Teach to How Students Learn Best

Carole L Hamilton

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This presentation shares new findings in cognitive science and empirical studies that can help students learn more effectively and with greater retention.

Accommodating these new insights

will require a new approach to teaching—one that is more rewarding to teachers as well as students.

Teachers work hard—but don’t

always teach how to think.

“Our common teaching-learning-testing strategies are rooted in outdated assumptions about how children and adolescents learn.” (VanSledright)

“Classrooms are too often places of ‘tell and practice’…In such classrooms, little thinking is happening.” (Ritchhardt, Church, and Morrison)

Why do we we still base our lessons on a 19th

century understanding of how people learn?

Here are the three insights from cognitive

science that can revolutionize your teaching.

1) People like to think and learn best when they figure things out themselves, rather than being told.

2) We think by analogy. Information is more easily retrieved from memory if it is attached to an analogy.

3) Students must engage meaningfully with the Threshold Concepts in our disciplines that students find difficult to master.

1. People Like to Think

“People like to think—or more properly,

we like to think if we judge that the mental

work will payoff with the pleasurable

feeling we get when we solve a problem.” ( Willingham)

Do we allow our students to wrestle with

meaningful concepts?

2. We learn by analogy. Analogy

is “the Core of Cognition.” (Hofstadter)

“Triangular

Trade”

Analogies

create visual

mental maps

that organize

information

efficiently.

3. Students must engage

meaningfully with the Threshold

Concepts that are central to our

disciplines.

Threshold Concepts are the central, defining truths in a given discipline, the ideas that open a gateway to deeper understanding. These

are the essential, indispensable

elements, the understandings that

transform the novice into a true

practitioner of the field.

Organize your course around

Threshold Concepts

“The fact that experts’ knowledge is organized around important ideas or concepts suggests that curricula should also be organized in ways that lead to conceptual understanding.” (Donovan, Bransford, and Pellegrino).

Do we allow students to fully understand threshold concepts when we move quickly from topic to topic?

Students have to discover Threshold

Concepts themselves.

They start by defending their ideas.

They work together to draw a model

that represents their theory.

The best diagrams make an analogy.

The key is that students do the thinking.

And they express their theory or

thesis using an analogy.

“Fitzgerald believed that society, in an attempt to create the American Dream, merely created a façade of frivolity, lavishness, and happiness behind which they could hide their inadequacies and sorrow.” (11th

grade AP English class)

Analogies Work!

The students’ analogy of a façade

organizes information from and about

The Great Gatsby” in a way they will

easily remember.

Threshold Concepts Change

Students’ Way of Thinking

They begin to think more like

practitioners in the discipline than

like novices. They begin to see

important implications of the

concept that enrich their

understanding.

In fact, once students pass

through that gateway of

understanding, there is no going

back to prior beliefs.

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Implementing these ideas requires

Organizing the course around

Threshold Concepts.

Changing lessons so that students

spend more time making and

defending theories.

Building in time for students to develop

meaningful analogies.

Want to Learn More?

You can buy my book, Read My Mind: Teaching to How Students Learn on Amazon Kindle, for $3.99. The book explains these concepts in more depth, offers sample Threshold Concepts and student challenge lessons from many disciplines, and includes excerpts from cognitive science findings about how students learn best.

Carole L Hamilton

Works Cited

Donovan, M. Suzanne, John D. Bransford, and James W.

Pellegrino. How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice.

National Academies Press. 2000. Print.

Ritchhardt, Ron, Mark Church, and Kristin Morrison. Making

Thinking Visible: How to Promote Engagement, Understanding,

and Independence for All Learners. Jossey-Bass. 2011. Print.

VanSledright, Bruce A. Assessing Historical Thinking and

Understanding: Innovative Designs for New Standards.

Routledge. 2013. Print.

Willingham, Daniel T. Why Don’t Students Like School? A

Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions about How The Mind

Works and What It Means for the Classroom. Jossey-Bass. 2010.

Print.