classroom advice – Page 11 – Education & Teacher Conferences Skip to main content

Tag: classroom advice

Older posts
Newer posts
Naps In Schools (Just Might) Improve Classroom Learning
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
July 20, 2019

Naps In Schools (Just Might) Improve Classroom Learning

Read More

I like a good nap. I’m not sure there’s such a thing as a bad nap.

But for this blog we must ask: can naps benefit learning?

We’ve written often about the importance of a good night’s sleep for learning. But, nap sleep might not have the same benefits as nighttime sleep.

Of course, we do have suggestive studies from the sleep lab. This study, for instance, shows that naps including both slow-wave sleep and REM sleep do boost learning.

But, what happens when we test naps in school? Do we show benefits there?

In other words: do actual students learning actual school stuff from actual teachers benefit from naps at school?

A Promising Start

This study from Brazil answers those questions with a resounding YES.

Researchers had 5th graders study either history or science during the first period of the day. Some napped during the 2nd period, while others studied another topic.

Over the course of six weeks, students learned more on the days that they napped compared to the days they didn’t. On average, they scored 10% higher on the content taught pre-nap.

This finding held true for longer naps (between 30 and 60 minutes), but not shorter naps (less than 30 minutes).

Slight Hesitations

Long-time readers know that I try to be especially skeptical about research findings that I want to be true. Because I like naps so much, I’m pushing myself to be skeptical here. For that reason, I raise these questions:

First: the study includes 24 students. That’s 24 better than 0, but it’s still quite a small study. I hope researchers follow this up with a few hundred students.

Second: I wonder about cultural influences. Does napping have a role in Brazilian culture that differs from its role others? I’m not sure why cultural influences would change the benefits of napping, but I’d like to see this research replicated in other cultures.

Third: This “nap” comes quite early in the morning: from 8:10 to 9:20 AM. I would have thought post-lunch naps to be more beneficial. The researchers explain that school begins quite early in Brazil — but, the timing of naps should clearly be studied.

School Implications

Despite my attempts at skepticism, I do think we should seriously consider investigating this question at scale. If students could in fact learn information better by sleeping at school, the benefits to both health and cognition could be dramatic.

After all, I’ve been “studying” naps on my own for years, and can report highly positive results.

Does Banning Classroom Technology Improve Engagement? Learning?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
July 18, 2019

Does Banning Classroom Technology Improve Engagement? Learning?

Read More

We’ve got many reasons to believe that technology — whatever its benefits — can distract from learning.

Heck, according to one study, the mere presence of a cellphone reduces available working memory. YIKES.

Unsurprisingly, we often hear calls for technology-free zones in schools. Laptop bans have ardent champions.

One group of researchers wanted to know: what effect might a technology ban have on the tone of the classroom?

Would such a ban complicate the students’ relationship with the professor?

Would it affect their engagement with the material?

And, of course, would it benefit their learning?

The Study

One professor taught four sections of the same Intro to Psychology course. Cellphones and laptops were forbidden from two sections, and allowed in two.

At the end of the course, researchers measured…

Students’ rapport with the professor: for instance, students rated statements like “I want to take other courses from the professor,” or “I dislike my professor’s class.”

Students’ engagement with the class: for instance, “I make sure I study on a regular basis,” or “I stay up on all assigned readings.”

Students’ grades — on 3 exams during the term, and on their overall final grade.

That’s straightforward enough. What did they find?

The Results, Part I: Hang On to your Hat

You might predict that a technology ban would improve class tone. Freed from the distractions of technology, students can directly engage with each other, with their professor, and the material.

You might instead predict that a ban would dampen class tone. When teachers forbid things, after all, students feel less powerful.

Hutcheon, Lian, and Richard found that the tech ban had no effect on the students’ rapport with the professor.

They also found that the ban resulted in lower engagement with the class. That is, on average, students in a tech-free class said they did class readings less often, and put forth less effort.

This finding held true even for students who preferred to take notes by hand: that is, students who wouldn’t be inclined to use laptops in class anyway.

The Results, Part II: Hang On Tighter

The researchers hypothesized that students in the technology-ban sections would learn more. That is: they’d have higher grades.

That’s an easy hypothesis to offer. Other researchers have found this result consistently (famously, here).

However, Hutcheon and Co. didn’t get that result. There was no statistically significant difference between the two groups.

But, they got a result that did approach significance: the technology-ban sections learned less. On the final exam, for instance, the tech-ban sections averaged an 84.30, while the tech-permitted sections averaged an 88.04.

