Methods of Encoding - Extension

"Miss Hawks. We talked about you over the weekend," said my excited 8th grader. 

This makes me nervous. Who knows if things I say get reported accurately at home. 
"I dropped an ice cube. My brother kicked it, and it went across the floor like really far." 
So, far, I'm not seeing where I come in.
"We were like, yeah, Newton's first law. Ice doesn't have much friction, so it keeps going."
My work here is done, y'all.

If you pull an all-nighter to study for biology, you may get some questions right on the next day's quiz; but you won't remember it for the semester exam.  Heck, you won't remember it three days later.  And that's because it wasn't encoded.  

For the past few weeks, I've been writing about explanations, visuals, and movement as ways of encoding information.  All are helpful. But if you can get to extension or transfer (seeing your learning in non-classroom contexts), you have truly made that content part of your brain.  

This is not easy, and it is not likely to happen with every gem of your content that you wish it would.  But there are ways to coax it out.  

1. Pay attention for examples in your own life - It is much easier to get students to see the relevance of your content if you do.  If I teach my students about the color spectrum, it may come off as a little dry, but if I tell them about the rainbow laden spray of water coming off of the tires of the car in front of me in traffic last week, I show them that I find it exciting to see it "in the wild." If I tell them I just learned about fogbows from a Scientific American article, they know that there are always new things to learn about my content. If you are an English teacher and notice a really cool use of alliteration in a song, bring it up on YouTube so they can hear it.  I was getting ice cream with a friend recently and saw an art sculpture of a Sierpinski Triangle outside the shop. If were a math teacher teaching shapes, ratios, or fractals, I would have brought the picture I took of it into my classroom. 
   
   
   
2. Ask them for examples from their life - I'll admit this is easier with physics than it might be with similes (or maybe it's not, I don't know anything about teaching English), but I find having students teach me about the ways physics shows up in their lives really useful for engagement, relationship building, and encoding. Student athletes and artists are super helpful for science teachers. Half way through a lesson on Bernoulli's Principle, I say, "Where are my baseball players?  Tell us about how to throw a curve ball."  Newton's laws?  Swimmers can explain their strokes better than I can.  When I'm teaching the impulse momentum theorem, I ask my gymnasts about sticking the landing and then ask runners why they keep running after the finish line because they are both examples of it. Talking about the "like dissolves like" concept, ask an art student whether they can mix oil paint with acrylic. 
3. Make it explicit - As experts, we often think the connections are obvious. It's the curse of expertise. But, you have to remember that they are novice learners. They need help seeing beyond the surface features of an example to the deep structure of the concept. Some students (like those athletes and artists) will make the connection for themselves because they have expertise in the related area, but most of them need you to explain it. I've had teachers balk at that because they think it will be boring, but it would only be boring to another expert who is thinking, "Yeah, I know that already." For novice learners, it is opening up the curriculum  by relating it to something they care about.

I said it before, and I'll say it again. This is not easy. It requires you to have a repertoire of examples. And it takes a lot of experience to have those in your long term memory.  So, when you find one, write it down. Keep it in a spreadsheet. Add it to your lesson plan. And if a student gives you one, use it and credit them. Other students will love that you got it from one of them. 

This is worth the effort for many reasons, but I'll tell you my favorite.  I do this so frequently that it has been years since a student asked me the dreaded question, "When am I ever going to use this in life?" 

Methods of Encoding - Movement

In a college biology class, I was learning about the difference between mitosis and meiosis. If you have learned this concept yourself, you know it can be very confusing to keep the movement of the chromatids straight at each phase of the process.  As I wrote last year, images are helpful, but because it is dynamic process, they were not helping me see how things moved from on phase to another. The professor knew this, so he had us all stand up. We began in a clump at the center of the room (cell). As we moved into prophase, metaphase, anaphase, and telophase, he had us move toward partners and away from other groups until we finally had split into two classes (daughter cells). He was taking advantage of movement for encoding.

Was it because we were a room full of kinesthetic learners?  Nope.  At the time, because I didn't know learning styles were a myth, I would have called myself an auditory learner, but experiencing the motion of each phase did help me encode each one better than words alone (or even words with images) would have. I would like to point out, though, that the movement alone wouldn't have been helpful without explicit explanation coming first.  The movement helped cement the learning, but it did not teach mitosis to me.

Gesture has become all the rage, but there is still much research to be done on its effectiveness.  As with a lot of things in science, the results of experiment are very specific to content and context.  So, the conclusion seems to be that some types of gesture help some kids learn some content. Given that there is zero cost to implementing it and it will help a bit with engagement, I say it is worth trying.  It can be as complex as the "dance steps" we did for mitosis.  It can also be as simple as having students hold up a circle with their hands to indicate a zero.

