# data[].attributes.body
James Lang interview

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Podcast (tihe_podcast): Play in new window | Download | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Google Play | Stitcher | RSS | How do I listen to a podcast?

On this week's episode, I learn about Small Teaching with Dr. James Lang.

James M. Lang is a professor of English and the Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College in Worcester, MA, where he teaches courses in British literature and in creative nonfiction writing. The author of five books and more than a hundred reviews or essays, on topics ranging from higher education to British literature, Lang writes a monthly column for The Chronicle of Higher Education, as well as contributing regularly to America and Notre Dame Magazine. He edits a series of books on teaching and learning in higher education for the University of West Virginia Press. He has delivered public lectures and faculty workshops at more than fifty colleges or universities in the United States and abroad. He is currently a roster member of the Fulbright Specialist Program in higher education, and available to partner with non-U.S. institutions for grant projects related to teaching, learning, or academic integrity in higher education.

Quotes

What I started to notice was that the coaches who paid attention to these little things, and focused on small fundamentals, tended to do a lot better than the teams that didn't.
-James Lang

I'm a big believer in the opening and closing minutes of class ... I think those are really ripe opportunities for small teaching.
-James Lang

I try to do framing activities to help the students realize the value of what we're doing.
-James Lang

Notes

Small Teaching: Small modifications in course design or communication with your students. These recommendations might not translate directly into 10-minute or one-time activities, but they also do not require radical rethinking of your courses. They might inspire tweaks or small changes in the way you organize the daily schedule of your course, write your course description or assignment sheets, or respond to the writing of your students.

Recommendations:
Bonni James
Are You Enjoying the Show?

1. Rate/review the show. Please consider rating or leaving a review for the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast on whatever service you use to listen to it on (iTunes, Stitcher, etc.). It is the best way to help others discover the show.

2. Give feedback. As always, I welcome suggestions for future topics or guests.

3. Subscribe. If you have yet to subscribe to the weekly update, you can receive a single email each week with the show notes (including all the links we talk about on the episode), as well as an article on either teaching or productivity.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On this week's episode, I learn about Small Teaching with Dr. James Lang. Guest: James Lang Author, Small Teaching* James M. Lang is a professor of English and the Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College in Worcester, MA, where he teaches courses in British literature and in creative nonfiction writing.

# data[].attributes.body
Essay by James Lang

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
When I first started teaching, the open space of a 50- or 75-minute class period seemed an eternity. Like many a new faculty member, I worried about having enough material. I wanted to ensure that, if discussion faltered or if I rushed through the lecture too quickly, I would have options to fill the remaining time. My greatest fear was using up everything I had and finding 30 minutes still left on the clock.

Twenty years later I seem to have the opposite problem: not enough time in the class period to accomplish everything I have planned. It seems so difficult to me now to do much of substance in 50 minutes. I don't know whether to blame that shift in perspective on the fact that I have more teaching experience or that I'm just older. I suppose those two possibilities don't untangle very easily.

In my early years I would walk into the classroom with just a minute or two to spare and spend the final moments before class putting my papers in order, preparing whatever technology I might be using that day, and gathering my thoughts. If we started a little late, no problem - there was so much time to fill! But lately I have turned around on this practice as well, arriving at the classroom earlier and earlier. I've become my father's son, doing the academic equivalent of arriving at the airport hours before my scheduled departure.

The more time I spend with students in that brief space before the start of class, the more I recognize that those warm-up minutes actually represent a fertile opportunity. I can use the time to enhance the learning that will take place in the hour that follows, to build a more positive atmosphere for class discussion, or simply to get to know my students a little better.

Over the next several months I will be making the argument in this space that small changes to our teaching - in things like course design, classroom practices, and communication with students - can have a powerful impact on student learning. To kick off the series, let's focus on what we can do in those potentially empty moments before class, the ones I used to fritter away with shuffling papers or collecting my thoughts.

The more time I spend with students in that brief space before the start of class, the more I recognize that those warm-up minutes actually represent a fertile opportunity.

Some faculty have to move hurriedly from one course to their next and might not have the luxury of an extra few minutes prior to class. But for those who do, I think you will find that a very small investment of time can pay substantial dividends. Consider the following three ways that you can set up the day's learning in the few minutes before the metaphorical bell rings.

How are you? Last year faculty on my campus met for dinner to discuss How College Works, by Daniel F. Chambliss and Christopher G. Takacs. The book documents a long-term study the authors conducted to understand which aspects of the college experience had the greatest impact on students - both during their undergraduate years and afterward.

Their most consistent finding: Students cited the relationships they formed as the most important and memorable aspect of college. Those relationships began with fellow students, but also included connections with faculty and staff members. The number and intensity of those relationships not only predicted students' general satisfaction with college, but had the power to motivate them to deeper, more committed learning in their courses.

While we were discussing this research over dinner, a colleague told us about an experiment she had been trying in her classes. Although she considers herself an introvert and finds small talk difficult (as do I), she had made a determined effort to arrive a few minutes before class and speak to an individual student or two each day. She rotated around the room, so that eventually she had chatted with each of them. The interactions were simple and brief: She asked how they were doing, or commented on something she had overheard them discussing, or inquired about their major or other interests.