The difference between a B and a B+ might not be statistically significant…but it sure might feel significant to those who got the B.

What On Earth Is Going On?

The researchers wonder if the tone of their tech ban led to these results. To be honest, when I read the policy on “Technology Use in the Classroom,” I thought it sounded rather harsh. (For example: “Repeated infractions will result in points lost on your final grade.”)

So, perhaps a more genially-worded ban would impede class engagement less, and allow for more learning.

But, that’s just a guess.

For me, the crucial message appears in the authors’ abstract:

“[T]hese results suggest that instructors should consider the composition of students in their course prior to implementing a technology ban in the classroom.”

In other words, technology policies can’t be the same everywhere. We teach different content to different students in different schools. And, we are different kinds of teachers. No one policy will fit everywhere.

To be crystal clear: I’m NOT saying “This study shows that a tech ban produced bad results, and so teachers should never ban technology.”

I AM saying: “This study arrived at helpfully puzzling results that contradict prior research. It therefore highlights the importance of tailoring tech policies to the narrow specifics of each situation.”

As I’ve said before, teachers should follow relevant research. And, we should draw on our best experience and judgment to apply that research to our specific context.

Decorating the Classroom: How Much Is Too Much?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
June 19, 2019

Decorating the Classroom: How Much Is Too Much?

Read More

Classrooms should do more than simply house our students. We want them to welcome students. To set an encouraging and academic tone. To reflect the values our schools champion.

That’s a lot of work for one classroom to do.

As a result, our rooms sometimes end up looking like the nearby image: a busy tumult of color and stuff.

Does this level of decoration have the desired result? Does it make students feel welcome, valued, and academic? Realistically, might it also distract them?

Two researchers in Portugal wanted to find out.

Today’s Research

Several people have studied the effect of classroom decoration on learning. (In perhaps the best-know study, Fisher, Godwin and Seltman showed that kindergarteners learned less in a highly decorated classroom.)

Rodrigues and Pandeirada wanted to know exactly which mental functions were disrupted by all that decoration. Their study design couldn’t be simpler.

These researchers created two study environments.

The first looks basically like a library carrel with a dull white finish.

The second added lots of lively, upbeat photos to that carrel.

The result isn’t as garish as the photo above, but it’s certainly quite busy. (You can see photographs of these two environments on page 9 if you click the link above.)

Rodrigues and Pandeirada then had 8-12 year-olds try tests of visual attention and memory.

For instance: students had to tap blocks in a certain order. (Like the game Simon from when I was a kid.) Or, they had to recreate a complex drawing.

Crucially, these 8-12 year-olds did these tasks in both environments. Researchers wanted to know: did the visual environment make a difference in their performance?

It certainly did.  On all four tests — both visual attention and memory — students did worse.

In short: when the visual environment is too busy, thinking gets harder. (By the way, visual distraction is not a “desirable difficulty.” It results in less learning.)

Two Sensible Questions

When I discuss this kind of research with teachers, they often have two very reasonable questions.

Question #1: how much is “too much”? More specifically, is my classroom “too much”?

Here’s my suggestion. Invite a non-teacher friend into your classroom. Don’t explain why. Notice their reaction.

If you get comments on the decoration — even polite comments — then it’s probably over-decorated.

“What a wonderfully colorful room!” sounds like a compliment. But, if your students see a “wonderfully colorful room” every day, they might be more distracted than energized.

Question #2: Won’t students get used to the busy decoration? My classroom might look over-decorated now, but once you’ve been here for a while, it will feel like home.

This question has not, as far as I know, been studied directly. But, the short answer is “probably not.”

The Fisher et al. study cited above lasted two weeks. Even with that much time to “get used to the decoration,” students still did worse in the highly-decorated classroom.

More broadly,  Barrett et al. looked at data for 150+ classrooms in 27 schools. They arrived at several conclusions. The pertinent headline here is: moderate levels of decoration (“complexity”) resulted in the most learning.

In other words: students might get used to visual complexity. But: the research in the field isn’t (as far as I know) giving us reason to think so.

Summer Thoughts

Here’s the key take-away from Rodrigues and Pandeirada’s research: we should take some time this summer to think realistically about our classroom’s decoration.

We want our spaces to be welcoming and informative. And, we want them to promote — not distract from — learning.

Research can point us in the right direction. We teachers will figure out how best to apply that research to our classrooms, for our students.

