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I blog on Brain-Based Learning, Metacognition, EdTech, and Social-Emotional Learning. I am the author of the Crush School Series of Books, which help students understand how their brains process information and learn. I also wrote The Power of Three: How to Simplify Your Life to Amplify Your Personal and Professional Success, but be warned that it's meant for adults who want to thrive and are comfortable with four letter words.

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Best Practice Checklist

November 29, 2018  /  Oskar Cymerman

teaching checklist
“What you stay focused on will grow.”
— Roy T. Bennett

Blood everywhere, the nurse frantically switching one blood bag for another. Empty. Full. Empty. Full. Empty and a full one again.

Utter chaos, the doctor rhythmically squeezing the heart with bare hands to pump blood to the patient’s brain. Squeeze. Release. Squeeze. Release. Life and death.

Life wins but it was close.

Performing a surgery he has successfully attempted many times before Dr. Atul Gawande accidentally cut his patients vena cava, the blood vessel that carries deoxygenated blood from the lower half of the body to the heart. The amount of blood the patient lost was lethal ten times over. A checklist is why he lives.

The story above and the subsequent a-has it evokes are part of the Hidden Brain podcast episode You 2.0: Check Yourself. The podcast takes on the subject of checklists in a non-traditional sense. Rather than looking at checklists as a tool that merely helps one remember a list of things to do the show host, Shankar Vedantam explores the ways in which checklists help highly competent and skilled professionals such as doctors or pilots minimize procedural risk and improve performance.

This article looks at designing simple, general checklists professionals such as teachers can follow to help them improve their craft.

Checklists Do More Than Help Memory

I don’t know about you but I sometimes forget to do this or that in the classroom as a result of the morning I’m having. Maybe I’m rushing and my mind dismisses things that are routine. Thus, a simple 5 - 7 item checklist - an agenda of classroom (or office) routines repeated daily - can be a helpful tool preventing their consignment into oblivion.

All we need to do is decide on the absolute must haves, write them down, and display them as a checklist to follow daily. Next time your mind is drawing a blank go to your list. You will not just maintain consistency. In fact, your process and outcomes will improve just as it did in aviation, medicine, and other industries. A checklist also saved the crew of Apollo 13.

Your checklist might not save lives of patients, pilots, or astronauts but it will illuminate your way. Though they may seem rudimentary, checklists are often designed for highly skilled professionals who know their respective crafts well. Checklists not only help prevent mistakes but lead to continual improvement of the process, the professional, and the profession they are applied in.

Designing a Classroom Checklist

The checklist below is my attempt at designing an easy to use tool that promotes best practice in the classroom. It can be customized to what you do and your teaching style.

  1. Before learning: Opening activity intended to help students recall key concepts from the previous lesson. I usually ask my students to solve problems or recall concepts in small groups first as I walk around the room. Then, the answers are recorded on the classroom board.

  2. School announcements: Is there anything that needs to be passed on to the students such as charitable drives, assemblies etc.?

  3. Class announcements: Is there a test or an assignment deadline approaching? Just because it’s written on the class board doesn’t mean the students know/remember it. Most likely do not.

  4. Front-loading: What’s the most student-friendly way for my students to receive today’s material? Does this topic call for direct instruction and modeling? Or, can students use technology and discovery? Project? Lab?

  5. Learning: What can my students do to learn? How can they apply the information they received to construct understanding? This calls for doing (active learning) - practicing, problem-solving, drawing diagrams, recording video, modeling etc.

  6. Review: Quick activity that summarizes or reviews the key concept(s) such as asking students to compare or contrast or scribble down or tweet a summary of what they’ve learned.

And while it may not be feasible to do everything on my list every day, having a checklist helps me be a better teacher.

It helps me remember to design lessons that minimize “me talking” and maximize “them doing.”

It brings focus to the fact that receiving and learning information are not the same.

It reminds me to include continual repetition (items 1, 5, 6) and, as I often forget to announce school- and class-related information, the checklist is there to save it from oblivion.

Try it for yourself. Or make your own. Checklist your plan. Follow it. Grow.

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Hi! I'm Oskar.          I teach, write, and speak to make learning better.

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Weird Beats Normal

November 06, 2018  /  Oskar Cymerman

“As soon as you’re born they make you feel small
By giving you no time instead of it all
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be

They hurt you at home and they hit you at school
They hate you if you’re clever and they despise a fool
Till you’re so fucking crazy you can’t follow their rules
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be”
— John Lennon

Weird is good

Once, in the Dark Ages of my teaching a student said to me: You’re weird.

I was offended. The young professional me tried so hard to be the normal teacher every kid would like and learn from. Instead, I was weird.

I didn’t realize it then but now I know it was a compliment. Regardless of the motivations behind his statement - the student might have liked me and wanted to give me props or, more likely, thought my ways were strange - being called weird is often a good thing.

To be fair, on any day other than Halloween being creepy-weird or spooky-weird is mostly bad. But unusual, unorthodox, unconventional, outlandish, mysterious, surreal, supernatural, and sometimes seemingly-crazy have a lot of appeal with kids and adults.

Sure, we call things and people weird to communicate our disapproval of them. But consider Picasso’s art - cubism, surrealism, and fluid clocks. Weird but great. Benjamin Franklin took air baths - he’d spend his mornings butt-naked reading or writing. Not your typical morning routine but that dude’s face figures on a $100 bill all the while all others assumed they have to put in time at the Oval Office to get in your wallet. And just look at that lion’s mane Albert Einstein called his hair. His contemporaries were probably weary of small animals jumping out of there and yet, just inches underneath lied a brilliant tool that greatly contributed to our understanding of the universe.