The results, she said, had been impressive. Students were more talkative in discussions. The atmosphere in class took on a more positive, productive tone, and she felt more connected to her students - even the ones who normally liked to hide out in the back row. Moreover, many students praised the practice in her end-of-term course evaluations.

The research in How College Works helps explain why. In her pre-class conversations my colleague was creating an opportunity for relationships to form - more substantive than the ones that arise from routine classroom interactions. And if Chambliss and Takacs are correct, simple practices like this one have the power to make a significant improvement on both student learning and the college experience.

Display the framework. In a different book - How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching - Susan A. Ambrose and her co-authors point out that key differences exist between the way novices (students) and experts (faculty) understand and process new material. Experts have a clear picture of the framework of their discipline and can quickly recognize how new ideas alter or confirm their understanding. Novice learners tend to see facts, concepts, and skills as discrete, isolated pieces of knowledge, without any awareness of the connections that join them all together. A key difference between experts and novices is "the number or density of connections among the concepts, facts, and skills they know," they write.

Their finding suggests that, in any given class period, we need to help students understand how to better organize the material. Ever looked at students' notebooks after a lecture in which they've been given no help on the organizational front? You find lots of facts and concepts written down, but very little understanding of which points deserve emphasis or how different ideas relate to one another. Part of the problem may be poor note-taking skills, but another factor is that connections that seem clear to us can mystify our students.

All of which leads me to a very simple recommendation: Before class, put up on the board the day's agenda in whatever form you choose - perhaps a broad outline of the lecture material or a list of discussion topics. Keep your agenda there and visible throughout class. As the session progresses, continue to remind students where they are within the framework for that day's material. The point is to let students see in advance how the class will be organized, even if you occasionally veer from that posted agenda.

This approach may have the added benefit of demonstrating to students that your course does, in fact, have an organization to it - something that seems obvious to you but not necessarily to them.

Create wonder. My final recommendation comes from Peter Newbury, an astronomer who now serves as the associate director of the Center for Engaged Teaching at the University of California at San Diego. In a wonderful blog post called "You Don't Have to Wait for the Clock to Strike to Start Teaching," he describes a teaching activity that he employs to stir interest and curiosity in class on that day's material.

Drawing inspiration from the "Astronomy Picture of the Day" - a NASA website that posts a new and fascinating image from the cosmos every day - he suggests that instructors post an image on the screen at the front of the room and ask two questions about it: "What do you notice? What do you wonder?" Before class starts, let the image direct the informal conversations, Newbury argues, and then use it to guide a brief discussion during the opening minutes of class.

Chief among the benefits of this strategy, Newbury says: It can activate students' prior knowledge, helping them form connections with what they already know. It also offers both the instructor and the students the opportunity to discuss how the images connect to previous course material. Obviously you could substitute anything for the NASA picture of the day: a great sentence in a writing class; a newspaper headline in a political-science class; an audio clip for a music class; an artifact in an archaeology class.

But what I really love about this technique is the simple message it conveys to students from the instructor: "I find this stuff fascinating, and I think you will, too; let's wonder about it together." I can't think of a better way to spend those moments before class officially begins.

The small decisions we make in our courses have the power to affect learning in big ways. Preclass activities like the ones I've described here can enrich any type of traditional college course, and even - with some tweaks - online learning experiences. So whether you are flipping your course or sticking with a lecture that day, consider how you might use the moments before class to prepare your students for learning.

James M. Lang is a professor of English and director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College in Worcester, Mass. His new book, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons From the Science of Learning, will be published in March of 2016. Follow him on Twitter at @LangOnCourse.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Small Changes in Teaching: The Minutes Before Class

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When I first started teaching, the open space of a 50- or 75-minute class period seemed an eternity. Like many a new faculty member, I worried about having enough material. I wanted to ensure that, if discussion faltered or if I rushed through the lecture too quickly, I would have options to fill the remaining time.

# data[].attributes.body
Essay by James Lang

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Welcome to readers from The Chronicle of Higher Education, who are visiting this page to check out some samples of the teaching activity of the Minute Thesis. (If you have arrived here without reading that article, go check it out first and then come back!) The Minute Thesis, a learning activity which I use in class whenever we have material to review or when students are ready to brainstorm project or presentation ideas, helps give students a quick preview of lots of possible ways to create new combinations and connections within the course material we have been studying, as well as to develop their own creative new approaches to what can sometimes seem like well-worn paths through ancient territories. It essentially involves creating category lists of course material, asking students to draw lines connecting items from different categories, and then giving them a minute (or more) to brainstorm a thesis that connects those items together. In a typical version of the game, we might end up thinking our way through five or six different new connections.