A final note: I’ve chatted by email with the study’s authors. They are, appropriately, hesitant to extrapolate too much from their library-carrel to real classrooms.

They show, persuasively, that visual distractions can interfere with attention and memory. But: they didn’t measure what happens in a classroom with other students, and teachers, and so forth.

I think the conclusions above are reasonable applications of these research findings; but, they are my own, and not part of the study itself.

Design Thinking: How Does It Work In The Classroom?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
June 16, 2019

Design Thinking: How Does It Work In The Classroom?

Read More

Design thinking invites students to approach learning with an engineer’s perspective.

Students begin with a problem, and think their way towards several possible solutions. Each design thinking framework includes its own particulars, but all include variations of these steps:

deliberately explore the problem,

brainstorm several possible solutions,

create those solutions,

repeat these steps as necessary (with healthy doses of metacognition).

Here, for instance, is a 1-pager from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education that summarizes key design-thinking ideas and protocols.

To be confident that this approach has merit, we should ask ourselves two hard questions:

First: do students who learn design thinking apply it in new circumstances? If not, then the method might help students solve a specific problem — but not help them think differently about problems in general.

Second: when students apply design thinking to novel problems, do they learn more than others who don’t? If not, then this new way of thinking doesn’t seem to have made much of a difference.

So: how might we answer these tough questions?

Researchers at Stanford’s School of Education wanted to give it a try…

The Research Plan

A large research team worked with 6th graders in a California public school. They had students practice two distinct design thinking systems.

One group practiced a system that urged them to seek out corrective feedback. That is: they got in the habit of looking for constructive criticism.

A second group practiced a different design-thinking system that emphasized creating several different prototype models before deciding on which one to pursue.

Helpfully, the study design insured that students learned and used these 2 systems in different classes.

Math class (2 weeks)

Social Studies (1 week)

Science (1 week)

A week later, students took a test gave them the chance to apply those skills.

However — and this is the key point — the test didn’t resemble any of the previous design thinking work that they had done. For this reason, the test let researchers answer this question:

“Do students who practice design thinking for a full month spontaneously apply those strategies when facing new, not-obviously-related problems?”

And, given how well they did on this test, it let them answer a second question:

“Do these design thinking strategies help students solve problems more effectively?”

That is: this study design let researchers answer the two hard questions we asked ourselves at the beginning of this post.

Two Answers

This study, I suspect, will be something of a Rorschach test for people who look at its conclusions.

Skeptics — and, by the way, I myself am often in the “skeptic” category — may focus on the most straightforward finding: “there was no stand-alone effect of treatment.”

In other words: the training didn’t have a statistically measurable effect.

Optimists, however, might well have a different take.

To explore their results in greater detail, Chin & Co. analyzed data for the students based on their prior academic accomplishment.

For students in the high-achieving group, and the middle-achieving group, the design thinking training had no statistically measurable effect.

However, for those in the low-achieving group, it certainly did.

An optimist’s summary might go like this.

“Mid- and high-achieving students are ALREADY doing what design thinking teaches. That is, those student ALREADY seek out constructive feedback, and try different models before they decide on one.

The design-thinking training helped low-achieving students behave more like their mid- and high-achieving peers.

That’s great!”

If, in fact, a design thinking curriculum can help some students develop the good learning habits that other students already have, that is in fact great news.

The best way to use design thinking will clearly depend on your own school’s culture and demographics. This study gives us some hope that — used the right way with the right students — it can help students learn.

“But I Study Much Better With My Music On”
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
June 13, 2019

“But I Study Much Better With My Music On”

Read More

You have, no doubt, heard of the “Mozart Effect.”

The short version is: “listening to Mozart makes you smarter!” (Translation: “Parents: run right out and by Mozart recordings for your children!”)

The longer version is: “in one study, children who listened to Mozart before they took a spatial reasoning test did better than those who didn’t. The effect lasted, at most, fifteen minutes.”

That initial study turned into several books, and several extravagant claims. In 1998, the governor of Georgia wanted the state budget to buy every child a classical music recording.

Plausible Extrapolation?

If listening to Mozart before a spatial reasoning test improves performance, then … just maybe … listening to music while I do my schoolwork will help me think better.

I know LOTS of teenagers who insist that this is true. Whenever I talk about brain research at schools, high-schoolers assure me quite passionately that they learn more with their music playing.

That’s a plausible claim. Let’s research it.

