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?"