Powerful Classrooms: Evidence-informed Strategies and Resources

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by Patrice Bain. Patrice is an educator, speaker, and author who was a finalist for Illinois Teacher of the Year. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Russia, and she's been featured in national and international webinars, podcasts, articles. and media. She was asked by the Department of Education a number of years ago to work with cognitive scientists to co-author Organizing Instruction and Study to Improve Student Learning. And she is the co-author of Powerful Teaching, Unleash the Science of Learning.

[00:46]

And she's the author of the new book, A Parent's Guide to Powerful Teaching, which we're here to talk about today.

[00:53] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:55] SPEAKER_00:

Patrice, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:57] SPEAKER_01:

Thank you so much, Justin, for having me.

[00:59] SPEAKER_00:

Well, I'm so excited to speak with you because your classroom, your own classroom as a middle school teacher, was literally the research laboratory for some of the most important work that's been done on the science of learning. And you've written one book on that already. And now you've written a second book explaining and translating much of that work for parents. But I wonder if we could start just with the research project, because I think in our profession, we have such a tendency to go on secondhand information about what works and secondhand information about what the science says. And often, by the time we put it into practice, it doesn't really match what the state of the art, you know, what the research says. So the research being done in your classroom, I think, is such an exciting concept.

[01:43]

And I'm so excited to speak with you about it. Take us into that project a little bit about the science of learning.

[01:49] SPEAKER_01:

Thank you, Justin. Well, up until about 2006, most research that was done on how people learn was done at universities, with college students, in laboratories. And doctors Henry Roediger and Dr. Mark McDaniel had this brilliant idea. What if we studied how students learn in an authentic classroom? And so they obtained a large grant and the classroom where this research started was mine.

[02:25]

And Pooja Agarwal also came and she worked with me directly in my classroom every day. And we started, our first study was on retrieval. The research just continued. I have over 25 years. I already had 10 years under my belt before the research began. So You know, I had a good idea about teaching and about students and learning.

[02:52]

But having this research was rich, you know, because of Drs. Roediger and McDaniel. You know, it was robust research. It was very well done. And I learned so much. And because of that, I was able to take this research and develop strategies.

[03:14]

So my classroom was not only research for them, but it was research for me, how to bring about strategies that really implemented this research. And As I taught, I realized there's another really important group besides the teacher and the student. But those parents became really important. And I called it the teaching triangle. And the book that started writing itself in my mind was actually this book for parents. But instead, as sometimes it happens, the first book that came out was Powerful Teaching that was based on this research of retrieval and spacing and interleaving and metacognition, the strategies around it.

[04:12]

And my parent guide that just came out a couple months ago. And I wrote it during the pandemic because I saw how parents were really struggling with their child's learning. It doesn't have to be that way. A quote from Powerful Teaching was I wrote that if a child is struggling, It's so important for a parent to feel empowered rather than defeated. And part of this teaching triangle is empowering all of us so that the student has success.

[04:53] SPEAKER_00:

Well, I don't want to step on the toes of your other book or pull too much from it in order to be able to focus on the new book. But I wonder if we could talk just for a minute about the importance of memory and retrieval, because I think those are concepts that have been downplayed in recent years. emphasized, you know, engagement and hands-on learning and understanding and things other than memory. And I know a lot of Henry's research and Mark's research and the research that's gone into your books now has focused on retrieval and on memory. Why are those so important as concepts for us to understand as parents and educators? Because I feel like they really don't get the attention that perhaps they deserve.

[05:32] SPEAKER_01:

I agree. In the book, Make It Stick, written by Roediger and McDaniel and Peter Brown, they have a great quote in there. And it is, learning that's easy is like writing in sand, here today and gone tomorrow. And too often, we want learning to be easy rather than difficult. But what research shows is that Our students need that struggle, this desirable difficulty in order to get the learning into long-term memory, where they can retrieve it, where they can combine it, build these schemas of learning. Too often, for example, What I discovered in my classroom was that my students had mastered doing homework, meaning they had mastered reading a question, looking up an answer, writing it down, and repeating.

[06:39]

But they didn't know the information. They could score 100% on homework. They could score 100% on tests. We couldn't discuss it. I couldn't get them to the critical thinking level. And that's where I really started to understand how we have to get information from simple recall in your working memory to retrieval from a long-term memory.

[07:11]

And once I realized that and started building strategies around that, Everything changed in my classroom. We had deep discussions. In fact, it was, I think, a bit humorous. But whenever we would start a new chapter, a new unit, I would write an essential question on the board. And more often than not, my students would giggle and say, Mrs. Bain, like we're ever going to be able to answer that.