Perham and Currie tested this claim quite simply. They had adults take a reading comprehension test adapted from the SAT. Over headphones, they heard either…

…music they chose because they liked it (Frank Ocean, Katy Perry),

…music they didn’t like (thrash metal),

…music that didn’t have lyrics, or

…silence

What Perham and Currie find?

Quite clearly, these learners did their best thinking in silence.

More specifically, when they answered reading comprehension questions in silence, they averaged 61%. Listening to music without lyrics, they averaged a 55%. Music with lyrics — either likable-Katy Perry or disliked-thrash metal — led to a 38% average.

The drop from a 61% to a 38% should get everyone’s attention.

Here’s a straightforward summary for our students.

Would you like to increase your reading comprehension 20%?

TURN OFF THE MUSIC and read in silence.

Asking the Right (Narrow) Question

To sum up:

Perham and Currie’s study strongly suggests that listening to music with lyrics interferes with reading comprehension.

This study strongly suggests that listening to music during a task interferes with students’ creativity.

But, this study suggests that listening to upbeat music before a task increases creativity.

And, this study might — or might not — suggest that students who join band classes in high school improve in their ability to process language sounds … which might (or might not) have beneficial academic effects.

In other words: to understand the relationship between music and learning, we need to ask narrow, precise questions.

When students say “I study better with music because, Mozart Effect,” we can say:

a) we’ve got good research showing that’s not true,

and

b) we can’t extrapolate from very tentative Mozart findings to your homework.

One final point deserves emphasis.

I understand the desire to say: “students should study music because it helps them do this other thing better.”

I’d rather say: “everyone should make music, because it connects us to our humanity and to each other.”

Mozart or Frank Ocean or Thrash Metal. Bring it on…

Overcoming Potential Perils of Online Learning
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
June 10, 2019

Overcoming Potential Perils of Online Learning

Read More

Online learning offers many tempting — almost irresistable — possibilities. Almost anyone can study almost anything from almost anywhere.

What’s not to love?

A tough-minded response to that optimistic question might be:

“Yes, anyone can study anything, but will they learn it?”

More precisely: “will they learn it roughly as well as they do in person?”

If the answer to that question is “no,” then it doesn’t really matter that they undertook all that study.

Rachael Blasiman and her team wanted to know if common at-home distractions interfere with online learning.

So: can I learn online while…

…watching a nature documentary?

…texting a friend?

…folding laundry?

…playing a video game?

…watching The Princess Bride?

Helpful Study, Helpful Answers

To answer this important and practical question, Blasiman’s team first had students watch an online lecture undistracted. They took a test on that lecture, to see how much they typically learn online with undivided attention.

Team Blasiman then had students watch 2 more online lectures, each one with a distractor present.

Some students had a casual conversation while watching. Others played a simple video game. And, yes, others watched a fencing scene from Princess Bride.

Did these distractions influence their ability to learn?

On average, these distractions lowered test scores by 25%.

That is: undistracted students averaged an 87% on post-video quizzes. Distracted students averaged a 62%.

Conversation and The Princess Bride were most distracting (they lowered scores by ~30%). The nature video was least distracting — but still lowered scores by 15%.

In case you’re wondering: men and women were equally muddled by these distractions.

Teaching Implications

In this case, knowledge may well help us win the battle.

Blasiman & Co. sensibly recommend that teachers share this study with their students, to emphasize the importance of working in a distraction-free environment.

And, they encourage students to make concrete plans to create — and to work in — those environments.

(This post, on “implementation intentions,” offers highly effective ways to encourage students to do so.)

I also think it’s helpful to think about this study in reverse. The BAD news is that distractions clearly hinder learning.

The GOOD news: in a distraction-free environment, students can indeed start to learn a good deal of information.

(Researchers didn’t measure how much they remembered a week or a month later, so we don’t know for sure. But: we’ve got confidence they had some initial success in encoding information.)

In other words: online classes might not be a panacea. But, under the right conditions, they might indeed benefit students who would not otherwise have an opportunity to learn.

I’ve just learned that both of Dr. Blasiman’s co-authors on this study were undergraduates at the time they did the work. That’s quite unusual in research world, and very admirable! [6-11-19]

Handshakes at the Door: Hype, or Helpful?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
June 03, 2019

Handshakes at the Door: Hype, or Helpful?

Read More

You’ve seen the adorable videos. Teachers have special handshakes they use to greet students as they enter the classroom. For instance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0jgcyfC2r8

I can’t help but smile when I see a video like that. What could set a better mood to start an academic day?

