by Austin Volz HGSE EdM ‘13 and Julia Higdon HGSE EdM ‘12 and EdD ‘15, Staff, Avenues Research and Development
Education in general and teaching in particular involve significant complexity. They require navigating not only the complex science of how we learn, but also questions around such things as motivation, self-esteem, and preparing for an uncertain future. The Elements of Education is a concise toolkit to help navigate this difficult terrain. In the 50 chapters ranging from Self Assessment to Project Based Learning and from Intelligence to Direct Instruction, educators can find an introduction to the concept, one recommendation for further reading, practical Dos and Don’ts as well as a choice quote to inspire reflection. Each element is a short, but information rich, two pages.
As many are adapting their instruction and operations in response to COVID-19 measures, we want to remind teachers to focus on the foundation of how we learn while adapting to a new medium of instruction. We’ve selected three elements here to share with the Harvard Alumni for Education community.
Most helpful for teachers: Feedback
Feedback is one of the most important things that teachers do to help students learn. However, it can be burdensome, for teachers and students, and much of it is ineffective. What type of feedback is best and what amount of feedback is best?
While taxonomies of feedback abound, there are essentially two types of feedback: directive and facilitative. Through directive feedback, we provide concrete information to students and through facilitative feedback, we provide hints. The best type of feedback to provide depends on the difficulty of the task, the type of task, and the level and motivation of the student. Use directive feedback when the task is difficult, involves factual or procedural knowledge, when students are novices, or when they lack motivation at that moment. Deliver directive feedback as quickly as possible to build or sustain momentum. Use facilitative feedback when the task is relatively easy, involves transfer of concepts students have mastered to new contexts, involves abstract or metacognitive goals, when students are advanced, or when they have high motivation at that moment. Deliver facilitative feedback after a delay to allow students a chance to think first. Giving hints when a student is unmotivated, facing a difficult task, or learning something procedural can be frustrating and inefficient. Giving an answer when a student is motivated, advanced, or working on transferring knowledge from one context to another can be frustrating and demoralizing. Using the best type of feedback for the learner and the learning goals at hand can save a lot of irritation.
In both types of feedback, less is more. This should come as good news to the teachers who’ve stayed up all night writing feedback. Your goal when providing feedback is to give one or two pieces of information, or one or two hints, to allow students to take the next step in their learning. Copious or tangential feedback is a burden to produce and usually ignored.
Most surprising: Sleep Strategies
One of the biggest contributors to learning happens outside of school: sleep. As children enter their teenage years, their circadian rhythms change so that they are inclined to go to sleep later and wake up later as well. This change is called sleep phase delay. The table below shows the average length of sleep as well as wakeup and sleep times at different ages.
AGE (years) | DURATION (hours) | AVERAGE WAKE and SLEEP TIMES
3–5 | 11.5 | 7:00 am–7:30 pm
6–13 | 10 | 7:30 am–9:30 pm
14–17 | 9 | 8:45 am–11:30 pm
18–25 | 8 | 8:30 am–12:30 am
26–64 | 8 | 7:30 am–11:30 pm
64+ | 7.5 | 6:45 am–12:15 am
For teenagers and college-aged students, a school start time that is before 9:30am can result in significant drowsiness. In contrast, the effect of school start times after 9:30am has such a benefit that it is comparable to replacing a highly ineffective teacher with a highly effective teacher. While the logistical complexities of later start times should not be underestimated, setting an appropriate start time for teenagers and college students is one of the most overlooked ways to promote learning.
Most likely to change: Transfer
Transfer is at the heart of education. The goal is that students will be able to apply what they learn in class on Thursday afternoon to the situations they encounter outside school on Saturday evening. That is exactly what transfer means: the ability to transfer what is learned in one context to another, dissimilar context. Typically positive transfer is classified in two ways: near transfer for when the two contexts are similar (e.g. using the same reading comprehension strategies on two different texts) and far transfer for when the two contexts are not very similar (e.g. using the formula to calculate the volume of a cylinder to estimate the volume of a stadium).
The important thing to know about transfer is that it doesn’t just happen. As educators, we cannot assume that students’ practice on worksheets will automatically transfer to the world outside of school. More likely than not, it won’t. However, there are three main strategies you can use to help promote transfer.
Vary problem types- What is the best way to ensure that students transfer their learning outside of school? Provide them with opportunities to apply their learning in authentic contexts. For example, incorporate presentations to non-school audiences and design problems that resemble real-world applications. The greater the variety, the more likely transfer will occur.
Call out deep structures- Highlighting deep structures that apply across contexts and disciplines encourage students to bring their understanding to novel problems. For example, by calling out the difference between correlation and causation, students will be prepared to understand the concept across different sources of evidence and in different subjects.
Use analogies to bridge understanding- Analogies and metaphors can help students transfer their learning from one context to another context by providing a familiar bridge. For example, by using the analogous structure of the circulatory system when learning about traffic flows, students are more able to transfer learning to better understand the structure of similar systems.
The current concept of transfer depends on measuring the similarity between different contexts. As the research continues to develop, we suspect that we’ll see more sophisticated ways to measure different contexts and a deeper understanding of what teaching strategies best promote transfer.
3/50
The above are just a selection of 3 elements out of the 50 that are in our book. Education progress occurs not through educators adhering to one single approach, but through the ability to select the best tool for the job based on the best available evidence. If you’re hungry for more, the book is a good place to start. Feel free to reach out to Austin (austin.volz@avenues.org) or Julia (julia.higdon@aveues.org) with thoughts, insights, or questions.