what it looks like and how it’s done.

If students experience the benefits of active learning at school they will be more motivated and have a greater understanding of how to apply various active learning strategies in their own studies. In this way, classroom learning can become a template for learning at home.

The design of classroom activities that engage students is active learning is necessitated by years of mind programming resulting from traditional teaching methods. Direct instruction is effective when done right, but lecture-based teaching followed by drill and kill worksheet or packet data entry many students have been exposed to throughout their schooling has programmed many passive learning (oxymoron alert!) habits.

Point is… If you just tell them to do it they’ll revert to what they’ve always done, because traditional ways are “learned helplessness,” and while ineffective, they‘re comfy and easy.

Admittedly, active learning is harder - it challenges the mind and requires more conscious effort. But that is how the human brain learns. Conversely, comfy and convenient does not raise the brain’s alertness to the level necessary for long-term encoding. Passive learning is a mindless, going-through-the-motions waste of brain power and time.

Focus and Engagement

How to focus and engage in the classroom

While we might want to have outer space aspirations for our students we don’t want them to “space out” while learning. Besides, that stupid look that one football player has on his face while imagining Scarlett Johansson, I mean Black Widow feeding him cupcakes… that’s not a good look.

Focus and engagement are crucial for making most of the “learning” piece of “active learning.”

The things on the image above are worth mentioning more than once and posting on the classroom wall as a constant visual reminder.

Active Learning Strategies

Active learning is the type of learning that involves “doing” - manipulating the information being studied or creating new content with it - anything that allows the learners to apply it in various ways to learn it. When defined this way, it’s easy to see that all of the strategies discussed below are active learning strategies and their thoughtful and strategic use exemplifies metacognition.

It’s easy to talk about what discussing, summarizing, drawing, and visualizing are but the best way to help students make their learning conscious is to explain the science of why and how active learning works. Much of it has to do with creating “desirable difficulties,” or conditions and tasks that challenge the mind to work harder and produce more. It is easier to copy information from a digital slideshow to a paper notebook than to create a comic strip that tells a story that uses the information from the slideshow in an innovative way. But it is the latter way that’s more memorable and effective in the long term. The additional processing leads to stronger neural connections.

Active Note Taking

Research suggests that note taking does little for memory due to the often all-consuming demands of the process of putting pen to paper while trying to watch and listen at the same time. And while capturing the key points and important facts from a lecture, slideshow, or a video has its benefits, it’s important to add a processing component to promote encoding of information when taking notes.

Enter active note taking. There are various strategies to do it, but the common element is to use retrieval.

First, ask your students to paraphrase as much as possible. This means decreasing the amount of content and slowing lectures down to allow extra time for (1) modeling paraphrasing via think-alouds (read a line on the slide and paraphrase it for your students) and (2) student use and development of the skill of paraphrasing efficiently and effectively.

Second, ask students and give them class time right after the lecture for retrieving what they remember using summaries, generating and writing down questions related to the content, and strategically leaving and later filling in the empty spaces with examples and visuals of what they’re learning (see the Make Notes section of the first note taking strategy on the slide above).

This is worth the time because many of your students need practice paraphrasing (read: they have no idea how to paraphrase) and they will become better learners as a result.

2. Allow For Smart Practice Opportunities

“Work on Purpose, Play on Purpose, Rest on Purpose. Do not let yourself or anyone else waste your time.”

— Izey Victoria Odiase

Some 8 years ago, a father of a very hard-working female student straight up asked me during conferences: So what’s the trick to doing this chemistry thing? I mean, Joanna (totally not her name) spends hours each day on chemistry and keeps failing the tests. I remember offering before or after school help and pointing him to a few online “enrichment” resources but I realize now that she might have been going at it hard but not practicing smart. Joanna didn’t know how to learn effectively.

Maybe she re-read her notes multiple times or kept solving problems while looking at the examples I gave in class. Whatever it was, it was because I did not teach her how to learn smart and use retrieval.

