As a kick-off to the Leonhard Center fall seminar series, Susan Ambrose led a discussion of her 2010 book, “How Learning Works: 7 Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching.” Susan is associate provost for education and director of the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence at Carnegie Mellon University. As the description of her book states, “Any conversation about effective teaching must begin with a consideration of how students learn. However, instructors may find a gap between resources that focus on the technical research on learning and those that provide practical classroom strategies. ‘How Learning Works’ provides the bridge for such a gap.” This seminar will provide an overview of the seven principles on how to improve students’ learning in the classroom.

This is a discussion that makes we wonder why practitioners in the classroom are not more aware of the real research that places like Carnegie Mellon are doing. Most of what was discussed was not new for those who teach and work to improve, but why make teachers have to learn everything through experience. I wish that I had sat through this discussion as a 1st year teacher.

Point Made: Improvement in teaching based on the following principles will make an instructor more efficient and effective.

Reflection: There was a question about the validity of becoming more efficient and effective. I thought Susan answered this brilliantly. She mentioned that often she uses a key to point out commonly made mistakes instead of marking each paper independently. This makes the process of grading more efficient and also gives her some data upon which to evaluate her teaching. My opinion is that there is always so much to do be effective as a teacher that any shortcut will only allow the instructor to focus on helping students even more in other areas or ways. To me as educators, we spend too much time on the mundane and details rather than looking at the bigger picture.

Point Made: (Paraphrased) Learning happens in that the student does and thinks. -Herb Simon

Reflection: How do we influence or facilitate that? I spent so much time putting together lesson plans and didn’t feel like I had the time to really reflect and make the adjustments to really improve. That is one reason why I’m doing more reflecting in my Instructional Design position.

Point Made: Needs to be a change in the paradigm from “How do we teach?” to “How do students learn?”

Reflection: This is where the importance of Cognitive Science comes into play. We need rely less on long-held assumptions and more on the research done on what really works.

Point Made: Prior knowledge helps or hinders

Reflection: There are several states of knowing that differ from the faculty to the student. As an example, students may think that they know something, but the knowledge that they have is inaccurate or inactive. It is important for educators to use valid prior knowledge or diagnose faulty prior knowledge to leverage this important tool to greater effect.

Point Made: “How prior knowledge is organized determines its access and use because organization can facilitate or interfere with retrieval, use, and further learning. If students have not organized prior information effectively, there is a good chance that they won’t be able to access it easily, if at all. Organization is a sophisticated cognitive task, so instructors need to model effective organization and provide practice for students to help them hone this skill:” – Ambrose

Reflection: When I was teaching, there was a specific instructor who was in charge of teaching study skills. One of the skills that was important was the use of visual models to organize thought. I really didn’t know much about this. As a math instructor, I was used to using tables and charts, but I never really thought about how organizational models could help my students to develop a deeper understanding of content. Susan used a great example of starting a class by having students make an organizer about Mexican Immigration as a pre-activity. Then during the course, she revisits this activity. This helps the students practice analytical skills and shows the teacher what is being learned.

Point Made: Student motivation determines, directs, and sustains what they do to learn.

Reflection: Motivation is often a dirty word in education. In my experience, I saw otherwise. Susan mentioned 2 important components of motivation, expectancy and value. Expectancy refers to fairness and consistency. Does a student believe that they have a chance to succeed? Value refers to whether a student believes that what they are learning is important to them. Both of these are perception-based from the student perspective. Motivation and student perception are important. These two elements were sort of overlooked. I wish I could have known that there is research to back this up. It would have impacted how I operated in a profound way.

Point Made: It’s important to find the “sweet spot” of not being too easy or too hard for maximum student motivation.

Reflection: This involves a lot of listening, observation, and reflection. Not sure how well I did this because I was often more worried about covering information instead of teaching the content.

Point Made: Goal-oriented activities coupled with targeted feedback enhance the quality of student learning.

Reflection: I have a vision of a ton of trial and error here. It’s definitely a process that works on refining the skill of giving student the proper activities for success.

Point Made: To develop mastery, students must acquire component skills, practice integrating them and applying them.

Reflection: This is where I should have depended less on textbooks for assignments. Everything in the book was so separated. It would have been better to come up with problem sets that were more valuable than the 20-50 problems that would be assigned without context.

Point Made: As mastery develops and students gradually gain competence within a domain, they first gain and then lose conscious awareness of the skills and capabilities they are exercising.

Reflection: When I was teaching math, it was difficult for me to separate the practice from the application and integration of concepts because I’ve mastered the topic. Somehow, that was something that I was blind to. Susan called this the expert blind spot. I stumbled upon the solution to this problem by having student tutors. It makes a lot of sense to do this because they understand each other and their needs. Plus it was good for me to watch the interaction to help inform my teaching from techniques and strategies that I could learn from them.

Point Made: Students current level of development interacts with the social, emotional, and intellectual climate of the course to impart learning.

Reflection: Learning doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Keeping in mind all of the circumstances and issues that a learner is dealing with is essential to helping them understand the material. As a teacher, I always felt like we were to take away the outside “distractions.” But this really resonates with me now.

Point Made: To become self-directed learners, students must learn to monitor and adjust their approaches to learning.

Reflection: Instead of fostering an environment with challenges that lead to learning and self-improvement, I saw many who were more interested in showing their success. Making mistakes and overcoming obstacles is the stuff of living.

Point Made: (In reference to the push to add more and more technology to education) We need to move from actively engaged to meaningfully engaged.

Reflection: This reminded me of the SEQUEL project that I was involved in. In this course, we focused on how to use technology to improve understanding. You have to do more than just throw technology at students; you must do it in a way that it improves learning and understanding.

Great session! Really enjoyed it!