[07:43]

But they did. And, you know, these were I'm talking about learning with 11 year olds where they could they could discuss how social pyramids changed as a result of different revolutions through history, you know, really taking it to a deeper level. And so I think part of part of learning has to be that students have these schemas that they can connect the dots. that they can critically think. And I think too often that boat is missed.

[08:22] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Well, let's talk about critical thinking a little bit because certainly if we're given a choice between, do you want your students to have good factual recall or do you want your child to be a good critical thinker? If there's a dichotomy there, I think we would want them to be critical thinkers, but it sounds like that's not really the way that it works. So what's that relationship between recall and critical thinking? And what are some of the misconceptions that you see around those concepts?

[08:48] SPEAKER_01:

I think a common misconception is that retrieval is simply recall. It's not like that. But I keep talking about these schemas, this putting together of knowledge. you do need to have factual knowledge. But what I found was it doesn't stop there. You know, for example, the example I already gave about revolutions, I would be able to talk about governments.

[09:18]

I would be able to talk about revolutions. But my students, it wasn't like, okay, well, this revolution happened and give me a date. And the leader was, and give me the name of a person. But they could see why revolutions occurred. What was happening to, for example, in the French Revolution, the Third Estate, Or, you know, to middle class people. What are those similarities?

[09:49]

So it takes the information from, of course, they needed to have factual knowledge, but you're able to take it so much farther. And interleaving is a research principle where you're able to have students discriminate between similar topics, content. And so, you know, using in my book, Powerful Teaching, I talk about power tools. robust, researched principles of learning that when you use these in your classroom, yes, you have factual knowledge, but yes, you have critical thinking as well. You know, I often say when I'm giving presentations or even talking to parents or students, it's as teachers, we work too hard to have our students forget

[10:50]

what they've been taught, why not use the research that is available to us in order to really increase learning? And research shows that this happens. Students will retain knowledge. Another quote that I like to say is, Having parents and students aware of research allows all of us to be purposeful and intentional in studying and time isn't wasted. Too often, students might study really hard for exams and not do well. But research tells us exactly why that happens.

[11:33]

It's because often students study what they already know, and they haven't had the strategies of metacognition to help differentiate. what they know from what they don't. So they know where to focus their study. So all of these things, listen to me, I can go on and on and on, but I'm just so passionate because I've seen how this works. I've seen how students who would internalize failure totally turn it around and begin to internalize success.

[12:09] SPEAKER_00:

Well, Patrice, you were saying just a few moments ago that one of the reasons that often students don't do well on tests is that they study the material that they know the best, that they rehearse things, that they review their notes that they're most familiar with. And it's that information that... that they've started to forget that they're not studying effectively. I've seen some research that has suggested that practicing things that we're about to forget or that we have just forgotten or that we're just kind of on the edge of losing is really critical.

[12:42]

Talk to us a little bit about forgetting and studying and what parents need to know about the role of forgetting and rehearsal with that kind of less familiar material that might be a struggle on a test.

[12:52] SPEAKER_01:

Great question. There's actually something called a forgetting curve, which the idea has been around for over a hundred years. In a nutshell, what it says is as soon as we learn something, we're pretty good at knowing it. And right away, we start forgetting it. In fact, within 24 hours of You've already forgotten maybe 80% of it. And the longer you go without bringing forth this knowledge or retrieving this knowledge, the more you will forget it.

[13:31]

So research shows that when you have some new learning, a good time to retrieve it is the following day, and then three days later, and then perhaps a week or two later, and you are spacing out the retrieval. And that is a very effective way. If we teach something in September, and then it's on a semester exam in December, It's basically gone. And that's why students have to cram. And that's simply not necessary. By using retrieval and spacing out the information, having strategies for the students to discriminate if they know it or if they don't, that's metacognition.

[14:22]

By the time that semester exam comes along, students are ready. In fact, we did a study where over 1,500 high school students were asked, does using retrieval practice make you more or less anxious for unit tests? It was only 8% said they were more anxious. It simply doesn't happen. And what also shows is when we do cram, we may do well on the test the next day, but then it's gone. You know, think back to all your college courses where you crammed the night before.

[15:06]

How much of it do you remember?

[15:12]

Probably not too much. And that's not why we work so hard teaching. We want this knowledge to be retained. An exercise I like to use is If you get a chance, draw a circle on a piece of paper and do a quick sketch of a penny. You know, how many pennies have you seen in your lifetime? You know, hundreds, thousands.