Retrieval Practice

Yes… I have a sneaking suspicion Johanna was just pretending that she was learning. Not that she didn’t want to learn. I know she did. But she was tricking her mind into thinking she was learning all the while the information remained in her short-term memory or working memory, which is often the case with analytical problem solving in which scaffolds are never removed during practice.

She did not know about retrieval practice - a kind of intentional practice that challenges the brain to recall previously learned information and leads to the formation of neural pathways between the cortex and and hippocampus, which is how scientists think long-term memories first form.

The authors of Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, a book that looks to inform teachers and learners on why common and counterproductive study habits and learning routines do not work and what strategies should be used instead, give and describe several tips for teachers to use to help their students become stronger learners. Explaining how learning works and teaching how to study figure prominently, because in their research they found that many students lack effective study skills as they do not understand how to the human brain learns. Thus, to help our students learn our subjects we must continuously teach them how to learn and remind them how to study for success.

Retrieval Practice: Retrieve, Don't Re-read

One of the best ways to help students understand retrieval practice is to ask them to imagine they’re in a school play or in a Hollywood movie they wrote the script for and are directing.

As actors, they have to memorize their character’s lines so they must remove the script and rehearse from memory.

As writers, they have to create an engaging and memorable story the audiences can appreciate.

As directors, they have to be able to explain and elaborate on the key elements and nuances of the story and the emotions it should evoke to everyone involved in the production of the movie (actors, set designers, costume designers, makeup artists, sound and light crews etc.) to make it not just convincing, but impactful in some way as well.

If you get some “that’s doing too much” comments you must be frank and agree and add that indeed this is the only work worth doing. Otherwise, it’s just “going through the motions” and learning nothing which is synonymous with soul suicide. That’s destination heavy, I know… But Fitty would agree.

Spaced Practice

Cramming is bad. Spaced practice is good. But what’s all the hoopla?

it’s about myelination - the thickening of the connections between neurons that happens when we retrieve and apply a concept or a skill over and over.

Once our mind encodes something into long-term memory it becomes harder to remove from the brain. But it can still be removed if we don’t use spaced practice. Cramming is the antithesis of spaced practice for this very reason. Most of what we cram never makes it to the brain library, because we do not use this information enough to make it seem sufficiently important (and useful in our survival efforts) for our brain to keep.

But if we periodically recall and use that which we have learned, we get to keep it. The information or skills we use the most become “our thing” — passion or profession or both. Over time, as the information is continually processed we can become experts. As the myelin sheaths surrounding the axons that connect the brain neurons responsible for processing of certain chunks of knowledge grow thicker with fat and protein we stop merely defining and start using this knowledge to create and innovate. With continual use of this knowledge and myelination, our brain’s processing speed increases as well. This is what getting smart looks like.

The hard part is getting our students to apply spaced practice to topics they’re simply not crazy about. If you mention myelination you might lose the non-nerdy herd. Just remember this: everyone wants to be faster, smarter, and better even if they’re too cool to admit it and spit it.

Mixing It Up or Interleaving

Interleaving can be used as short-term spaced practice when used to alternate between separate topics or subjects being studied. In this way, it’s a great vehicle to use retrieval practice, because the learner can go over several separate concepts and come back to each in random order to retrieve information that describes each previously reviewed concept.

Mix It Up: How to Use Interleaving to Study

It is also important to help our students understand why they need to mix up the order of tasks while studying. For example, it is more beneficial to deviate from chunking and solving similar problems together in math, and alternate between different kinds of problems, as doing so promotes critical thinking and prevents robotic repetition of procedures. The second benefit is that students will be ready for randomly ordered tests.

Another way to mix it up is to alternate learning strategies. Using a variety of strategies during a study session increases stamina, because students avoid the monotony of doing the same thing for too long. For example, a student might choose to watch and summarize a short video to learn the first concept, Google and discuss the second concept with a peer, and then draw a Venn diagram to compare and contrast the two concepts. This promotes linking of concepts and forming information chunks.