This first image, to the right, comes from a course I have been teaching on a regular basis in recent years, and which I love, in spite of its less-than-thrilling title: "British Literature Survey II." This course helps prepare our majors for the upper-level literature courses they will be taking, offers a general education literature course to non-majors, and gives all students an opportunity to see how British and Irish literature from 1800 to the present can help inform our understanding of the relationship between literature and history, as well as the richness of the British and Irish literary traditions. The particular version of the Minute Thesis represented on this board is designed to create connections between the various authors we have read during the Romantic period and the subject matter and themes that dominated our readings and the time period. In this case, the student with the marker has the task of circling a single theme and connecting it to two authors. The students then come up with a thesis for how those two authors might have both addressed or reflected that theme in their works, and also how they might have dealt with that theme in different ways. You can see one line, for example, which connects William Blake and William Wordsworth to the subject of the "Natural World." It shouldn't require much creative thinking to see how the natural world played a critical role in the thinking of both of these authors; it does require some thinking to establish how the natural world might have played a slightly different role in their thought and poetry. In this class I sometime will swap out the themes for historical events, and leave the themes open. So in that case the second column would have included instead things like: 1789--French Revolution; 1798--United Irishmen Rebellion; 1811-1812: Luddite Rebellions, etc.

The second board depicted here, to the left, represents an attempt to use the Minute Thesis to encourage faculty to consider how they can use a handful of learning principles to create small and positive changes to their teaching. The items in the column on the left are a partial list of learning principles from my new book, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning (Jossey-Bass, 2016); the column on the right presents moments of a course or a class period which we often don't use as productively or effectively as we could: the first five minutes of class, the last five minutes of class, first day of the semester, last day of the semester, etc. In this case I ask faculty workshop participants to consider a course they are teaching as a third item on the list, so the arc of one line essentially might ask them to consider: "How can I use retrieval in the first five minutes of British Literature Survey II next week?" Even just running through three or four possibilities with a group of faculty, and asking them to work in pairs or small groups to generate their course-specific theses, enables everyone to walk out of the session with one or two new ideas, all grounded solidly in the research on teaching and learning in higher education.

As I said in the Chronicle article, you can vary the categories, the time, the means of creating the connections, and almost everything about this exercise in a thousand different ways. If you come up with a variation that works really well, and you would like to share it with others, please post it in the comments on the original article or on this blog post. And if you are looking for lots more small ways to create continuous engagement from students in your courses, keep an eye out for Small Teaching, out on March 14, 2016.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Welcome to readers from The Chronicle of Higher Education, who are visiting this page to check out some samples of the teaching activity of the Minute Thesis. (If you have arrived here without reading that article, go check it out first and then come back!)

# data[].attributes.body
Essay by James Lang

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I count myself as an amateur enthusiast of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, which makes me fun to hang around with at parties. This particular interest of mine began when I took a course in Aristotle's thought as an undergraduate philosophy major, and I have since returned to his work at various points over the course of my life for reflection and guidance. In the wake of the recent presidential election, amidst the swirling storm of negative emotions and overheated arguments that flew around my social media accounts, I took refuge in his work once more, and re-read both the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics.

This was my first sustained re-reading of these works since I began writing books about teaching and learning almost a decade ago. As a result, I was pleasantly surprised to discover the ways in which Aristotle's philosophy can provide us with some insightful reminders about how we can best help students learn, now almost 2400 years after it was first presented to his students. It adds an interesting layer of complexity to this enterprise when we note that all of Aristotle's works come to us essentially in the form of rough drafts or notes from his students; although he was apparently a prolific writer on almost every subject imaginable, from biology to metaphysics, none of his finished works have survived.

The concluding section of the Politics actually directly addresses education, but I found that material less compelling than three more general principles of his thinking which strike me as still relevant for our pedagogical conversations today.

1) Learning from frequent practice. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle addressed the question of how people become virtuous or vicious. He was responding in part to arguments from Plato, and to more general theories about the source of human ethics. He argues, for example, against at least two different theories: that people are born virtuous or vicious, or that one can be a virtuous person while still doing occasionally vicious things. Instead, he suggests, virtues develop in us slowly and gradually as we make the conscious decision to perform virtuous acts:

"We . . . take on the virtues by first being at work in them, just as also in other things, namely the arts; the things that one who has learned them needs to do, we learn by doing; and people become, say, housebuilders by building houses or harpists by playing the harp. So too, we become just by doing things that are just, temperate by doing things that are temperate, and courageous by doing things that are courageous."

In other words, a person who performs courageous actions gradually becomes a courageous person, and his slowly developing courageous character makes each new act of courage easier and more likely for him. Later commentators on Aristotle's work have referred to this as the virtuous cycle: the more we perform virtuous acts, the easier it becomes to perform virtuous acts. Our actions develop our character, and our character then gives birth to our actions.

This sounds to me a whole like what we know today about the virtue of frequent practice for learning. If we want students to learn how to think like philosophers, we can't stand at the front of the room and philosophize for them. We have to create the context in which they can practice thinking like philosophers. The same holds true for any cognitive skill we want students to develop. Would Aristotle have been an advocate for the flipped classroom? Perhaps he might not have gone that far, but he certainly represents an early advocate for the modern principle that we "learn by doing."

