Book Review: Learning Habits by Richard Wheadon

Are you a parent who wants to help your child become successful in school?  Are you a teacher who sees kids dependent on machines or you for studying and you want them to feel the satisfaction of being an independent learner? If so, put Learning Habits by Richard Wheadon on your summer reading list and start the next school year off strong.

I first encountered Richard at a ResearchEd conference last year. He's passionate about learning, optimistic about the future of teaching, and delightfully British. While the accent doesn't come across on the page, everything else does. 

The first thing I appreciate about this book is that he diagnoses the problem - kids use ineffective study techniques and are demotivated when those don't lead to success - but he doesn't stop there. He asks the next question. "Why do they use ineffective techniques?" Kids don't study poorly because they want to fail. They don't study poorly because they are lazy. If that were the case, they would look for the techniques that give the most benefit with the least amount of time invested (Re-reading the chapter does just the opposite). 

They use ineffective techniques because the effectives ones don't FEEL effective in the moment. One of the talks I give at conferences address this exact thing. I compare it to weight lifting. At the end of my BodyPump class at the Y, I don't feel stronger; I feel like I might not be able to hold my arms up long enough to wash my hair when I get home. Yet, the very thing that is making me feel weak in that moment will cause strength later because of the response of my muscles to stress. Retrieval practice makes kids FEEL dumb in the moment because they have trouble remembering the answer to some questions. But, it is that very stress that will stimulate the neuron growth and myelination that will make their learning stronger for the future.  

Wheadon addresses something most study books do not, the tricks our brains play to give us mental shortcuts. There are a myriad of biases, heuristics, and self-gratification techniques that get us through our days without having to think about every single thing. That is fantastic news for daily life because it saves mental energy, but it can interfere with your learning when we operate unaware of them in academic pursuits. By giving examples of those, he provides ways students might overcome them.

This book is evidence based and well-sourced (in case you want to follow up and read the studies for yourself). It is realistic in its explanations and understanding of real classrooms. At the end of each chapter, he summarizes the main points and gives questions for reflection, so you and a student could sit down together and make plans based on what you read in each chapter. 

And that's the best part of this book.  It's actionable. Putting Wheadon's advice into practice will help you develop the habits to be more successful in school and in all of the learning you will have to do as an adult.

The Power of Small, Consistent Effort

Last week, I did something big. 

I mailed in my last house payment - 9 and a half years ahead of schedule!

Did I just get a massive salary bump?  Nope, I'm making about half of what pulled in when I was teaching. Did a rich uncle die and leave me an inheritance? No, as far as I know I have no wealthy distant relatives (or close relatives). Did I win the lottery? Not a chance - literally -  because I don't play the lottery, so my chances of winning are 0.0% (just slightly below the 0.0000000034% it would be if I did play). 

So how did this happen? Because of the best advice I've ever followed, and it wasn't even given to me.  I happened to be at a birthday party where I overheard Bob, a financially savvy man giving advice to a younger man, whose name I do not know, who was about to buy his first home. He said, "Never pay only the amount it says on the bill. Always pay something over. Sometimes, it may be more. Sometimes, you may be rounding up, but whatever you can do over in any month will save you a lot in the long run."  I thought that sounded reasonable and have applied it to every loan I've had since.

For 19 years of that time, I was on a teacher's salary.  While I was doing pretty well in the 19th year, the first few years of that time were slim. I was still in credit card debt at that time, so the amount I had to put over on the mortgage payment was small. Once the card was paid off, I was freed up to add more while dealing with some other costs. When my car died and had to be replaced, and I had to lower the amount I was paying over on the house again. At times when I got a tax refund, I was able to put more on it.  When I left teaching 18 months ago and started my job at the Y, I was thankful I had savings to pull from. But I never made a single payment that was only the minimum. Even if the amount over was, as it once was, $8.51, I knew those small amounts would still add up.  And they did.

"This is supposed to be an education blog," I hear you saying. "What does this have to do with education?" Well, thank you for asking; I'm glad you always do when I have seemed to stray from the point.

Some students have a long way to go when it comes to scholarship.  Perhaps, they stopped paying attention during online learning and have yet to figure out how to re-adapt. Perhaps, they stay up too late at night on their phones and come to you in a less than optimal state of alertness. Perhaps they haven't had to study in the past or have gotten by until now with ineffective techniques. 

Regardless of the changes they need to make, they cannot make them all overnight. They can start going to bed earlier, but it is going to be a minute before that results in noticeable change because their body must adapt. And some may need to back up their bed time by 10 minutes per night in order to make it work because trying to back it up two hours all at once will just result in tossing and turning. It might take more than one test for newly acquired study techniques to show improvement.  They may only be able to sustain 10 minutes of focused attention during studying and need to make it 12 next week and 15 the week after that.  

The human brain resists change because it worries you might die if you deviate from the status quo. And, it really resists big changes that happen fast.  So, encourage your students not to take a New Year's Resolution approach to improvement. Encourage them to change one thing until it becomes normal and then take on another.  These small but consistent efforts add up over time, but more importantly, they are sustainable in a way that big, sudden changes are not. 

