Three Powerful Lessons from Psychology To Change How You Plan Lesson Content (Part 3/7)
This is the third story in a series of posts about how learning science insights can improve course design. The other stories are linked within and included at the end of this post.
We can talk about learning science until we’re blue in the face, but the real meat and potatoes of teaching is content.
Exactly what is it that we’re teaching?
Turns out, learning science has something to say about that.
From choosing content, to knowing what students need to do with that content, to figuring out how to break down that content, to understanding how to organize the content, learning science has insights.
First: choosing content. This one goes back to goals and objectives and assessment. When we start with a conceptual focus and have a conceptual assessment, we can more easily choose content that helps us teach the concepts. Should the English department assign The Hate U Give or A Thousand Splendid Suns? Should the history department teach the French or American revolution? These decisions are based on which content best helps students understand the concepts.
And often the answer is that different content can teach the same concepts. So teachers can choose.
In many classrooms, students can choose.
This is very powerful for differentiation, as students no longer have to read the same text or study the same conflict in order to pass the course. Now student conversations can be richer and more nuanced as they present how the content they studied highlights the conceptual focus.
A discussion about girls’ power in society is much richer when students compare Starr’s experience in Garden Heights and Mariam’s experience in Kabul.
The details of who fought against whom matter little when students focus on what forces drive people to rebel against the government.
Does this mean that content doesn’t matter at all?
Clearly, it does. Learning science very explicitly shows the importance of prior knowledge in student learning [1]. Teachers should have a good idea of what content students learned before so they can build on students’ prior knowledge. And they should have a good idea of where students are going, so they can choose content wisely.
Prior knowledge matters for content [2]. But prior knowledge also matters a lot for general reading skills [3]. The more information students know, the better they read, since they can make inferences, understand nuance, critique arguments. So choosing content wisely helps students be better readers throughout their lives.
Context also matters [4]. Students make connections to what they know, so content that can link to students’ reality might be a better place to start than content that is totally foreign.
And assessment matters [2]. If students will need to understand the processes involved in revolution, they probably don’t need to memorize the names of the major Jacobins. If students are writing a research paper on historical figures in literature, they may not need to learn every metaphor and simile used in a text.
Depth of Study
Learning science reinforces what teachers already knew: there’s more than one way to teach content. Remember Bloom’s taxonomy? It was expanded in 2001 to draw attention to several ways of teaching [5].
We can teach content factually, making sure students know information and details. We can teach content conceptually, making sure students make links between the big picture and details we present. We can teach content procedurally, making sure students can follow the steps required to solve a specific type of problem.
And we can emphasize metacognition: We can teach content conditionally, making sure students know when to apply their knowledge to solve problems. We can teach content critically, making sure students ask questions and engage with the assumptions and arguments presented. We can teach students to be self-aware, monitoring their understanding of content as well as their understanding of themselves.
Sometimes we should be teaching at all levels. Sometimes, one of those levels is the most appropriate one.
As teachers, we should be crystal clear what level we need students to learn.
We should also be aware of the implied hierarchy within these levels. Students struggle to follow a procedure if they know nothing about the content. Some amount of declarative or conceptual teaching comes before procedural instruction. Similarly, students struggle to know which problem-solving strategy to use when if they don’t know the problem-solving strategies.
Tying It Together
Choosing content isn’t just a matter of thinking about which facts, skills, and processes students will learn. It also involves knowing how deeply we want students to process the content.
Is it enough for them to know the factual information and recall it on a test? Do we want students to be able to apply their knowledge in a variety of different situations? Do we want students to know which process to follow for different types of problems? Do we want our students to think about the most appropriate approach for a given question, evaluating evidence and selecting the information that makes the most compelling argument?
We need to know this and we need to communicate this to our students.
Task Analysis
Many of the things we ask students to do are very complex and require lots of separate skills and steps. You might be thinking to yourself: Yeah, this is easy. Of course I teach solving one step equations before moving on to two-step equations. Of course I teach essay writing before assigning the first essay.
But actually, research consistently shows that once we know how to do something — once we’ve become experts in our fields — we have a really hard time breaking that skill down.
Partly this is because experts tend to chunk their thinking differently than novices. Experts tend to see more patterns, identify underlying conceptual and structural relationships, and create cognitive ‘chunks’ out of lots of steps which have become second nature to us [6].
Partly this is because of human biases: once we know something, we forget what it was ever like to not know it.
Some skills we explicitly break down because it’s clear that students need small chunks to learn. Learning how to read or other foundational skills fall into this category.
As teachers we often assume that our students have many other skills. Time management and effective study strategies, for example. Knowledge of how to write an essay, for example.
We think that those are natural skills that ‘good students’ will pick up. We forget that we had to actively practice these skills.
We had to try out new time management strategies. We had to test study skills to see what worked for us. We had to try out various approaches to writing essays to see what worked best. We had to get feedback — from teachers, parents, ourselves, our peers — throughout this process.
We had to learn these skills.
Here’s the good news: if we know how hard it is for experts to break things down, we can take steps to improve.
We can read extensively to see what others have done. How others approach similar tasks. How other experts have broken down the steps.
We can work with others who aren’t experts in our fields in order to get a feel for whether we’ve broken something down enough.