Content which involves relationships in three dimensional space benefit from use of moving the body to represent those relationships.  Mitosis is one example, but as a physics student, I was taught the "right hand rules" to help with analyzing the relationship between electrical current, magnetic fields, and force.  Each pair of those has a perpendicular effect on the third one.  Unless you are already quite familiar with this topic, that explanation was probably confusing.  It will help if you see this picture, but nothing helps as much as students twisting their hands to the orientation of the set up described in the problem.  One only needs to walk into the test on this chapter and see students silently doing that exact thing to know how much it helps.

Since the research is fairly new, there are a wide variety of hypotheses about why it works and no solid conclusions.  Some have posed that it provides an offload to working memory.  If I can hold the number 3 that I'm going to need in a second in my hand, I don't have to hold it in my brain.  I've done this without meaning to while teaching cycle classes.  If I know we are going to increase tension 6 times, I'll have four fingers resting on the handlebar, so I can tell my class, "This one is number 5 of 6."  If an anatomy student is pointing at her own femur while rehearsing proximal and distal attachments, she won't have to look back at a diagram to remember which part she is dealing with.  The gesture might serve as a physical mnemonic device, reminding you of the thing it symbolizes. Like I said, the research is too new to have drawn any meaningful conclusion about the mechanisms just yet.

We all know the power of muscle memory for physical activities, like dance and sports.  Muscles are meat, so they don't actually remember, but a well myelinated pathway from repeated practice is how we make learning permanent. 

If you want to implement this is your classrooms, start slowly.  There is no need to insist that every piece of content have a motion or gesture, and the research doesn't support that anyway.  I would suggest the use of movements and gestures will only be really helpful if they are natural.  If you have to think hard to come up with a gesture and force it to fit, it will likely not be beneficial.  

Methods of Encoding - Explanations

Despite all of the fads encouraging "guide on the side rather than sage on the stage," the most common form of instruction remains good, old fashioned explanations.  

Why?  

Because the most effective, efficient, and straightforward way of getting information from the head of someone knowledge to the head of someone without it is to tell them.  We know it works from research, but even if we didn't, we would know it works from the thousands of years of history in which oral tradition was the only option available (perhaps paired with a drawing on a cave wall, but we'll talk about that next week).

So, most of the encoding that happens in schools is done through explanation.  That means, we should invest a lot of our professional development time on getting explanations right.  Anyone who has ever helped their dad with a home repair, only to misunderstand and mess up the project, knows that explanations aren't all created equal. 

Good explanations engage listeners through hooks, brisk pacing, frequent checks for understanding, analogies, and clear sequencing.  

Hooks:

Think of the best sermon, stand up comedy routine, or TED talk you have ever heard.  Chances are, you remember how it started more than any other part of it.  And that's likely because excellent speakers start with something to get your attention.  Sometimes, it's a quote or especially interesting fact, but more often than not, it's a story.  Better yet, it is the first half of a story that they will finish later in the speech.  People who want you to keep listening are wise to pique your curiosity and make you want to know more.  Teachers, pay attention to the world around you, and you will see myriads of opportunities to connect something you have seen to your content.  "Last week, I saw a bird fly into a window, and it made me wonder, 'What makes glass transparent?'" will draw students in far more than, "Today, we will talk about what make glass transparent."  An English teacher can tell a story about an argument they overheard as the lead in to a discussion on literary conflict.  Even in math, there is a way to turn a variable into a character.  Check out this TED talk from Tyler DeWitt on using story telling in his science classes to help his kids care about what they are learning.  The point, if you don't grab their attention early, you don't stand a chance of keeping them engaged when the lesson gets harder.

Brisk Pacing:

I confess that I had not thought much about pacing (other than my own need to fit the whole lesson into a class period) before reading Zach Groshell's book Just Tell Them.  In his role as instructional coach and consultant, Zach has observed hundreds of lessons and says that one of the things he has noticed most is pacing that is too slow.  He's not advising that teachers speak at lightning speed and blow past checks for understanding (far from it if you have ever seen him present).  He is simply advising that we not dwell forever on one point if it isn't needed and eliminate things that aren't necessary for learning.  I'll add that a lot of classroom management issues could be pre-empted with faster pacing as well and free up time for retrieval practice at the end of the period.