2) Listening to our learners. Aristotle's Ethics begins with the argument that human beings are meant for happiness, and so sets out to inquire what makes us happy. But instead of simply trying to logic this out from first principles, he recounts what people say about the subject. This happens over and over again in both the Ethics and the Politics. Aristotle always begins his inquiries by considering what people have had to say about the subject in the past, and he searches for bits of truth and good ideas in these surveys of popular opinion. In Book One of the Ethics, for example, he concludes an overview of different theories of happiness with this sentence:

"Some of these things are said by many people and from ancient times, others by a few well-reputed men, and it is reasonable that neither of these groups would be wholly mistaken, and that they would be right in some one point at least or even in most of them."

It seems likely to me that, in his actual lectures, Aristotle solicited these opinions from his students, in some form of a dialogue or discussion, but we can't know that for sure. In any case, Aristotle reminds us that we can view the knowledge that students bring into our classes as harmful and mistaken, ready for our correcting--or we can view it as the starting point for our inquires together. When we view the prior knowledge of our students in this light, the classroom becomes a community of learners working together to increase all of our understanding, rather than a forum in which one person imparts knowledge to the many.

In the Politics Aristotle refers explicitly to the idea of a community of learners, and the power of their collective knowledge, with the metaphor of a banquet: "And as a feast to which all the guests contribute is better than a banquet furnished by a single man, so a multitude is a better judge of many things than an individual."

One of the most important principles I have learned from the literature of teaching and learning in higher education has been to listen to what learners bring into our classrooms. Rather than simply starting a new lesson by offering students a box of content, we should take a few minutes to address the fact that our students always bring folk theories about our subject matter into the room, and that their prior knowledge can provide us with building blocks for what we want them to learn.

3) Remembering context. Over and over again, in both the Ethics and the Politics, Aristotle reminds us that general principles always fail to account for the particulars. General principles must be put into practice in specific contexts, and those contexts require further reflection, modification, or even rejection of the general principle. He addresses this specifically with respect to education in the final book of the Ethics:

"And further, educations tailored to teach person are better than those that are given in common, just as in the case of medical treatment, for in general rest and fasting are beneficial for someone with a fever, but perhaps not for some particular person, and a boxing instructor probably does not impose the same way of fighting on all people."

Most of us don't have the time to tailor an individual education to every student we encounter, but this principle should remind us of two important things. First, the general principles that helped us (i.e., faculty members) learn might not work with our students. Just because we learned best from reading and listening to lectures (as I did, and I loved it), that does not mean that all students learn best from those methods. So we have to continue to reflect on our methods, and vary them in order to ensure that we are providing educations that make sense with the particular contexts of our students, and not the students we used to be.

Second, educational research that works in one context might not work in every other context. If you spend enough time reading and analyzing the literature on teaching and learning in higher education, you will eventually realize that no magic solution of any kind exists for student learning. The particular contexts of our individual classrooms contain so many confounding elements for any one teaching technique, however well-researched, that we have to remain continuously reflective about our practice, and continuously alive to the possibility of change. That can be frustrating, but it can also be intellectually stimulating, and keep us thinking and evolving through a whole teaching career.

Note: all quotations from the Ethics come from this edition, translated by Joe Sachs; quotations from the Politics from this edition, translated by Richard McKeon.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I count myself as an amateur enthusiast of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, which makes me fun to hang around with at parties. This particular interest of mine began when I took a course in Aristotle's thought as an undergraduate philosophy major, and I have since returned to his work at various points over the course of my life for reflection and guidance.

# data[].attributes.body
Essay by James Lang, author of Small Teaching

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Keith Negley for The Chronicle

One day near the end of the spring semester last year, I was standing at the front of the room in my British literature survey course, as students completed a writing exercise. One of the best students in the class, "Kate," finished early and sat back to await our discussion.

This talented senior represented something of a puzzle to me. On the one hand, she wrote well, contributed to discussions, sat in the front row every class period, and was always pleasant. On the other hand, she sometimes seemed distracted in class, as if she were secretly on her phone or using social media on a laptop. But no laptop or phone was ever in sight. I chalked up her occasional inattention to senioritis.

Once the class discussion began that day, I had drifted toward the row of desks where Kate sat when something on the floor caught my eye - it was a flash of light, as if from a cellphone. Kate was staring down at it as well, in one of her distracted states. I realized that she was gazing inside her purse, where her phone had been carefully positioned to allow her to see any texts that arrived during class. She couldn't respond to them, but she could read them. New ones lit up her black screen, and she just had to turn her head ever so slightly to keep up with her group chats throughout the class session.

I was so taken aback by this discovery that I had to pause and compose myself in order to keep the discussion on track. I didn't say anything to Kate then or later. She was a second-semester senior, and it was the last week of class. The prospect of haranguing one of my favorite students about phone use in class during her last week of college just depressed me.

But the experience brought into clear focus the deep nature of the problem of distraction in college classrooms in the 21st century.