This is bigger than one student or one test. Small, consistently sustained improvements eventually result in good habits.  Good habits eventually result in more self control. More self control produces better character. Better character contributes to a more responsible citizenry. You see where I'm going. These things that seem so small in our students as individuals ultimately make the world better for everyone. 

And you, as teacher, get to be part of that with your own small, consistent effort in the lives of your students.

Practical Advice for Your Student - Part 2 - Studying For Tests

After I began attending Learning and the Brain conferences in 2018, one of my favorite things to do was have individual conferences with students who were not performing as well on tests as they would like.  I knew that I had advice that could help them because of what I had learned about cognitive science and memory.

I started by asking them how they currently study.  Their number one answer was, "I look over my notes."  I asked them what that meant, and it was clear why their study habits were ineffective.  They were basically re-reading the words they had copied from the wall with no context or processing.  For a couple of years, I gave them better advice about studying for tests.  

Then, I realized I needed to start expanding these conversations.  We discussed, first, what they were doing in class while learning.  I then addressed more effective study techniques.  Then, finally, we talked about how to deal with questions during the test.  

So this post is the second of the series.  How should a student study for tests?

First, their intuition is likely wrong.  In surveys, the methods students list as most effective turn out to be the least effective according to research.  My students most common answer, "I look over my notes" does little to improve their memory or understanding of the content.  Highlighting and underlining, as it turns out, have a negative effect on memory and fools you into believing you know it.  It's like your brain says, "Of course I know that.  Look at it; it's yellow."

The simplest way to answer the question about the best way to study is to recognize the power of retrieval practice.  The method is less important than that guiding principle.  Does this method allow me to passively receive input? If so, it is not an effective method.  Does it require me to actively retrieve the information from my memory?  If so, it is likely to be effective.  

So, make flashcards.  Use Quizlet or Anki.  Make flashcards.  Make and play a game of Kahoot.  Make flashcards.  Have your parents ask you questions while you answer without looking.  Did I mention you could make flashcards?  

Most of those are only useful for questions that have very short answers (definitions, examples of concepts, etc.), but they aren't great for questions that require you to explain.  For that, I would make a list of questions, including those the teacher has told you will definitely free response questions and those that just require more explanation to understand.  Then, without using your notes or book, write out the answer to the question as you would on a test.  Only after you have written out the entire answer should you go to the book, video, or other resource and check your answer against it.  Don't just do it in your mind; write it out.  I can't tell you how many times I have had students use most of the right words only to get the concept completely wrong.  In an explanation of how Boyle's Law determines breathing, the wrong answer, "Increasing volume in the chest raises the pressure" will be easy for you to fool yourself into thinking you got it right when you go look it up in the book to find "Increasing volume in the chest lowers pressure."  You see most of the right words and don't realize that you described a direct relationship when there is actually an inverse one.  But if you write it down, it is harder to fool yourself.  

It boils down to this: 

Recall > Reread

Wait some time.  Shuffle your cards / questions.  Recall again.  Wait even more time.  Shuffle again.  Recall again.  This requires planning.  It can't be crammed into one night.  But it is effective.

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.

Student Meetings - A Follow Up

Two weeks ago, I wrote about meetings I had been having with 8th-grade students about their study habits.  On Thursday, we had our first test since those meetings, so I thought it was a good idea to do a quick follow up.

At some point, I lost count of the meetings. Kids would show up unexpectedly, or two would show up when I was only expecting one.  I believe that I had about 20 meetings, roughly a quarter of my 8th-grade students.  I was able to personally advise them about note-taking, study, and test-taking.  It was encouraging to get emails from them with deeper questions than they had previously asked (and those emails started coming several days before the test, a good sign that they were spacing their study).  When I was passing out the tests, a few asked if they could have a blank sheet of paper, showing that they intended to apply one of the pieces of advice I had given them.  

In each of my classes, the average score went up.  In one, it was a moderate rise of 3 points.  Scrolling through that list, I realized that only two of them had come in for a meeting.  That class average was also affected by one student having a dramatic drop in score; I haven't worked out what the cause for that was yet.  The most impressive result is that my lowest-performing class from the last two tests improved their average score by almost 13 points!  Out of the 18 students in that class, 7 had come to meet with me.  I know this isn't scientific statistical analysis or a controlled experiment, but I'd say it is pretty strong evidence that these meetings are working.  There is a fair amount of time invested in these meetings, but they are clearly worth it.

By the way, this test was on chemical bonding, which is much harder material than the first two tests covered.  That makes their improvement all the more impressive.  When I return this test, I always say, "If you made an A on this test or improved your score, go home and hang it on the fridge.  If you made a 100, buy a frame."  (There are so many tiny ways to go wrong with this test that making a perfect score is exceptionally difficult.). 

My kids stepped up, and I'm proud of them.  I hope that success will breed more success.  I got to send some congratulatory emails last week, which is one of my favorite things to do.  To take advantage of growth mindset, I don't just congratulate them on getting a better score.  I point out the work that went into it and tell them to keep doing those things because they are paying off and they will get even better at them as they keep practicing.  

