What is Sticky Learning?

What’s the stickiest thing you can imagine? When you hear the word “sticky,” perhaps you imagine pine pitch, or wallpaper paste, or duct tape, or a burr in your pets’ fur.  In the process of remodeling our 1935 cabin we needed to drywall over an existing ceiling.  In order to ensure that the drywall stuck, in addition to using drywall screws to secure each piece, we applied construction adhesive.  Once the adhesive was applied to the drywall and lifted into place, there was very little time before the piece was permanently fixed in place.

Don’t you wish memory worked that reliably?  Have you ever gotten a song or an advertising jingle stuck in your head? Have you ever wondered why that tune won’t go away but you can’t remember the three things you wanted to get at the grocery store? Why do certain things stick with us either temporarily or over time?

Intangible things, like concepts and ideas, can be sticky, too, but what makes one idea sticky and another idea seem to disappear? Since its release in 2007, the book Made to Stick has become popular with managers, marketers, teachers, ministers, entrepreneurs, and others who want to make their ideas stick. The authors, Chip and Dan Heath, borrow the concept of “stickiness” from Malcolm Gladwell’s popular book, The Tipping Point, and apply it as a practical tool to create and construct effective ideas that transform behavior. In The Tipping Point, Gladwell argues that the method of presentation and the structure of information greatly affect the “stickiness” of a message.  Gladwell says you know a message is sticky when it makes an impact, when it sticks with you beyond the learning experience, and when it influences your behavior.  Sticky learning is about knowledge and methods that may be applied in various contexts to enable your ideas to be understood and remembered, and to have a lasting impact.

Sticky Learning Is Effective Learning

Every educator wants to believe that he or she can have a lasting impact on students and that the words we say will immediately and permanently stick in our students’ heads, like the construction adhesive stuck the drywall to the ceiling.  But we all know that is not the case and often quite the opposite is true.

The greatest impact an instructor can have is not by merely imparting wisdom or knowledge but by understanding how learning occurs and how learning can be reinforced and become part of the long-term memory of the student, having an impact not only on their thinking and reflection in the current setting, but their actions and behavior in settings far beyond the classroom. As we become more aware of elements of learning and memory and are able to make some shifts in our pedagogy and content delivery, we can truly become agents of transformation for our students, but that requires educators to make some changes from the way most of us received our instruction.

We Teach as We Are Taught

Reflect back to the first time you stood before a class as an instructor. How did you know what to do? In some cases, we may choose to model our teaching style after a particularly memorable professor or our desire to emulate a respected colleague, but in most instances, we may simply duplicate the type of learning environment we experienced ourselves. We replicate what we know. Conventional wisdom suggests that, with some exceptions, of course, the methods and practices we use to craft educational experiences for our students are modeled after the way in which we received our own education and the classrooms in which we gained our knowledge, and will, in turn, become models for our students as they create educational experiences in future ministry or educational settings.

John Medina, author of Brain Rules, suggests that our brains were created to “solve problems related to surviving in outdoor settings, in unstable meteorological conditions, and in nearly constant motion.”  To see John Medina, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceWNNrHspvg&feature=youtu.be&t=59m53s  where he speaks to the American Dental Education Association in 2013.  Medina humorously notes that if we wanted to create a learning environment that was the polar opposite of how our brains were created…..we would create a classroom!  Assuming that most of us are ‘stuck’ in more or less traditional classrooms, albeit with new technologies, how can we teach in such a way that our students not only learn but develop memories of what they are learning?

Which came first—the chicken or the egg?

The same kind of question could be asked of memory. Which comes first—learning or memory? Some educators, as well as cognitive neuroscientists, would say that memory is the same as learning, using the students’ ability to recall as the evidence or assessment of learning and their ability to retrieve the information as the assessment of memory.  The purpose of learning is therefore to remember, to retrieve information, and so teaching methods and pedagogy are developed to enhance retention of information for the testing or assessment period. This circular logic can get us into trouble.  We end up teaching to the test.  We clearly want to provide access to as much information as possible so students can be successful and demonstrate proficiency when asked to recall the information in the near future, but is that the ultimate goal?

A purely biological definition considers memory to be the pattern of data recorded and stored in the cortex of the brain, which is received as both internal and external sensory stimuli and data. This data can be conscious or unconscious events, procedures and experiences that excite the neural synapses, causing electrical and chemical responses that have the potential to develop various forms of memory.

While the biological definitions are helpful in understanding what is taking place at a specific moment when stimuli is received, memory is no one, single phenomenon, but is instead a variety of different memory systems, interacting with each other and yet independent from one another. Memory is not localized, but is distributed widely throughout the brain. From the prefrontal cortex to the cerebellum and in between, your brain is working hard to store data in a variety of ways and places, depending on how it arrives, how you respond, and a host of other factors, some of which become extremely relevant for educators who want the learning experiences to be memorable for their students.

Curriculum Beyond Design

Much time and energy, both institutionally and personally, is spent on curriculum design and reforming curriculum design.  Sticky learning suggests that we shift our focus toward curriculum that guides students to extract the learning that comes from everyday life, connected and relevant to experiences which are either shared by the learners or brought to the learning environment by the learners.  Of course, this style of “curriculum beyond design” is more relevant for some academic disciplines than others, but the challenge is true for all those in education.  It is not up to us to make sure the information sticks with our students, but rather it is up to us as artistic educators to create spaces where learning becomes memorable.  In the next blog, we will explore some tips for sticky learning that cross boundaries of age and academic disciplines.
Sticky Learning: How Neuroscience Supports Teaching That’s Remembered  is part of the Seminarium Elements book series.

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Photo credit: “Sticky.” Copyright Richard Moross. Licensed for reuse by CC BY-SA 2.0 license

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