Distraction actually arises from a conflict between two fundamental features of our brain: our ability to create and plan high-level goals versus our ability to control our minds.

Like every faculty member these days - and like most high-school and even middle-school teachers - I am in a constant battle with cellphones and laptops for the attention of my students in the classroom.

I know from both personal experience and scads of published research that when students have phones or laptops out in class - and are texting, surfing the web, or posting on social media - they are only half-present (if that). I try to make my classes as interactive as possible, with students engaged in discussions, group work, or other tasks. So a roomful of half-present students seriously detracts from what we can accomplish on any given day.

The answer is not banning all devices from the classroom. As I have argued before, such a ban can single out students with accommodations who need those devices to participate in class. And given the direction of the world and the omnipresence of technology in our lives, a ban seems to me a quixotic gesture at best.

For a long time now, I have felt stuck at an impasse on the challenge of how to handle these digital distractions. But a new book on the more general nature of distraction and attention has helped me see some pathways forward. The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World (MIT, 2016) represents a collaboration between neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley and psychologist Larry D. Rosen, and it should be required reading for every teacher today - and probably all humans. In a series of columns, I plan to explore their ideas and how their research can help us reshape our teaching practices.

Almost every book or article I read about this issue begins with a run-down of all of the ways in which distraction can interfere with learning. But The Distracted Mind provides a broader context: Distraction occurs, the authors argue, when we are pursuing a goal that really matters and something blocks our efforts to achieve it.

After all, we don't consider ourselves distracted when we are scrolling through Facebook on a Friday night with nothing else to do - we are only distracted when we are scrolling through Facebook while trying to grade papers.

Distraction from any particular goal - putting aside the digital angle for the moment - can come from multiple sources, Gazzaley and Rosen write. Those sources can be generated externally (the bird at my window feeder, a child clamoring for my attention, a colleague knocking on my office door) or internally (making a cup of tea, switching from one task to another, or, yes, checking Facebook).

They argue that distraction actually arises from a conflict between two fundamental features of our brain: our ability to create and plan high-level goals versus our ability to control our minds and our environment as we take steps to complete those goals.

"The reason why goal interference in particular is so prominent in our lives," they write in The Distracted Mind, "is the inherent complexity of our goals and the limitations we have in fulfilling them. Our ability to establish high-level goals is arguably the pinnacle of human brain evolution. Complex, interwoven, time-delayed, and often shared goals are what allow us humans to exert an unprecedented influence over how we interact with the world around us, navigating its multifaceted environments based on our decisions rather than reflexive responses to our surroundings."

But our admirable goal-setting ability runs up against the fundamental limitations of our "cognitive control abilities." Those abilities "have not evolved to the same degree as the executive functions required for goal setting," Gazzaley and Rosen write. "Our cognitive control is really quite limited: We have a restricted ability to distribute, divide, and sustain attention; actively hold detailed information in mind; and concurrently manage or even rapidly switch between competing goals."

Put simply, they say, distraction can be visualized as "a mighty force" (i.e., our goals) colliding "head on with a powerful barrier, represented by the limitations to our cognitive control."

Drawing on research from Gazzaley's neuroscience lab at the University of California at San Francisco, The Distracted Mind presents some intriguing findings on those cognitive-control limitations. They diminish our ability to direct and sustain our attention, to remember things, and to switch back and forth between tasks. An especially fascinating thread in the book considers how those limitations shift over the course of our lifetimes: The challenges to our attention and working memory are different for children and adults, and become more intense in certain key areas for older adults.

For example, our ability to stay focused on a task depends upon two separate neural processes: (1) directing our attention to goal-related activities, and (2) blocking out irrelevant distractions. Experiments from Gazzaley's lab have documented that, while older adults can fully retain their ability to focus their attention, their capacity to block out irrelevant distractions diminishes with age. That's one reason why older adults may have more trouble concentrating on a conversation in a crowded restaurant than younger people.

The conflict between our complex goals and our cognitive-control limitations occupies the first part of The Distracted Mind and sets the stage for the second part - which I will take up in next column in this series - about how our digital devices are reshaping our experiences with attention and distraction.

But even before we get there, I hope readers can begin to see how The Distracted Mind has the potential to shift the nature of our conversation about digital distractions in the classroom.

When I walked out of class after discovering Kate's surreptitious phone scanning, the questions I asked myself were about her, or about my ability to control her behavior: Why can't she focus in class? How can I keep students away from their distracting devices in class?

But when I reconsidered the experience through the lens provided by Gazzaley and Rosen, a new set of questions began to emerge: What goal had I established for Kate's learning that day? How had I created an environment that supported her ability to achieve that goal? And perhaps most important - assuming that the class had a learning goal that mattered for her - did she know about it?

The more powerful the goals we establish for ourselves, and the more we feel ownership over those goals, the more we are able to pursue them in the face of both internal and external distractions.

We all know this from experience. Most of us can shut out distractions when we are pursuing something that really matters to us. So if we want to deal with distractions in teaching, an obvious place to turn would be toward our goals for the classroom: Who creates them? How much do they matter? And how well do students understand them?

