Implications for the Classroom

Review Each Lesson Plan in Terms of What the Student Is Likely to Think About

This sentence may represent the most general and useful idea that cognitive psychology can offer teachers. The most important thing about schooling is what students will remember after the school day is over, and there is a direct relationship between what they think during the day and their later memory. So it's a useful double-check for every lesson plan to try to anticipate what the lesson will actually make students think about (rather than what you hope it will make them think about). Doing so may make it clear that students are unlikely to get what the teacher intended out of the lesson.

For example, I once observed a high school social studies class work in groups of three on projects about the Spanish Civil War. Each group was to examine a different aspect of the conflict (for example, compare it to the U.S. Civil War, or consider its impact on today's Spain) and then teach the remainder of the class what they had learned, using the method of their choice. The teacher took students to a computer laboratory to do research on the Internet. (They also used the library.) The students in one group noticed that PowerPoint was loaded on the computers, and they were very enthusiastic about using it to teach their bit to the other groups. The teacher was impressed by their initiative and gave his permission. Soon all of the groups were using PowerPoint. Many students had some familiarity with the basics of the program, so it could have been used effectively. The problem was that the students changed the assignment from "learn about the Spanish Civil War" to "learn esoteric features of PowerPoint." There was still a lot of enthusiasm in the room, but it was directed toward using animations, integrating videos, finding unusual fonts, and so on. At that point the teacher felt it was far too late to ask all of the groups to switch, so he spent much of the rest of the week badgering students to be sure their presentation had content, not just flash.

This story illustrates one of the reasons that experienced teachers are so good. This teacher clearly didn't let students use PowerPoint the next year, or possibly he thought of a way to keep them on task. Before you have accumulated these experiences, the next best thing is to think carefully about how your students will react to an assignment, and what it will make them think about.

Think Carefully About Attention Grabbers

Almost every teacher I have met likes, at least on occasion, to start class with an attention grabber. If you hook students early in the lesson, they should be curious to know what is behind whatever surprised or awed them. But attention grabbers may not always work. Here's a conversation I had with my oldest daughter when she was in sixth grade.

Dad: What did you do in school today?

Rebecca: We had a guest in science. He taught us about chemicals.

Dad: Oh yeah? What did you learn about chemicals?

Rebecca: He had this glass? That looked like water? But when he put this little metal thingy in it, it boiled. It was so cool. We all screamed.

Dad: Uh-huh. Why did he show you that?

Rebecca: I don't know.

The guest surely planned this demonstration to pique the class's interest, and that goal was met. I'm willing to bet that the guest followed the demonstration with an age-appropriate explanation of the phenomenon but that information was not retained. Rebecca didn't remember it because she was still thinking about how cool the demonstration was. You remember what you think about.

Another teacher once told me she wore a toga to class on the first day she began a unit on ancient Rome. I am sure that got her students' attention. I am also sure it continued to get their attention—that is, to distract them—once the teacher was ready for them to think about something else.

Here's one more example. A guest in a biology class asked the students to think of the very first thing they had ever seen. The students mulled that question over and generated such guesses as "the doctor who pulled me out," "Mom," and so forth. The guest then said, "Actually, the first thing each of you saw was the same. It was pinkish, diffuse light coming through your mother's belly. Today we're going to talk about how that first experience affected how your visual system developed, and how it continues to influence the way you see today." I love that example because it grabbed the students' attention and left them eager to hear more about the subject of the lesson.

As I alluded to earlier in the chapter, I think it is very useful to use the beginning of class to build student interest in the material, or as I put it, to develop the conflict. You might consider, however, whether the beginning of the class is really when they need an attention grabber. In my experience, the transition from one subject to another (or for older students, from one classroom and teacher to another) is enough to buy at least a few minutes of attention from students. It's usually the middle of the lesson that needs a little drama to draw students back from whatever reverie they might be in. But regardless of when it's used, think hard about how you will draw a connection between the attention grabber and the point it's designed to make. Will students understand the connection, and will they be able to set aside the excitement of the attention grabber and move on? If not, is there a way to change the attention grabber to help students make that transition? Perhaps the toga could be worn over street clothes and removed after the first few minutes of class. Perhaps the "metal thingy" demonstration would have been better after the basic principle was explained and students were prompted to predict what might happen.

Use Discovery Learning with Care

In discovery learning students learn by exploring objects, discussing problems with classmates, designing experiments, or any of a number of other techniques that use student inquiry rather than have the teacher tell students things. Indeed, the teacher ideally serves more as a resource than as the director of the class. Discovery learning has much to recommend it, especially when it comes to the level of student engagement. If students have a strong voice in deciding which problems they want to work on, they will likely be engaged in the problems they select, and will likely think deeply about the material, with attendant benefits. An important downside, however, is that what students will think about is less predictable. If students are left to explore ideas on their own, they may well explore mental paths that are not profitable. If memory is the residue of thought, then students will remember incorrect "discoveries" as much as they will remember the correct ones.