Checks for Understanding:

No matter how good an explainer you are, there will be misconceptions in the minds of your students.  They miss an important word that changes the meaning of a sentence.  They activate some partially relevant piece of prior knowledge and make an inappropriate connection to it.  Their lack of background knowledge or vocabulary makes them have only a partial understanding.  There are lots of ways misconceptions can sneak in to your excellent lesson.  And misconceptions are like weeds; they grow out of control alongside the good information.  And, they are easier to uproot if you catch them early.  For that reason, your explanations should include frequent checks for understanding from as many of your students as possible.  Don't just call on the kid with his hand up.  He only raised his hand because he was confident, so he's almost always going to be right; and that is almost always going to mislead you into believing that everyone understands.  You can whiteboards, paper, choral response, cold calling, or digital tools, but you must ask them to answer questions that show their thinking.

Analogies, Metaphors, and Similes:

The best way to understand something is to connect it something else that you already understand.  Using analogies in your explanations help content to stick.  Chemistry teachers, make the reactants and products of a chemical reaction people at homecoming trying to find the right dance partners.  

Algebra teachers - "Think of the variable like a loner.  He just wants to be by himself.  He's trying to get everyone to go away by doing the opposite of what they want to do."  Kids understand that a lot more than "To isolate a variable, employ the opposite operation of those terms already connected to the variable."

You do have to be careful with analogies.  Because they are so powerful, they are sometimes the part of your explanation that sticks the best.  I used to describe dissociation (the process of ionic compounds dissolving in water) with the analogy, "It's like a married couple going to a party.  They wife goes one direction and the husband goes another to mingle during the party.  But, they aren't divorced (to make the point that chemical decomposition has not happened) because they come back together at the end of the party.  One the next test they had, several students gave me a detailed answer to the question, "Describe the process of dissociation" without ever mentioning ions or polar molecules.  They told me a lot about mingling at parties.  That was a good reminder for me to constantly circle back to the content to prevent only encoding the analogy.  

Sequencing:

Perhaps the most under-appreciated part of explanations is the sequencing of information.  I think that is because most of us plan it rather unconsciously.  But it is worth taking a few minutes to think about as you plan your lessons.  Will "A" make sense if I teach it before I teach "B"?  If not, re-sequence.  

There are time when this is difficult, especially as students get older and the content becomes more complex and self referencing.  I often found myself saying, "But we'll talk more about that next semester."  The key then is to explain what they NEEED to know in order to understand what you are teaching them today.  It's okay to say, "There will be more on this later" without trying to teach all of the coming concept.  In fact, I found that my especially curious students were excited to know that things would connect up later.  I also really liked making that explicit when we got there.  "Hey, remember that thing from two weeks ago?  See how it all comes together now?  Isn't it cool how everything depends on everything else?"  Once a student made the connection for me.  I was teaching Net Ionic Equations, and a student said,"Man, this one thing has stuff from like four different chapters."  I had not recognized that yet, but he was right.  If I had tried to teach those too early in the year, it would have been an absolute mess. 

Explanations may be the most straightforward way to teach, but it takes time to plan effectively.  I recommend two books to help with this process.  The first one is one I already mentioned - Zach Groshell's Just Tell Them.  Zach practices what he preaches, so it is a short book that is practical, to the point, and leaves out the fluff.  

If you have a little more time and you want to deep dive into the science behind explanations, I recommend How to Explain Absolutely Anything to Absolutely Anyone by Andy Tharby.  It is a little more dense than Zach's, but it is chock full of great connections to cognitives science research.  Together, these two books will up your explanation game in a huge ways.

Practicing What You Have Not Learned?

I discovered a delightful show on YouTube during lockdown.  I say "discovered;" it had already been on for fourteen years before I found it.  It's called Would I Lie to You?, and I'm honestly not sure I would have gotten through the hybrid year without it. I'd come home at the end of the day a puddle of exhaustion and eat dinner watching Colbert, after which I would watch a couple of episodes of WILTY and laugh until I cried.

Last week, a more recent episode featured a story in which one of the participants claimed to have made a sculpture of a girl he liked (like the girl in the Lionel Richie "Hello" video).  Spoiler alert in case you plan to watch the show:  This story turned out not to be true.  But, as he was selling his tale, one of the questions that was asked was, "Do you have experience with sculpting."  His answer was, "No, but I figured you learn by practice."

This could just be the education nerd in me or a reflection of the age of the young man telling the story, but all I could think was, "Well, there's someone who has been exposed to too much "discovery learning."  Here he was thinking that the highly specialized skill of representative sculpture (not an abstract, but the face of a girl he was trying to impress) was something he could figure out on his own by trial and error.  It's a good thing this story wasn't true because I don't think he would have won the affections of this girl with a "learn by practice" sculpture.

I think the reason this stuck with me was the word "practice."  There are two parts to learning.  Encoding and practice.  

Whether knowledge or skill, encoding must come first.  I'm not saying it has to be learned from a professional teacher, but no one is truly self-taught.  They get their initial knowledge or skill from somewhere.  Whether it is from reading, direct instruction, modeling, or TikTok video - something must first be input and encoded.  Practice, by definition, is the repetition of something already learned.  Practice is important as it myelinates the nerve cells and solidifies the skill or knowledge, but it cannot come first.