For their part, teachers can structure classroom activities in a similar way to enhance the student learning experience and increase motivation by providing more active learning opportunities.

3. Ask Students To Teach

“Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach.”

— Aristotle

Teach it to others and more know how you'll gather

And those who teach, understand better. They also learn more. Teaching is one of the best ways to learn because it forces the teacher to gain enough competence in the topic she must teach to allow her to elaborate on it, give examples of it, and apply it in a useful way. It is not necessary for the teacher to be an expert on the topic - she just needs to prepare, and the better she prepares the better she’ll be.

Putting this mantra into practice with our students allows them to use the “teach it” strategy to learn more effectively and become better learners.

Elaborative Practice

The main purpose of elaboration is to link individual pieces of information we are learning to each other and the information already stored in the brain to aid future recall and increase understanding of the new concepts. Providing as much detail as possible when explaining each new concept to someone else is especially effective when we use commonplace examples, analogies, or metaphors to elaborate on concepts. This is something effective teachers do during direct instruction and students can take advantage of when they study.

But students don’t have to teach others to benefit from elaboration. They can teach themselves using elaborative interrogation - a study strategy that, despite its evocative name, involves little psychological torment and a lot of questioning and explaining. The strategy is akin to Socrates teaching Plato; rather than providing answers, the teacher poses questions and the student seeks answers to these questions. Except that during elaborative interrogation Socrates and Plato are one and the same person — the student asks and answers his own questions.

For example, a student can take a major topic covered in chemistry such as ionic bonding and generate a list of questions about it. How does ionic bonding occur? What kinds of elements are involved in ionic bonding? How do atoms become ions? Why do ionic bonds form? What are the some properties of ionic bonds? How is ionic bonding different from other types of bonding? Then, the student can go from question to question providing as many details as she can remember to answer each question. This helps her teach herself by recalling facts she already knows and finding knowledge gaps she must still fill. Elaboration ups a student’s learning skill.

Leveling Up The Learning Skill

Teachers are not smart in their subject because they studied it in college. College was just the beginning. Teachers are smart in what they do because they repeatedly teach it using retrieval practice, interleaving, spaced practice, dual coding, reflecting on and correcting mistakes they make, and yes - elaboration.

See if this seems familiar when teaching that one complex concept many students struggle with year after year:

You teach it. Some students get it. You teach it another way. A few others understand. You show a different example to a small group. The dear-in-the-headlights look disappears from two more faces. You work through a new problem with a student individually. It’s beginning to click. When the day is done you look at what went well and how you can improve. You look at alternative ways to simplify it; to break it down even further so they can see it. Then you teach it again hoping one or two or three more find it doable.

If learning the shit out of something had a definition, teaching would be it.

Even if you knew it well before, you understand it two- or three-fold now, because you forced yourself to look at it in many different ways, from many vantage points and produced multiple ways of presenting and explaining this new concept or new way of problem-solving. You probably had a few new realizations along the way too.

Perhaps we can’t afford the class time required to let our students mimic this sort of in-depth learning by teaching for every concept we must cover. But maybe we can give them opportunities to teach each other while in class from time to time? Or maybe keeping focus on a few but key concepts and learning the shit out of those would serve our students best? Each teacher must decide themselves, because what we want to do and what we can do might not match.

Key Takeaways To Help Students Learn More Effectively:

Use Active Learning in the classroom and teach students how to study effectively.
Teach Smart Practice and explain how to do Retrieval Practice, Spaced Practice, and Interleaving. Be transparent and tell students that Smart Practice is harder than traditional, ineffective studying, and explain WHY IT WORKS (it rewires the brain).
Teaching leads to deeper understanding. Create assignments that force your students to Elaborate and explain how they can use Elaborative Interrogation on their own.

References:

Brown, Peter C. (2014). Make it stick: the science of successful learning. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

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Hi! I'm Oskar.

I teach, write, and create to make teaching easier and learning simpler.

BOOKS

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