Student Meetings

Instead of lunch and planning periods this week, I've been holding one on one meetings with some of my 8th-grade students.  So far, I've met with seven students (and a mom).  I have four meetings scheduled for next week.  No one is in trouble.  No one has done anything wrong.  These meetings are about preparing for tests.  

At GRACE, the 8th-grade team understands that our responsibility is to meet kids where they are and get them ready for where they are going.  This is, of course, true for teachers of every grade.  The first grade team is preparing kids for second grade.  But there is something that most students and parents understand about the eighth grade - high school is next.  The curriculum in 8th grade assumes a fair amount of foundational knowledge, and it is now time to learn analytical skills.  Students are no longer only learning the name of a family on the periodic table; they need to know how to use the periodic table to calculate how many neutrons are in the atom of an element in that family and how many valence electrons it has.  This requires more than the flashcards that they have been so dutifully making all these years.  It means that note-taking can't mean copying what the teacher projects from their PowerPoint presentation.  It means dropping most of the little tricks our older siblings have passed down (like choosing all of the above because it's only a choice if it's right - I will break them of this belief).

I spend a fair amount of classtime talking to them about why retrieval is superior to rereading and how to prepare for different levels of thinking-level questions.  I try to prepare them for the fact that they will have to change some of the habits that have led to their prior success, but they often just don't believe me.  Until it is real, I'm just saying stuff teachers say. Then, a student who is accustomed to As makes a B- or a C+ and they want to know what they can do.  While they mean extra credit, I bring them in and talk to them about how they currently study and how they might modify that to be more successful with tests that inlcude higher level thinking.  I divide it into three sections of advice - in class, studying, and test taking.  Let me share some of that with you.

In Class -  I work in a one to one laptop school, so there are plenty of ways to be distracted, but that isn't new.  Students have always found things to distract them in class.  I watched a student read her pencil once just to avoid doing what she should have been doing.  When I speak students about learning, we start there.  First, if your computer is distracting you, feel free to take your notes by hand.  

Then we talk about notes.  Most students fall into one of two extremes - they either write down almost nothing or they attempt to write down everything.  Neither of those is conducive to good learning.  Note taking involves paying close attention and making decisions about what is important to write down, which is not the same for every student.  In a class like mine, where the book is very closely aligned with what we are doing in class, it may be better to think of notes as a map, pointing to the information you need to study and supplementing with a few things from class.  Students have grown accustomed to copying the power point presentation and are surprised when I say, "Oh, that's just to remind me of what to talk about next or to give you a visual aid.  Unless I tell you that you need to copy a slide, you probably don't need to."  (There is a technique I'm afraid to experiment with called "retrieve taking."  In this technique, students to not write anything down during the class period.  You give them five minute at the end to write down everything they can remember.  I want to try it, but I'm a little afraid that I would have a hard time justifying it if it didn't work.). 

We also talk about asking and answering questions as a way of remaining engaged rather than just letting the class wash over you.

Studying - This is the longest part of the conversation and the one with the most research based support.  I start by asking them what they currently do to study.  By far, the most common answer I get is, "I look over my notes."  After asking them what they mean by that, it is clear they do not know that study is a verb.  They are re-reading notes that don't accurately represent what they did in class and hoping that will be enough to have it stuck in their heads.  We talk about why that is not helpful for their memory.  I ask them if they have ever memorized lines for a play; you don't learn your lines by reading the play again.  You learn them by trying to remembre them, crashing and burning, and trying again.  We talk about flashcards and making a list of questions for yourself and brain dumps a number of other retrieval strategies.  

For higher level thinking questions, flashcards may not be your best tool, so we talk about that too.  How might you "think outside the book" and prepare for questions that require using the knowledge they have gained from their flashcards.  How might you write yourself a question that is similar to one we have gone over in class?  What skills might you need to employ that would help?  This, again, requires that you have been engaged in class.  Learning is a complex activity, and it requires your full attention.  

Test Taking - About three-fourths of the students I meet with identify themselves as people with test anxiety.  I don't say identify themselves as a way of criticizing them; I think we all have at least a little bit of test anxiety, and it is not really a diagnosable condition.  We talk a little about taking the time to breath or pray or count to ten or whatever it takes to calm you rather than trying to ignore your feelings and power through.  And then I give them what I think is a simple but powerful piece of advice.  Cover up your test with a piece of paper.  It keeps you from seeing how much you have left to do and allows you to focus on the question you are currently on.  Most students with anxiety are also prone to talking themselves into all of the choices, so I tell them to cover the choices with the paper, read the question and think of the answer in their mind first; then just go look for that answer.  The only questions that doesn't work for are ones where the answer is "all of the above," but that's usually only one or two per test.  It's worth the trade.  These students are also generally prone to changing their answers while going over their test after they finish.  All of the research I've read says this is a bad idea.  I can't remember the exact number, but it was much more likely that students who have prepared well would change from a right answer to a wrong answer (or from one wrong answer to a different wrong answer).  It is rare that they change from a wrong answer to a right one.  If you have prepared well, trust yourself.

I want my students to be successful in all of their subjects, not just mine.  None of this advice is specific to my class or to the 8th grade.  If they actually absorb this, it should serve them well for years.