Now this doesn't mean that discovery learning should never be used, but it does suggest a principle for when to use it. Discovery learning is probably most useful when the environment gives prompt feedback about whether the student is thinking about a problem in the right way. One of the best examples of discovery learning is when kids learn to use a computer, whether they are learning an operating system, a complex game, or a Web application. Kids show wonderful ingenuity and daring under these circumstances. They are not afraid to try new things, and they shrug off failure. They learn by discovery! Note, however, that computer applications have an important property: when you make a mistake, it is immediately obvious. The computer does something other than what you intended. This immediate feedback makes for a wonderful environment in which "messing around" can pay off. (Other environments aren't like that. Imagine a student left to "mess around" with frog dissection in a biology class.) If the teacher does not direct a lesson to provide constraints on the mental paths that students will explore, the environment itself can do so effectively in a discovery learning context, and that will help memory.

Design Assignments So That Students Will Unavoidably Think About Meaning

If the goal of a lesson plan is to get students to think about the meaning of some material, then it's pretty clear that the best approach is one in which thinking about meaning is unavoidable. One of the things that has always amazed me as a memory researcher is the degree to which people do not know how their own memory system works. It doesn't do any good to tell people, "Hey, I'm going to test your memory for this list of words later," because people don't know what to do to make the words memorable. But if you give people a simple task in which they must think of the meaning—for example, rating how much they like each word—they will remember the words quite well.

This idea can be used in the classroom as well as in the laboratory. At the start of this chapter I said that asking fourth graders to bake biscuits was not a good way to get them to appreciate what life on the Underground Railroad was like because they spend too much time thinking about measuring flour and milk. The goal was to get students thinking about the experience of runaway slaves. So a more effective lesson would be to lead students to consider that experience by, for example, asking them where they supposed runaway slaves obtained food, how they were able to prepare it, how they were able to pay for it, and so forth.

Don't Be Afraid to Use Mnemonics

Many teachers I have met shudder at the use of mnemonics. They conjure up images of nineteenth-century schoolrooms with children chanting rhymes of the state capitals. But as bad as a classroom would be if a teacher used only mnemonics, they do have their time and place, and I don't think teachers should have this instructional technique taken away from them.

When is it appropriate to ask students to memorize something before it has much meaning? Probably not often, but there will be times when a teacher feels that some material—meaningless though it may be now—must be learned for the student to move forward. Typical examples would be learning letter-sound associations prior to reading, and learning vocabulary in both their native language and foreign languages.

It might also be appropriate to memorize some material using mnemonics in parallel with other work that emphasizes meaning. When I was in elementary school, I was not required to memorize the multiplication table. Instead I practiced using different materials and techniques that emphasized what multiplication actually means. These techniques were effective, and I readily grasped the concept. But by about fifth grade, not knowing the multiplication table by heart really slowed me down because the new things I was trying to learn had multiplication embedded in them. So every time I saw 8 × 7 within a problem I had to stop and figure out the product. In the sixth grade I moved to a new school, where my teacher quickly figured out what was going on and made me memorize the multiplication table. It made math a lot easier for me, although it took a few weeks before I would admit it.

Try Organizing a Lesson Plan Around the Conflict

There is a conflict in almost any lesson plan, if you look for it. This is another way of saying that the material we want students to know is the answer to a question—and the question is the conflict. The advantage of being very clear about the conflict is that it yields a natural progression for topics. In a movie, trying to resolve a conflict leads to new complications. That's often true of school material too.

Start with the material you want your students to learn, and think backward to the intellectual question it poses. For example, in a science class you might want sixth graders to know the models of the atom that were competing at the turn of the twentieth century. These are the answers. What is the question? In this story, the goal is to understand the nature of matter. The obstacle is that the results of different experiments appear to conflict with one another. Each new model that is proposed (Rutherford, cloud, Bohr) seems to resolve the conflict but then generates a new complication—that is, experiments to test the model seem to conflict with other experiments. If this organization seems useful to you, you might spend a good bit of time thinking about how to illustrate and explain to students the question, "What is the nature of matter?" Why should that question interest sixth graders?

As I've emphasized, structuring a lesson plan around conflict can be a real aid to student learning. Another feature I like is that, if you succeed, you are engaging students with the actual substance of the discipline. I've always been bothered by the advice "make it relevant to the students," for two reasons. First, it often feels to me that it doesn't apply. Is the Epic of Gilgamesh relevant to students in a way they can understand right now? Is trigonometry? Making these topics relevant to students' lives will be a strain, and students will probably think it's phony. Second, if I can't convince students that some material is relevant, does that mean I shouldn't teach it? If I'm continually trying to build bridges between students' daily lives and their school subjects, the students may get the message that school is always about them, whereas I think there is value, interest, and beauty in learning about things that don't have much to do with me. I'm not saying it never makes sense to talk about things students are interested in. What I'm suggesting is that student interests should not be the main driving force of lesson planning. Rather, they might be used as initial points of contact that help students understand the main ideas you want them to consider, rather than as the reason or motivation for them to consider these ideas.

In the previous chapter I argued that students must have background knowledge in order to think critically. In this chapter I discussed how memory works, in the hope that by understanding this we can maximize the likelihood that students will learn this background knowledge; much of the answer to how we can do this was concerned with thinking about meaning. But what if students don't understand the meaning? In the next chapter I discuss why it is hard for students to comprehend the meaning of complex material, and what you can do to help.