Of course, I’d smile even more if we had research to show such a strategy might be effective.

Well, let me shake your hand this morning with good news: we do have such research.

Beyond Cute Videos

All teachers recognize the problem. In the hallway between classes, students revel in their freedom. We want them to settle down and get working.

How can we best make that vital tonal transition happen?

A large research team investigated a proactive strategy they call “positive greetings at the door.” The strategy focuses on two steps:

First: greeting each student positively at the door: “Good morning, Dan — great hat!”

Second: offering “precorretive” reminders: “We’re starting with our flashcards, so be sure to take them out right away.”

The researchers trained five teachers (in sixth, seventh, and eighth grades) in these strategies.

Happily, the researchers did a great job to ensure the validity of their research. For instance, the control group was not merely five other teachers going about “business as usual.” Instead, this control group was also trained by school administrators in other classroom management strategies.

In other words: all ten teachers got training. Five practiced “positive greetings”; five practiced “attention control.” Overall, more than 200 students were in these classrooms.

The Envelope Please

What effect did all these greetings and all these proactive reminders have?

Researchers video-taped classes before and after these trainings.

For the control group, little changed. Time on task was in the mid-to-high 50%, while disruptive behaviors took place about 15% of the time.

For the positive greeting group, researchers saw big changes.

Time on task went from the high-50% to more than 80% of the time.

Disruptive behaviors fell from ~15% to less than 5% of the time.

All that from positive greetings.

Will This Strategy Work for Each of Us?

Researchers chose classrooms that were both racially and economically diverse.

At the same time, they asked principals to nominate classes that had seen higher-than-average levels of disruption.

That is: if your class is already well behaved, you might not see much of a change. (Of course, if your class is already well behaved, you don’t really need much of a change.)

Another important point: the video above shows a teacher demonstrating verve and drama. If that level of energy doesn’t match your style, don’t worry. You DO NOT need a big performance to make the strategy work.

You can keep it simple and quiet.

Stand at the door. Greet students by name. Perhaps shake their hands. Give them proactive reminders of how to start well.

The volume level doesn’t matter. Your daily personal reconnection with each student does the work.

Constructivism: In The Brain, In The Classroom
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
June 01, 2019

Constructivism: In The Brain, In The Classroom

Read More

In this helpfully provocative post, Mike Hobbiss argues that we often misapply the theory of constructivism.

For Hobbiss, the theory makes perfect sense when describing learning. However, he  worries that constructivism is unlikely to be helpful as a theory of pedagogy.

As he argues, drawing on extensive neuroscientific research, we can help students construct their own understandings by creating multiple, partial, and overlapping mental schema.

That kind of “constructivism as learning” might not be best fostered by “constructivism as teaching.”

Hobbiss offers this potentially controversial argument in measured and thoughtful tones. Even if you disagree with him — perhaps especially if you disagree with him — his ideas merit a careful read.

But Does It Work In The Classroom? (A Hint: YES!)
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
May 30, 2019

But Does It Work In The Classroom? (A Hint: YES!)

Read More

Teachers who follow brain research have probably heard of “interleaving.”

This teaching strategy encourages us to mix up different kinds of practice problems, rather than sort them tidily into distinct bunches.

Imagine, for instance, that your math curriculum includes these four units:

A: graphing lines

B: calculating the area of circles

C: simplifying expressions

D: solving inequalities

I might be tempted to have have my students review graphing one night. The next night, they would focus on circles. The next, they would simplify expressions. And so forth. (Researchers call this “blocking.”)

Or, I could have them practice all four skills each night. (“Interleaving.”)

So, does blocking or interleaving help students learn better?

One Useful (but Incomplete) Answer

We have “known” the answer to this question for a long time.

The answer is: interleaving. By a lot.

When students interleave while practicing, they learn information more durably.

However, the verb “know” is in quotation marks above because we “know” that answer in a very particular setting.

The best-known research of interleaving took place in a college psychology lab.

Students learned formulas to calculate the volumes of irregular solids. Those who interleaved practice did better on a quiz two weeks later than those who blocked.

To be clear: this is a great study. (I always show it when I talk about interleaving with teachers. The graphs get gasps — really!)

But: does interleaving work for K-12 students? Does it work for anything other than irregular solids?

And, crucially: does it work beyond 2 weeks? We want our students to remember for months — even years. Two weeks is nice, but…we’re actually curious about much longer periods of time.