Of course, even if I had established a clear goal for Kate's learning that day, and helped her understand and take ownership of it, she would still face challenges to her achieving it from the fundamental limitations of her cognitive control - the same limitations that plague us all, and have done so for all of human history.

But that phone in her purse, as The Distracted Mind explains - and as I will consider in more detail in the columns to come - exacerbates the nature of those challenges. Even while it presents Kate with a host of new ways to enhance and support her learning (I'll consider some of those, too, in this series), it also offers her increasingly slick road ramps to distraction. For faculty members, it sets up increasingly more complex barriers to the student learning we hope to foster in our courses.

James M. Lang is a professor of English and director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College in Worcester, Mass. His latest book, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons From the Science of Learning, was published in the spring of 2016. Follow him on Twitter at @LangOnCourse.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
One day near the end of the spring semester last year, I was standing at the front of the room in my British literature survey course, as students completed a writing exercise. One of the best students in the class, "Kate," finished early and sat back to await our discussion.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
How often do you hear the following sentiments from students?

"I won't ever use anything I am learning in this class, but I have to take it to graduate."

"I don't care about this class. I just need a passing grade."

"I can't remember anything I learned in that class."

Granted, not all classes cover interesting material all the time. While we can't always change what needs to be taught, we can change how we deliver it. If we make the right adjustments to our course design and teaching methodologies, we will hear less complaining in our classes. So, what can we do to achieve higher levels of student satisfaction and long-term learning that lasts far beyond the end of our class?

Begin by realizing that you don't usually need a complete course re-design to teach more students at higher levels of engagement and retention. You can start making simple yet strategic changes that improve learning right away in the courses you already teach. Here are two simple yet effective techniques you can use in your courses to improve learning and retention: frontload the relevance and engage their memory.

Frontload relevance
Have you ever gotten to the end of a class and excitedly "pulled back the curtain" to reveal the big moment of connection for everything you have taught only to see uninterested and expressionless faces staring back at you? It is likely that students in this situation have "zoned out" during the lesson, so any grand conclusions you make mean nothing to them. We cannot assume that our power to assign a grade is enough to get them to care about what we are teaching beyond a basic "do we need to know this for the test" level.

One simple way to help solve this "zone-out" problem is to give students a reason to stay focused from the beginning of a course or lesson by frontloading relevance. Relevance is something that is meaningful and interesting to your students-not you. What problems are they facing and what questions do they have outside of your course that your material can help them resolve? The intent of frontloaded relevance is to activate curiosity, pique interest, or trigger an innate desire to resolve problems they see in the world around them.

Initial relevance building need not be laborious. It can be accomplished using an applicable problem, short story, video clip, or case study followed by a prompt such as, "Now, let's explore a few theories/concepts/processes/practices/or products that can help us make sense of this situation."

You could also use one of the following activities to build relevant interest at the beginning of class:

Poll students on their level of confidence in a widely held belief related to your lesson

Show students an object or picture that could be related to your topic and ask them to make connections between the tangible object and your abstract concept

Similar to seeing the picture on a puzzle box before putting pieces together, give context by asking your students to "Look for..." or "Watch for..." target objectives before having them read a block of text, watch a movie, perform an experiment, or work on an assignment

When determining relevance consider the following, "Whose questions am I trying to help the students answer, mine or theirs?"

Make it Memorable
Consider the many and varied responsibilities of a student's brain. In addition to regulating the physical operations of the body, it has to process large amounts of sensory input and determine what to forget and what to remember. It is therefore understandable that most of what they see and hear gets quickly forgotten. There are three factors that determine the strength of an item in memory:

Recency-How long has it been since last exposure?

Frequency-How many times have they experienced it?

Potency-What kind of impact did it have?

With all the sensory input our students experience, it should not surprise us that they quickly forget most of what is presented in our class. Rather than being frustrated with this process of forgetting, we can leverage it to help them learn and make that learning last.

Begin by selecting the most crucial facts, theories, skills, or processes you expect students to remember the longest from your course. Make sure they are exposed to these critical items more than once or twice in your classes (increasing the recency and frequency factors). Also make sure they interact with these vital elements in a variety of engaging and relevant ways (increasing the potency factor).

Build an expectation in your courses that students will be required to do more than just remember facts or understand foundational ideas. Find ways for students to do meaningful and applicable things with the material you teach (create something, or work on a real-world project appropriate to your discipline and the scope of your class). This will encourage them to stay focused and engaged throughout the learning process and retain the information and skills longer. It will also be more enjoyable for them than the traditional "zone-out/cram/test/forget" cycle.
Dr. Tyler J. Griffin is an assistant professor at Brigham Young University.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Learning That Lasts: Helping Students Remember and Use What You Teach

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
How often do you hear the following sentiments from students? "I won't ever use anything I am learning in this class, but I have to take it to graduate." "I don't care about this class. I just need a passing grade." "I can't remember anything I learned in that class."