We can ask students for feedback — and of course, observe their behavior and success — to see where there are gaps and where students struggle to think like an expert.
We can iterate — over and over and over — to improve our practice.
Tying It Together
When choosing content we need to be aware of our expert blind-spots. We may not be aware of just how much we take for granted.
In addition to our curricular content, we need to think about the skills we need to be teaching. We need to break those skills down into pieces that are appropriate for novices. And we need to treat that content with as much value as our disciplinary content.
Interleaving
Usually, when we select content to teach, we teach it until the students have mastered it. Then move on to the next content. Our units are designed this way. Our tests are designed this way.
Learning science suggests that this is not the most effective way to learn. Instead, if we switch up our learning and practice so that we’re reviewing previously-learned material and learning new material concurrently, it’s better for our learning [1, 7].
Adding and multiplying fractions is a good example. Typical approaches to teaching fractions are to first teach adding and subtracting fractions, practicing them in class, in homework, and on quizzes before a fractions test. Then teacher would move on to multiplication and division of fractions, again teaching, practicing, assessing.
Perfect: we’ve taught two skills, practiced two skills, students have demonstrated mastery of two skills.
But then we get to a more complex question where students have to do both and suddenly they’ve forgotten. Do we need to find a common denominator? Do we need to multiply or add by the reciprocal?
Now imagine we restructured our teaching. We introduce adding and subtracting fractions, practice until students are confident, but have not yet attained mastery. We introduce multiplying and dividing fractions.
This is important: embedded within the practice of multiplying and dividing fractions are additional addition and subtraction problems.
So our students practice each skill AND they practice the differences between the skills.
But this approach requires that we think carefully about our content, to see not only what specific pieces we want to teach, but also how those pieces are connected to other content that we want to interleave.
We can interleave practice, as in the example with fractions.
We can also interleave instruction.
Instead of thinking about lessons as one chunk, think about it in smaller sections — part of the lesson for new information, part of the lesson interleaving previously learned information, part of the lesson strengthening memory through retrieval practice.
It can be uncomfortable, though. Uncomfortable for us, as teachers. And uncomfortable for our students.
We’re used to finishing things before moving on to the next. Interleaving requires that you don’t finish — yet. That you introduce new content while you’re still working on other content.
That you switch your focus before things have come totally into focus.
Tying It Together
Planning for content includes identifying the depth of thinking we require. Planning for content involves breaking down the concepts and skills for novices. And planning for content involves thinking about how we will structure that content to maximize how we learn.
All of these may be uncomfortable. But all of these help students learn.
The Take-Away
Content in a Nutshell
When people think of curriculum design, they often just think about content. But content is just one of many factors — and in fact it relies on many of the other factors. Without clear objectives and assessments, choosing content is largely arbitrary.
Instead, we should plan content based on the concepts we’re teaching.
We should ensure the content matches the level of learning we require. And we should consider how the various levels of learning interact so that we give students the tools to access all of the levels we require.
We need to think deeply about how we, as experts, understand the content. Then break that down — more and more — because novices approach content very differently from the way experts do.
And we should consider mixing up our content — even if it makes us uncomfortable — so that our students can better differentiate between similar tasks and learn better.
Related Posts
How Insights from Learning Science Can Transform Your Teaching (Part 1/7)
Three Insights From Learning Science to Structure Your Lessons Better (Part 2/7)
What Learning Science Says About How to Teach (Part 4/7)
How You Can Use a Top-Ten Instructional Strategy to Boost Learning (Part 5/7)
The Surprising Ways Thinking About Learning Can Impact Learning (Part 6/7)
Rethinking Testing: Better Ways to Use Assessment to Improve Learning (Part 7/7)
Teaching in a Pandemic: How Learning Science can Help (Part 8/7)
Prior Knowledge: Why It Matters and What We Can Do
References
- American Psychological Association, 2015. Top 20 Principles from Psychology for PreK-12 Teaching and Learning. Washington DC, American Psychological Association.[Links].
- Ambrose, S. A., Bridges, M. W., DiPietro, M., Lovett, M. C., & Norman, M. K. (2010). How learning works: Seven research-based principles for smart teaching. John Wiley & Sons.
- Willingham, D. T. (2017). The reading mind: a cognitive approach to understanding how the mind reads. John Wiley & Sons.
- Alexander, P. A. (2005). Psychology in learning and instruction. Prentice Hall.
- Anderson, L. W., & Krathwohl, D. R. (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives. New York: Longman.
- Ericsson, A., & Pool, R. (2016). Peak: Secrets from the new science of expertise. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
- Carpenter, S. K. (2014). Spacing and Interleaving of Study and Practice. In V. A. Benassi, C. E. Overson & C. M. Hakala (Eds), Applying science of learning in education: Infusing psychological science into the curriculum (pp. 59–70). Retrieved from the Society for the Teaching of Psychology website: http://teachpsych.org/ebooks/asle2014/index.php
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Stephanie Hepner has taught middle and high school special education/learning support and English in New York, Brussels, and Stockholm. She currently works in education in Singapore. An international educator committed to equity in education, she is passionate about learning science as it promises to improve learning for all students.