A Second (Much More Complete) Answer

Doug Rohrer’s team have just published a study looking at real-life interleaving in real-life classrooms.

They worked in five different schools, with fifteen different teachers, and almost 800 7th graders.

And, the test covered quite different topics — the four listed at the top of this post: graphing lines, calculating areas, simplifying expressions, solving inequalities.

And, get this: the study lasted for several MONTHS. From the first interleaved practice set to the final test was something like 145 days.

The results: the students who interleaved remembered more than those who blocked. By a lot.

(If you’re statsy, you’ll be impressed to know that the Cohen’s d averaged 0.68. For an intervention that costs basically nothing, that’s HUGE.)

In addition to these data, Rohrer &  Co. gathered information from an anonymous teacher survey.

They got lots of good news. For instance:

14 teachers agreed (or strongly agreed) that interleaving raises scores.

13 thought it helped low-achieving students. (15 thought it helped high-achieving students.)

11 said they could use interleaving without changing the way they usually teach.

12 said other teachers can do it with little or no instruction.

(Check out page 9 for further survey results.)

Why Does Interleaving Work?

Rohrer’s team offers two answers to this question.

First, interleaved practice automatically produces two other benefits: spacing and retrieval practice.

Second, think for a minute about blocking. If students do practice problems that all require the same strategy (aka, blocking), then they have to execute that strategy. But, as Rohrer points out:

“Interleaved practice requires students to choose a strategy and not merely execute a strategy.”

This additional level of desirable difficulty requires students to practice selecting strategies: an essential part of using learning in the real world.

In Sum:

Rohrer’s study concludes with a few caveats.

Interleaving probably takes (a little) more time than blocking.

It probably has less of an effect over shorter periods of time. That is: you’ll see bigger results on chapter tests and year-end assignments than on weekly quizzes.

Crucially: students probably need a little blocked practice early on to get hold of a topic or concept. We shouldn’t start interleaving while initially explaining an idea.

But, the headlines focus on great news.

Interleaving works with real students in real classrooms. It’s easy to add to our teaching habits. It costs almost nothing. And: it genuinely helps students learn.

 

 

 

[A Specific] Movement Helped [Specific] Students Learn [A Specific] Thing
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
May 23, 2019

[A Specific] Movement Helped [Specific] Students Learn [A Specific] Thing

Read More

Can Movement Teach Math?

Here’s a vital question: How can we help young students learn math better?

We’ve got decades of research showing that children who understand a number line do better at many math tasks than those who don’t. In fact, when we teach them to understand the number line, they get better at those math tasks.

Researchers in Germany wondered if movement might help kindergarteners understand the basic principles of a number line.

That is: By moving their whole bodies to the left, they could see numbers get smaller. By moving their whole bodies to the right, they could see numbers get bigger.

Does this kind of bodily movement help children think about numbers and math?

The short answer: yes.

When students compared numbers simply by checking boxes, they didn’t get better at various numerical measurements. When they compared numbers by moving left or right on a dance mat, they did — at least on some measurements.

The specific application of this principle will depend on you and your students. But, to get the conversation started, we can say:

Having kindergarteners manipulate a number line by moving left and right helped them understand some basic math better.

Specifics Matter

I’ve seen lots of enthusiasm lately about movement in classrooms. While I’m all in favor of allowing — even encouraging movement — I think we need to be precise and careful about the arguments for doing so.

The study cited above does NOT show that “movement helps students learn.” Instead, it shows that a particular movement helped particular students learn a particular topic.

Remember, earlier research had showed the importance of the number line. The researchers weren’t testing movement just because movement seemed cool. They tested it because the physical reality of a number line makes this idea so plausible.

Imagine, instead, that the study methodology described above were used to teach students about colors.

Of course, unlike the number line, colors aren’t an especially spatial concept. So, it’s not obvious that this same teaching technique would have benefits for this kind of learning goal.

To be clear: my point is not that movement is a bad idea. Instead, we should understand clearly why this movement will benefit these students while they learn this topic.

Maybe a particular movement fits with a particular cognitive process — as in the number-line example.

Maybe movement helps re-energize droopy students.

Maybe you’ve seen thoughtful research showing that students did better learning parts of speech (say) when they did hand gestures along with them.

In each of these cases, you’ve got a good reason to incorporate movement into the lesson plan. We should not, however, default to a sweeping statement that students must move to learn.

Your own teaching (and learning) experiences may show that — at times — quiet, motionless concentration create the very best learning environment.

 

Older posts
Newer posts