# data[].attributes.body
website

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
Retrieval Practice: A Powerful Strategy to Improve Learning

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Retrieval Practice: A Powerful Strategy to Improve Learning

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Harness powerful teaching strategies, unleash the science of learning, and transform your classroom with resources by cognitive scientists.

# data[].attributes.body
in learning by Ian Leslie

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
We tend to assume that learning things easily is the same as learning them well. In school, teachers are pleased when children grasp a concept or a skill in one lesson, and so, of course, are children. The trouble is, when learning is too easy, we may not actually be learning much atall.

We know Abraham Lincoln, for example, as an autodidact who made himself erudite in literature, history, and the law. But if you had been at school with him, you probably wouldn't have marked him out as a future lawyer, let alone a future president. A cousin remembers him as "somewhat dull ... not a brilliant boy, but worked his way by toil." Lincoln himself remarked that "I am slow to learn and slow to forget that which I have learned. My mind is like a piece of steel, very hard to scratch anything on it but almost impossible after you get it there to rub itout."

Lincoln's phrase - "slow to learn and slow to forget" - actually describes a universal truth about the way our brains absorb information. In the early 1990s, a cognitive scientist at the University of California named Robert Bjork landed upon an insight that changed the way psychologists think about learning. In its simplest form, it is this: We learn better when we ﬁnd learningdifﬁcult.

In a series of carefully designed experiments, Bjork showed that when people learn something rapidly, they often learn it superﬁcially; that is, they are more liable to forget it in the long term. They are also less likely to integrate the new information with what they already know, which means the new knowledge is less "transferable" - that is, applicable to other problems. In one experiment, students were asked to study a passage of text with the aim of remembering it. Before reading it, one group was given an outline that summarized the information in the same order as the text, while another group was given an outline that put the same information in a different order. Participants in the ﬁrst group appeared to learn the text better-they scored higher on a test of recall. But when the two groups were set creative problem-solving tasks related to the text - the kind of tasks that required a deeper understanding of its content-it was the second group who came out on top. The extra difﬁculty faced by the second group in comprehending the text made it more difﬁcult to recall, but increased their understanding of what it was about. That meant they were better equipped to transfer their knowledge to the creativeproblems.

Similar findings abound: Psychologists at Princeton and Indiana University found that students remembered reading material better when it was printed in an ugly, difﬁcult-to-read font. And scientists from the University of Amsterdam gave people anagram puzzles to solve, while, as an obstacle to concentration, a series of random numbers were read out. Compared with those in a control group who performed the same task without this distraction, these subjects displayed greater cognitive agility - they were more likely to take leaps of association and make unusual connections. These researchers also found that when people are forced to cope with unexpected obstacles, they react by increasing their "perceptual scope" - taking a mental step back to see the bigger picture. In real life, this happens when you ﬁnd your journey to work blocked by a construction site, requiring you to mentally map the city in order to reach yourdestination.

Bjork coined the phrase "desirable difﬁculties" to describe the counterintuitive notion that we learn better when the learning is hard. His work has inﬂuenced thinking on education; he recommends, for instance, spacing teaching sessions further apart so that students have to make more effort to recall what they learned last time. Difﬁculty is desirable because it forces our brains to work harder at encoding and integrating the inputs that it has coming in. It makes us think, to put it plainly, and the harder we think, the better we remember. The same applies to anything we can get better at. Skills, in other words, come fromstruggle.
Excerpted from Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It by Ian Leslie. Available from Basic Books, a member of The Perseus Books Group. Copyright ©2014.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why You Should Want Your Kid to Be a Slow Learner

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We tend to assume that learning things easily is the same as learning them well. In school, teachers are pleased when children grasp a concept or a skill in one lesson, and so, of course, are children. The trouble is, when learning is too easy, we may not actually be learning much atall.

# data[].attributes.body
by Dan Willingham

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool
Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016, $28; 336 pages.
As reviewed by Daniel T. Willingham
Since the early 1990s, Anders Ericsson has done more than any other psychologist in modern times to further our understanding of how people-especially those who become experts-learn and master skills. As the old adage puts it, practice makes perfect. But if practice is all there is to it, why has my typing improved so little in the last 40 years?

Ericsson's research clarifies the difference between what he calls deliberate practice and other activities that call for repetition. Even though I type every day, my typing is not really practicing, because I'm not purposefully or systematically trying to improve it. Given that I have not formally studied typing, I may even be reinforcing bad technique.

In Ericsson's formulation, deliberate practice has several components: evaluating what needs improvement, selecting one small aspect of the skill to work on, developing a strategy, and then evaluating the results of the revised performance. And if you plan to become really good, you need to practice: a lot. Exactly how long? That depends on the skill-10,000 hours is the popular author Malcolm Gladwell's magic number, not Ericsson's-but plan on years.

In the book's first four chapters, Ericsson and his adept co-author, the science writer Robert Pool, take the reader through the science of expertise, building toward the idea that "memory representations" lie at the heart of skill. People who are superb at something have an enormous stock of memories related to what happens in their domain of skill, and how to act on it.

