Tactical Teaching: Part 2—Four Principles of Interaction

The following excerpts of David’s upcoming book, Teaching to Learn, Learning to Teach: Reflections on Education as Transformation through Dialogue (Summer, 2014), are used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.

As I mentioned in my previous post there are four principles for empowering students to learn information beyond the lecture: repetition, context, engagement, and enjoyment.

Principle #1: Repetition 

Repetition is the lifeblood of understanding and memory. We seldom remember something just because we have heard or seen it one time. If we repeat something often enough in a variety of ways, we have a much better chance of grasping it and retaining it in memory. If a student can read about it, write about it, hear about it, talk about it, and recall it for an exam or a paper (involving different senses), the chances for short-term and long-term retention are increased significantly.

When it was important for students to learn certain information, the process of repetition usually involved two or more of the following elements:

1. An assigned reading with a request to write a summary paragraph so that they repeat what they have read;
2. Asking students to read their summaries in small groups in class and engage them in discussion with some guiding questions;
3. A brief lecture on the material from my perspective or several perspectives, explaining why it was important for them to know this subject matter;
4. A brief not-for-credit quiz, which we went over together as a class, with commentary.
5. Sometimes an out-of-class assignment for students to repeat the information to someone who was not in the class and encourage the listener to ask questions to draw out the student’s knowledge of the subject. The students would have several opportunities to recall and repeat the information they were learning.

Giving students for-credit exams on information also focused on repetition, I was straightforward about what they needed to know, giving the students a list of identification items that the exam would cover; that way, they were sure to study/learn what was important for them to know, even if some of the material did not appear on the test. To test their understanding, the “objective” style exam—true/false questions, matching, multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank—would give space for one sentence after each objective question for the student to explain their answer.

Some guidance I gave students before exams was this: “Don’t be satisfied with simply reviewing the material; you must also practice recalling it without benefit of looking at the notes or a book—before you get to the test.” Many students will say, “I reviewed all this material last night. I knew it then, but I couldn’t remember it when I got into the exam.” The key is for students to replicate the recalled required in the exam situation when they study. In the case of essay exams, students prepared by writing outlines of answers to potential essay questions and then they memorized the outlines. These practices gave students better short-term as well as long-term retention of the material. All teachers probably already know this, but many of us fail to articulate these methods of repetition to the students.

Principle #2: Context

Expecting students to learn isolated facts can be counterproductive if they do not see those facts in context. When students got a list of people, places, events, and things to learn, they often responded with very cursory explanations. So, in a study guide or on an exam, I reminded them to use a journalist’s questions about who, what, when, where, how, and why, and also note each one’s relationship to other identifications they were studying. These instructions assured that the students fully understood what they were learning.

I also encouraged students to understand specific facts in terms of how they fit into a larger historical or literary context. When we had studied a gospel writing and were reviewing it, I would show students how to take one detail about a gospel and see how they could recall by association many other details and themes of the gospel as a whole. In the Gospel of Mark, for example, I would start with a verse about how the disciples are so obtuse, which exemplifies the markan theme of misunderstanding, which is in turn due to the fact that Jesus’ identity is hidden to characters in the story. The disciples are dense due to fear, which leads to remembering Jesus’ predictions of death, the flight of the disciples at the arrest of Jesus, and the fear of the women at the end of the Gospel. The theme of fear then also recalls the historical context of Mark, namely the Roman-Judean War, its date of 66 to 70 CE, the place of Palestine as the provenance of authorship, and the threat of persecution from Judeans and Romans alike. When details relate to each other in a larger coherent picture, they are easier to remember. When the process is done with each of the four Gospels, one can more easily grasp the distinctiveness of each gospel. Using a chart comparing and contrasting the beginnings, endings, plot line, character traits, and the main themes of the gospels also helped students grasp and retain information about the gospels.

Testing details in context can also enhance comprehension. For example, after I had taught all four gospels, I gave an exam with forty or so different quotations (in no particular order) from the four gospels. Based on the students’ coherent and comprehensive understanding of each Gospel, students would identify which gospel a quotation came from and then give one sentence explaining why they connected that quotation to the gospel in question.  Studying for the exam was not simply a matter of learning details from the different the gospels but also of understanding them in the context of distinctive themes, characters, plot, settings, and structure of each Gospel.

Principle #3: Engagement 

How can we help students engage with the information they acquire? Students understand better when they have a purpose for reading an assignment. Otherwise, students may read an assignment simply to get the general idea or merely to complete the assignment. I found it helpful to assign students a paragraph that restates the thesis of the article or book and identifying the key supporting evidence. Then they know why you have been assigned the reading. Unless they understand it well, they will not be able to agree or disagree. And if they know the reading well, they will be much more engaged in the class discussion. I could pose challenging questions on the material or in debate.

Students were also engaged when all of them has a chance to reflect or talk about a lecture. Immediately after giving a lecture, I asked students to sit silently for a few minutes to process what they have heard or to pair up briefly and have one explain to the other what they heard, have the other confirm or correct, and then together come up with questions or challenges to the lecture. Students might follow along with a lecture as they hear it, but that does not mean they have understood it. If they were able to explain it to someone else, they discovered what they understood and what they did not understand.

Another way to engage students was to present them with diverse points of view about the information they were learning, such as assigning a reading that interpreted Paul’s letter to the Galatians in a way different from a standard interpretation and asking them to react to it. Or a lecture would lay out several options for understanding Paul’s attitude toward Jews in Galatians. Then the students would be invited to weigh—using information from the letter to argue their point of view. If the course was team-taught or involved a guest lecturer, we would sometimes engage in debate and draw the students into the debate.

Principle #4: Enjoyment

Video game technologies are revolutionizing the idea of engagement via enjoyment. But even when I was teaching it made sense to me that students would understand and recall information better by learning it in an entertaining way. Today the term for that is gamification*. I tried this with a course on daily life in the time of Jesus, which involved a lot of information about houses, clothes, roads, taxes, people and groups, the temple, and much more. I took the book they were reading and turned the details into cards with questions for a game. We got several boards of the then-popular game Trivial Pursuit, divided up into teams, and played Trivial Pursuit with questions from first-century Israel. Because they knew they were going to play the game each day, the motivation was very high to learn this information so they could do well in the game!

* For the latest see also this link laden post from the Association of College and Research Libraries called “Keeping Up With… Gamification.”

Photo Credit: “gamification” by Samuel Mann  – CC by 2.0

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