I Tried it Once. It Didn't Work.

Recently, I tweeted that I was creating a Study Skills elective and asked people to tell me what they thought was the most essential to include.  In case you were wondering, this was not, for the most part, a helpful exercise.  Some people suggested the two books I was already using.  Some gave me really weak things that I wouldn't likely spend time on (I'm not telling a high school student to organize a notebook in a specific way).  By far, the weirdest piece of advice I got was this (She meant well, so I've blotted out her name).

First of all, are any of these study skills?  You might be able to make a case for note-taking (and I will be spending a little time showing them Daniel Willingham's advice about figuring out the thematic hierarchy in a lecture in order to make connections in your notes), but again with organizing?  Have you ever tried to impose someone else's organizational method on yourself?  It doesn't work.

But here is my real beef with this advice.  "I'd teach different ways to do each thing and then have them try each way for a week or so."  This feels like the least effective strategy I can possibly imagine.  There is no world in which a week is enough time to know if something will work.  That's not even enough time to cover one chapter in a class and see the results of your method on a test.  

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why an educator would give me this advice, so I finally went to look at her profile.  She isn't an educator.  She works in machine learning, a field in which "fail early" and "multiple iterations" are prized.  That helped it make some sense.  The tweet has a bit of a learning styles vibe to it with "so they can see what works and doesn't for them."  People who are up on education research know that the idea that we all learn differently and must find our personally preferred method or it won't work for us is not true.  While it is true that every brain is different, most of them function in similar ways to the rest, so we need to find what works, not what works for us.

But mostly, I think it rubbed me the wrong way because it reflects the short attention span, multi-task-attempting, commitment-dropping culture in which we live.  If I don't see results in the short term, they must not yield results in the long term either.  Instant gratification or nothing.  I'll try this for a week and the judge it inadequate.

When I was a yearbook teacher, students were required to sell two ads to offset the cost of book production.  While I admit this is a daunting task and difficult to do (which is why I only required two), students often had little endurance for it.  One year, a delightful young lady said to me, "I don't know what to do.  I've tried a lot and haven't been able to sell one."  I said, "How many people have you asked?" and she replied, "Like two!"  I laughed so hard I almost fell out of my seat, not because she wasn't adorable but because she had described her efforts as having "tried a lot" only to answer with the number two.  It's a good thing sales is not her future career.  I said, "You are likely to get several no answers before you get a yes.  Keep trying."  

Whether you are attempting to drop an old bad habit or develop a new good habit, one week is not enough to judge if it works.  It is possible one month will not be enough.  Often, there is actually a temporary drop in performance while making the switch.  The illustration below comes from Peps McCrae's weekly newsletter Evidence Snacks.  In this one, he discussed our misconceptions about trying something new.  He said most people believe that if something works, our growth in it will be linear.  It will start working right away, and we will keep getting better at it as we practice.  Yet, this is not the case.  When first implementing a new policy or technique, you may see a drop as you adjust from the way you used to do things to the new way.  For example, my brother took Bowling as a PE class during his freshman year in college.  They taught him a different method than the one he had grown up using.  For a short time, he was a terrible bowler because he hadn't learned the new way very well yet, but he could no longer do it the old way.  It isn't until the new way becomes a well-myelinated pathway that automation allows us to judge the effectiveness of a new method.

Because we expect progress to be linear, we misjudge any drop in performance, but we don't see benefits until the new way of doing things becomes automated.  We often don't like something in the beginning for no other reason than we resist change.  Sometimes, we know something isn't the best way to do it, but it is the way we are accustomed to, so the new way feels like it isn't working.  Daniel Willingham's book Outsmart Your Brain discusses the reasons why you often misjudge something as not working when it really is because the difficult way is yielding long-term benefits rather than short-term feelings of improvement (Google his brilliant pushup analogy).  If I were to follow the advice in this tweet, my students would end the year believing no method worked for them, and I would have failed them as a person who knows how to dig into studies and provide research-based advice.

So, I'm clear on that not being the way to go.  What will I do instead?  Well, first, let's not look at a bunch of ways that might work for us.  Let's look at what the research says works generally (spaced interleaved retrieval practice with feedback).  While individual students may have to adapt methods to fit their schedules and context, the advice we give them should start with research-backed practices.  For that, I am using Barabara Oakley's classic book, Learning How to Learn, and the new book by Daniel Willingham, titled Outsmart Your Brain as well as the amazing website retrievalpractice.org with advice from the lovely researcher Pooja Agarwal.  These sources will allow me to deliver advice with confidence and explanations about why techniques work.  They will practice them for the entire year.  I will add techniques for different thinking levels, but I will not give multiple techniques for the same thing in the hopes that one might land.  

This is not just an important concept in education, so let's look at it in everyday life.  If you have a goal to achieve, it is going to take time.  Let's say you want to lose 15 pounds.  You can't go to one spin class and 

say, "Well, I am not 15 pounds lighter, so exercise clearly doesn't work."  If you want to improve an artistic skill, you can't spend an hour watching YouTube tutorials and say, "Well, I am not any better at this now than I was an hour ago, so these tutorials are garbage."  We need to recognize that nothing in your brain changes instantly.  Trying something one time will not allow you to adapt or even to accurately judge whether you are good at (or like) what you are doing.  

Don't just say, "I tried it once.  It didn't work."  Keep doing it until it becomes an automatic routine in your life.