[15:39]

And you know, even if you just do a stick figure, which way does the person face? Who is it? What writing is on there? Where's the writing? And even though you've seen something so often, it doesn't mean you know it. And to me, I think that is such a profound example because how often do we have our students, do we instruct our students, oh, go home and read over your notes.

[16:12]

Read that chapter in the book again. What you're doing, what we are doing when we do that is we are simply having this student look just like looking at a penny rather than having them retrieve the information. And that simple switch makes all the difference. Some strategy that I endorse being used at home or in the classroom is say a student has a study guide to complete. Rather than having them complete it with a book open, close the book, close your notes, and now fill it in. That helps the student understand what they know and what still needs focus.

[17:01]

So simple little tweaks in what we do makes such a big difference in learning.

[17:09] SPEAKER_00:

So the direction there of pulling the information out of your head versus rereading it, reviewing what you have in front of you, you're saying that itself is huge.

[17:19] SPEAKER_01:

And Pooja Agarwal has this great quote that is, so often we focus on getting information into our students' heads. What if instead, we focused on pulling information out. And that's retrieval.

[17:39] SPEAKER_00:

And that's learning. And yet I feel like quizzes and tests and, you know, semester tests, you know, cumulative tests where we're having students review things they learned a while ago. I feel like all of that has kind of gotten a bad rap in recent years. Like it almost feels old fashioned to say we need to teach kids how to be better quiz takers and test takers and review and have a semester. Like all of this just seems, you know, oh, don't we have more, you know, more modern strategies? But I mean, it sounds like this is very much at the heart of how learning actually works.

[18:11]

What's your take on, I don't know, maybe the unpopularity of quizzes and tests these days?

[18:16] SPEAKER_01:

Well, it's all in how you look at it, right? Because what I found, the example of how, when I talked earlier about how my students had mastered doing homework, that came about because Pooja and I The first year we worked together, we did a POP final exam. And it was POP because we did not want students to study for it. We didn't want any cramming. It did not go in the grade book, so it was fair. But we really wanted to know if retrieval had been used throughout the year.

[18:59]

What was the difference in how much they remembered at the end of the year? Things that had been retrieved, things that had not been retrieved. It was a great study. And what I found was that my top GPA student had only scored in the 50th percentile. You know, she had aced everything. And that's when I realized that she in particular had mastered homework that she hadn't been retrieving.

[19:34]

And so, you know, I fortunately that was a semester at the end of the year exam. So I had all summer to ponder. And what I did the following year, school year, was that I realized that my homework had not been effective. My homework had simply been study guides and, you know, look up answers. And so, you know, not all teachers can do this. But what I did is I quit giving homework.

[20:09]

And instead, I started every day with a mini quiz. which is what would have been homework, what we discussed in class, I put on little slips of paper. We would begin class with a mini quiz. It was so non-threatening. You know, it was In fact, I used recycled paper, little two by three inch pieces of cut up paper. They would number one through five.

[20:40]

I would just randomly pick out five questions. I would say them. They would write down answers. They would turn them in. I would go over the answers. So the beauty of this, remember that forgetting curve.

[20:56]

So I did this 24 hours later. So students were having opportunities to retrieve in that 24 hours. So I was using retrieval. I was using spacing. They could test their metacognition, whether they knew it or whether this still required study. But what happened, what I found throughout that first semester of no longer giving homework, but instead doing the mini quizzes, was that students started listening differently in class.

[21:31]

Because they knew now. They weren't, you know, trying to write down while I was talking or trying to fill in a study guide so they wouldn't have homework. But instead... we started having dialogues and they started listening differently because they knew that anything we talked about could be on a mini quiz the following day.

[21:54]

And that's when I started realizing that I could really start building this schema of knowledge. And that's where I started really being able to see the critical thinking aspects come through. And then at the end of the week, I would give what I called a BBQ or a big basket quiz, where it could be anything from the week from a month ago. And I asked 10 questions. And these were so non-threatening. The students really understood that these are the things that really help them learn.

[22:34]

And as they, you know, I still had essays, I still had tests. But the students' confidence rose. And by the end of that year, I didn't even use the term test anymore. I called them celebrations because the students had learned so much that we celebrated everything that they had learned.

[22:58] SPEAKER_00:

So the pop final exam, I have to say that's a phrase I've never heard before. But the idea there was to kind of eliminate the effect of cramming, right? To say, okay, what do students actually know? Not what did they review last night and pop back into their heads, but what are they taking away from this course? And if we're thinking about real life, what do students leave with? What knowledge are they going to take with them after they move on from us?