If reading a lot of detail about memory sounds formidable, fear not. The authors keep the material lively by using stories to illustrate scientific points. Over the course of the book, you'll meet the Navy's Top Gun pilots, a violinist so skilled that when a string breaks during a performance he simply completes the piece on the remaining strings, and the eccentric Hungarian psychologist who was so confident in his theory of genius that he sought a wife who would collaborate with him in raising a child to be a chess prodigy (it worked).

Good science writing requires not just clarity but energy and compelling narrative. Peak delivers, and is a pleasure to read. After reviewing the science, the authors explain how we can apply the principles of deliberate practice to our own personal and professional learning. In the profession of medicine, for example, we could "make" better doctors if we provided them with opportunities to systematically practice medicine rather than simply "doing" it.

What lessons, then, does the book hold for educators and policymakers? Surely the world's expert on expertise has something to say about the process of learning math, for example. In one respect, the book is an excellent companion to Carol Dweck's Mindset. Dweck emphasizes the importance of children believing they can get smarter if they work hard on the right things. Ericsson offers specifics about how they need to work if their efforts are to bear fruit.

And if Dweck doesn't want you to focus on talent, lest you believe that your innate ability matters more than your concerted action, Ericsson takes this principle a step further, and in fact further than most psychologists would go. Ericsson has little use for talent at all. In his estimation, innate abilities matter only before people have practiced much. The kid with a high IQ will play better chess than the kid with a low IQ, but only because neither knows much about chess. If they both practice, the influence of IQ will disappear, and whoever practices more will be the better player.

Many people would contend that practice theory cannot fully explain how we reach the peak of performance, especially in certain domains, such as athletics. We tend to see a standout like LeBron James as having been "born great," no matter how hard he had to work to fulfill his talent. Ericsson concedes that physical characteristics do influence achievement in sports and other physical activities and cannot be modified by practice.

But in most spheres, Ericsson holds that the role of innate ability, as in the chess example, only provides an advantage at the beginning of the learning curve. It is far from clear that Ericsson is completely right about that, but his underlying message-"Damn the talent, full practice ahead!"-is one that most psychologists (and educators) could support.

What are the practical implications of Ericsson's features of deliberate practice for K-12 education? Ericsson writes that Nobel laureate physicist Carl Wieman uses teaching methods that embody the principles of deliberate practice. Wieman, who is known for his method of teaching large lecture courses via small-group student discussions of carefully selected questions, emphasizes that such discussion requires that students stay mentally active, whereas the more common lecture format encourages mentally passive note-taking. Ericsson agrees, but also highlights Wieman's careful delineation of learning objectives and meticulous sequencing of small mental steps toward those objectives-hallmarks of the deliberate practice method.

Even if a teacher isn't drawn to Wieman's methods, I'd argue that principles of deliberate practice are well worth knowing. The mere distinction between experience and deliberate practice can help guide educators in imparting certain skills. For example, many schools want students to work well with others, so they assign group projects. But working in a group is simply experience. If you want students to become better group members, they need to practice being a group member. They must be explicitly taught how to work in groups, and that's something few schools do.

What's more, deliberate practice calls for working on one aspect of the skill at a time. Ericsson would suggest that the complex of skills required for working in a group or writing a research paper should not be tackled at once but should be broken down into smaller tasks, each of which would be practiced on its own. For writing a research paper, one could imagine subtasks such as using a database to locate research, evaluating the relevance of sources, creating an annotated bibliography, writing a rough outline and then a detailed one, and perhaps as many as four or five substeps in the writing of effective expository prose.

Even more than the teaching of students, Peak set me thinking about the training of teachers. Most teachers have no opportunity for deliberate practice of their craft. It's long been noted that, by most measures, the average teacher improves enormously in the first several years on the job, after which student-achievement gains (one gauge of teacher effectiveness) level off. It's reasonable to speculate that this drastic slowing of improvement is due to a lack of purposeful practice. But if teachers are to deliberately practice, they need to be given time in their schedules to do so.

Another challenge here is rooted in the way some teachers view their profession. Practice is only possible if practitioners agree on who the experts are, so the goals of practice can be articulated. In addition, educators will need to define the sequence of subskills to be acquired on the way to expertise. Practitioners need to know that "once you've mastered X, you move on to Y." For those who see teaching as more art than craft, such dissection is not feasible.

Enabling practice in the teaching profession will not be simple, but Ericsson and Pool's Peak offers a stark wake-up call, pointing up that we can't expect teachers to improve in the absence of real practice. The book also provides an excellent resource for those who want to take action and begin integrating the principles of deliberate practice into K-12 education.

Daniel T. Willingham is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. His most recent book is Raising Kids Who Read: What Teachers and Parents Can Do.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
When Practice Does Make Perfect - Education Next

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016, $28; 336 pages. As reviewed by Daniel T. Willingham Since the early 1990s, Anders Ericsson has done more than any other psychologist in modern times to further our understanding of how people-especially those who become experts-learn and master skills.