As the great Tom Sherrington put it in one of his recent blog posts, "You need to make some initial pathways in your brain (some actual physical connections) before we can worry about strengthening them through application and practice."

We have underemphasized this in recent years with the talk of retrieval practice at every conference.  I'm downplaying retrieval.  We must have both to make learning stay in long term memory.  But let's talk more about good methods of encoding.

I'm going to attempt to do my part by making the next few posts about methods of encoding.  So stay tuned this summer.

Reflections the Science of Memory - What is Thinking?

The Learning and the Brain conference is an overwhelming experience.  That’s not a complaint.  It’s the best professional development I’ve ever participated in.  It’s overwhelming in the way a magnificent artwork is overwhelming, just too much to take in.  It’s overwhelming in the way meeting a beloved public figure would be overwhelming, just wanting to remember every part of the moment but also knowing that you won’t.  I have attended this conference twice now, and I have come away both times with the same mixture of feelings.  First, I feel mostly affirmed that much of what I and my colleagues are doing is in line with how student's brains work.  Even though much of it has been developed through trial and error or intuition, we seem to have done a lot right.  Second, there are some changes we need to make to some of our practices.  Holding those two thoughts simultaneously weighs down my luggage on the trip home.

The only way I have found to deal with the sheer volume of information I get from this conference is to reflect on parts of it a little at a time while I figure out how I might like to apply them.  Since this blog is for me to reflect and process my thoughts and let you read them if you wish, I’ll be dealing with those here for a while. They might come out in weekly posts or I might post several over the course of a few days.  Who knows?  If you just want straightforward notes (with a few personal thoughts because that’s how I take notes), you can find them at these three posts (Friday, Saturday, Sunday).  These posts will be both more and less than the notes.  More because I will be working out my own thoughts but less because I will likely choose small parts to reflect upon.

I am going to say something that will make many teachers angry.  Learning styles are a myth.  They are a kind, well-intentioned, and humane myth.  I know you can tell me about a kid in your class who suddenly started doing better when you . . . In science, we call that anecdotal evidence, and I teach my 8th graders that it is poor science.  I can give you evidence of people who died after drinking water, but it doesn't mean water kills people.  Science is based on research, not an isolated story.  MRI scans show that there is nothing different in the brain of someone who is a "visual learner" and someone who is an "auditory learner."  It is a preference in the same way favorite colors are preferences.  The reason you can point to classroom practice and say it works is because the brains of all students respond to teaching in a richer learning environment that includes multiple modalities.  It's called dual coding, and there will be a separate post about it.

This post is to explain the cycle of thinking and learning.  Let's start with a few terms.

• Sensory memory - What happens as you take in data from any of your senses.  It lasts microseconds while you decide what to attend to.
• Working memory - What happens in your brain while you are learning something.  When you rehearse a phone number over and over so you can remember it when you get to the phone, you are holding things in working memory.  It can hold an average of 4 items at one time. 
• Cognitive load - When the working memory reaches the maximum it can hold.  
• Retrieval - This is the intentional process of remembering.  When you have to think about a question in order to answer it, you are engaging in retrieval.
• Long term memory - These are the things you can still remember a week, a year, a decade after learning them.  When someone says, "Who you gonna call," and you respond with, "Ghostbusters," it's because it is in your long-term memory.

This cycle happens every time you learn something.  

• First, you take in thousands of pieces of information through your senses.  
• You choose one to pay attention to.  You can only pay attention to one thing at a time.  Multi-tasking is just rapid switching between single tasks. Something is always lost in the switch. 
• What you pay attention to goes into your working memory, where you make meaning of the relationships between the items.  You rehearse the information by writing it down or repeating it to yourself.  As you do, it makes its way to your long term memory.  If you relate it to things you already know, your brain makes connections to those neurons, creating richer meaning and increasing the likelihood that it will stay in your long term memory.
• Occasionally, you retrieve information to tell someone else about it or write it on a test or use it in some meaningful way.  The act of retrieval thickens the myelin on the neuron, which causes it to work faster.

The bad news is that you 

• Have limited working memory.
• Only remember things you work hard at.

The good news is that

• Pictures have power
• Spaced interleaved retrieval practice is the way to work hard.
• While you cannot increase your working memory capacity, you can trick it through chunking.

Let's talk about chunking for a minute.  Much of what you teach is related in a way that can be categorized.  Asking kids to do that will make their brains think of each category as an item.  

Since this post is getting a bit long, I'll do separate posts on dual coding and spaced and interleaved retrieval practice.