[23:23]

That's how it works, right? Life is a pop quiz on everything you know. We often see these abysmal studies or sometimes late night comedy shows where they'll ask basic scientific information or historical information of just people on the street. It's like, how do we not know this? How did we forget so much? How did we fail children?

[23:45]

And it seems like part of the answer, it seems, is that we're not providing enough of those opportunities for retrieval. We are providing lots of homework and activities and kind of review things that don't really demand that retrieval. As a result, we're not really setting kids up to retain what it is that we're teaching them, which theoretically should be a big concern, right? Fascinating.

[24:06] SPEAKER_01:

Every, every year, I would get so many emails from former students who were in college. who would say, oh, my professor brought something up and bam, I knew right away what they were talking about. You know, every year I got so many of those that this knowledge was in there. They remembered it. They could just rattle off things that they remembered.

[24:36] SPEAKER_00:

And it's slightly different than what students say. And I was a middle school science teacher. And I would often have students say, oh, yeah, I remember this. We did this in third grade. And then I would give different assessments. And I think, OK, well, you don't actually know this.

[24:47]

We still need to teach this. We can't skip this. So there's a difference between familiarity with, I remember having learned this in the past. And I actually still know it. I can actually recall this information accurately and explain the concepts. To me, that makes sense.

[25:03]

That clicks with my experience as a teacher.

[25:05] SPEAKER_01:

Yes. And to add to that, you know, when students tend to study really hard for a test and they don't do well, often when they are simply, again, looking at their books, looking at their notes, those things look familiar to them. And that's why they have this illusion of confidence that they're going to do well. And they don't. And, you know, as teachers, we know what it's like when we have students come in. Oh, I'm so pumped.

[25:36]

I'm so ready. I'm going to ace this task. And they're devastated when they don't. And what happens, eventually they quit studying because they don't get the payoff.

[25:47] SPEAKER_00:

Now, again, this is a parent's guide to powerful teaching. But just again, as a teacher, I have to ask one more thing, because something you just said there, Patrice, that I think is very important and very interesting is this idea of low stakes, right? The pop final exam and the daily pop quizzes did not affect the student's final grade, right? What was the rationale for that? And do students not care? Like, do they not take it seriously if it doesn't count?

[26:12]

How does that work?

[26:13] SPEAKER_01:

First of all, Low stakes or no stakes. If you have to give, just make it minimal points. But what I found, I always started my first day with, I'm your teacher and I'm going to teach you how to learn. And as students saw the strategies that I was using, they became so invested because they saw that these strategies, that learning worked. A quick story I had about those mini quizzes. I had a student's mom come in during parent-teacher conferences.

[26:52]

She was a little frustrated. She said, my son does not do well on these mini quizzes. And I asked him about it. And she said, do you know what he said to me? She said, oh, mom, don't worry about it. It was just, I wasn't able to retrieve it.

[27:10]

My metacognition was telling me I just couldn't retrieve it yet. And she said, what kind of an answer was that? And so I showed her every one of his test grades. He had gotten 100% on every single test. And she said, well, how about that? He really does know what he's talking about.

[27:31]

And so when you teach students how to learn, you know, they aren't threatened by if they didn't do well, but instead it's, oh, okay. Yeah. I need to work on that one a little bit more. And so you don't want to give quizzes as an aha, but instead it's, use them as a learning strategy. Teach your kids how to learn and they become very invested in the outcome.

[28:06] SPEAKER_00:

I love it. I think that's one of the most, to a lot of people, counterintuitive things about the science of learning and retrieval, that a low stakes quiz, being forced to retrieve information is is actually one of the best ways to make sure that it sticks. And I will refer our listeners to the podcast we did with Dr. Rittiger on his book, Make It Stick. A while back, you can find that on our website. So the book is A Parent's Guide to Powerful Teaching.

[28:33]

Patrice, if people want to learn more about your work or follow you online, where are some of the best places for them to go?

[28:38] SPEAKER_01:

I have a site, patricebane.com, that has different podcasts and articles that I've written, if you'd like more information. On Twitter, I'm at patricebane1. I love Twitter. I learn every single day from amazing educators that I follow. You know, my books are on Amazon and JohnCat.com.

[29:03]

The parent guide is also with John Cat. And I just don't want people to struggle with learning because the science of learning is here and it's now. And I know what it's like to have students successful. We can do this.

[29:21] SPEAKER_00:

Well, Patrice, thanks so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure.

[29:24] SPEAKER_01:

Oh, Justin, I get so passionate. I like can keep on talking forever. So thank you for helping be a mountaintop to share the science of learning.

[29:34] Announcer:

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