Weird is where it’s at.

Weird is more memorable

I recently showed my chemistry students how to use a memory palace (method of loci) to remember 14 concepts for the vocabulary quiz. I told them that they will remember the concepts better if they strive to understand not just memorize them. If you’re a teacher I’m sure you’ve given that same speech ad nauseam too.

Two weeks later, the mean score was 70 percent.

On one hand, 70 percent is the average the educational system is built for. It is often used as the acceptability benchmark. It’s “good enough.” The 70% kid will be able to follow his boss’ directions and perform the job. He won’t be a societal parasite. He won’t stand out either but he’ll be a productive citizen. He’ll be normal. Check.

On the other hand, do I really want to look away and accept mediocrity as the norm?

I can’t. I won’t. It’s because too frequently normal participates but doesn’t create. A whole lot of normal and only a tiny bit of weird got us to today. It is the weird, not the normal that drives progress. So lets subtract normal, add weird, and innovate.

But it won’t be easy. Conditioned habits are hard to replace. Myths we buy into and keep retelling die hard. Many of my students did badly on the vocab quiz I mentioned before because they were “normal.” They studied the usual way. They did what they always do and they got what they always get. They averaged 70 percent.

This might be related to how we teach them - the methods we teach and don’t teach in class. A normal high school junior has undergone some 10 years of conditioning to do things a certain way in school; the regular way. Some are still stuck on studying the normal way - rereading textbooks and notes. Others use flashcards, which albeit less so, is still a primitive recall method that utilizes only written language. Only a few students visualize what they’re learning because somehow their imaginations pointed out the better path to learning - the not so normal way.

Most teachers don’t explicitly teach students to visualize the concepts they’re learning. After all, this is not the way we were taught ourselves. I myself only started preaching to my students to always turn written definitions into mental pictures about 3 years ago. This is especially important when we are dealing with abstract concepts such as the ones that appear in science curricula.

However, converting concepts into visuals can and should be done with all information a student (or anyone else) needs to understand and remember.

There are two reasons for this. One, letters and numbers are abstractions. Two, the human mind has evolved to process in images.

Our Minds Prefer Images

How did you learn that a tree is a tree? I’m no psychic but I bet it looked something like the following. You were about 2 and walking about your habitat with mom or dad or both and you saw this big thick brown stick with a whole lot of green on it. You pointed at it. That’s a tree honey! said mom. Twee! you repeated enthusiastically.

The next several times you saw a tree you’d point at it and say twee! Your little brain encoded the image and the name your language associated with it. And if you speak a different-than-English first language than your mind encoded the sound as something else. For example, prior to coming to the US it was “drzewo” to me - the Polish word for tree. But the image was the same as yours and barring a traumatic brain injury neither of us is ever forgetting what a tree is or what one might look like. We can imagine and describe one in crazy vivid detail on a dime and think nothing of it.

And crazy vivid is where it’s at when it comes to learning. But, it’s often perceived as weird.

Turn the Abstract Into the Understandable

Perhaps I should have but I did not make it mandatory for my students to create a memory palace for the vocabulary they were going to be quizzed on. I did not want to collect my students’ “palaces” and grade them. After all, the idea was for the kids to store them in their minds and use them to rehearse the quiz concepts.

As I walked around the room that day, I noticed that maybe one half of the students took my advice and worked on creating memory palaces on paper or the classroom dry erase tables. Others defaulted to lists or flashcards.

Oh well. I imagine unlearning flashcards or definition lists and replacing them with mental movies is similar to trying to walk backwards after doing it the normal way for 15 years. The difference is that walking forward is already more efficient than crabbing your way through the world while the old school flashcards and rereading are not the most efficient way to learn vocabulary. Visual methods are. Memory palaces are. But the student minds perceive these unfamiliar methods as weird. And they are right - they are weird. But weird is the way.

Even the students who followed my advice and created memory palaces defaulted to studying the old school way. Most did not go back to their mental palaces to rehearse the information. When I asked most admitted to not using their palace.

Perhaps they were unclear on how to use it or uncomfortable with it or unconvinced that it will help. Perhaps some used it but their visualizations weren’t weird enough.

Nelson Dellis, a six-foot-six 4-time US Memory Champion suggests adding the three ingredients - Sensory Overload, Grotesque Absurdity, and Moveable Attributes - to the visuals one imagines to make them more memorable.

Sure enough, all three ingredients are full of weird. Imagine what a pizza looks like. Then overload the senses by trying to imagine what it smells, tastes, feels, and sounds like. Make it grotesque by imagining the red sauce is actually scalding-hot blood that’s dripping from a dismembered cartoon rat that’s been tied to the pizza and tortured. And by the way, the rat is still moving - the poor thing is screaming and squirming while the red sauce is bubbling and sizzling all around like lava adding to its misery.

Now, try to get that image out of your head. If you imagined it in the first place, you can’t. You remember every gory detail. Maybe you felt sickened and compelled to make a PETA donation or maybe you thought WTF is wrong with you Cymerman! But the truth is - the human mind remembers weird stuff best - crazy, grotesque, emotionally-scarring, gross, graphic, absurd - take your pick, or better yet pick all of the above and teach your students to remember better.

So next time someone tells me I’m weird I’ll be ready. It’ll go like this:

Someone: Dude, you’re weird.

Me: How I roll homes. You better recognize!

Don’t fear the weird. Be weird. Teach weird. It beats normal and is unforgettable.

And check out Nelson Dellis’ book Remember It! for more gory, grotesque, and weird descriptions of many memory and learning techniques you and your kids can benefit from.

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Hi! I'm Oskar.          I teach, write, and speak to make learning better.

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