10 techniques to accelerate your teaching and learning.
When learning the art and science of becoming a teacher we learn that there are many methods for delivering content. These tend to focus on traditional ideas of teaching such as lecture, group learning or demonstrations. However there are many other principles and techniques that underlie good teaching. These have been developed by a range of people including those with a scientific, philosophy or even a physics background but all have a deep understanding of the principles behind how people acquire knowledge, skills and understanding.
The Pareto Principle - also known as the 80/20 rule. The point is to recognise that life is not distributed evenly and that 80% of the outcome will come from 20% of the causes.
When teaching focus your effort on the 20% of teaching that will lead to 80% of the result. Another way of looking at this is to consider when delivering a 20 minute session you need to make sure that the learners know the big picture and what the outcome will be in the first 4 minutes of the session.
The main input of the session should be about 20% of the time of the session and the rest of the time is consolidation of learning.
2. Feynman Technique - developed by Richard Feynman, a theoretical physicist, as a way of demystifying complex topics. It is a four step process for understanding any topic.
He stated that learning should be an active process of “trial and error, discovery and free enquiry”.
Step 1 - Choose a concept to learn
Step 2 - Teach it to yourself or someone else
Step 3 - Return to the source material if you get stuck
Step 4 - Simplify your explanations and create analogies
A key point of this technique is the understanding of what you don’t know. Confront what you don’t know, engage with the learning material and resources and clarify your understanding.
As a trainer this is a useful concept to understand whether or not you are ready to deliver your subject to your learners.
3. Optimise learning through interleaving
Create a lesson plan that mixes different topics or skills within your subject area to help the learners develop a more robust understanding and facilitate connections between them.
In first aid training this works well when creating learning and assessment scenarios and mixing in a number of different aspects. For example I might set up a bleed scenario where the casualty also loses consciousness so that the learner has to cope with a changing situation.
4. Implement spaced repetition for long-term retention
Design a spaced repetition teaching process to enable learner to effectively review the topic or skill over time, ensuring better retention and recall.
Again a great example comes from first aid training where we introduce the ABCDE system in a step-by-step manner. This allows plenty of repetition which my learners always say helps their learning and retention.
5. Develop mental models for complex concepts
Create mental models or analogies to better understand and remember key concepts in your subject area (topic or skill).
The Water Cycle is a great example of this - think back to when you learnt this in school and all the pictures you had to draw to show how water comes from and returns to earth.
6. Experiment with different learning modalities
Make use of various learning resources (eg videos, books, podcasts, interactive exercises for the your topic or skill that cater for different learning styles. If you can deliver learning in a variety of ways you will meet individual learning needs more easily. Plus it keeps the interest up in longer sessions.
7. Harness the power of active recall
Provide a series of challenging questions or problems related to your subject area to test understanding and improve long term retention. This links back to the Feynman technique and the idea that to truly understand a subject you should be able to explain it to others or to implement the learning in a practical manner.
8. Use story telling to enhance memory and comprehension
Transform key concepts or lessons from your subject area into engaging stories or narratives to help learners better remember and understand the material.
Stories are great but keep them short and relevant. Stories are not for the trainer to boast about their own achievements but unfortunately this is often the way. Make sure your story has a point and is related to the learning material.
9. Implement a deliberate practice routine
Design a deliberate practice routine for a topic or skill focusing on an area of weakness and providing regular feedback for improvement.
Practice makes perfect. 10,000 hours is a catchy term to suggest the amount of time you need to put in to achieve mastery of a skill. Scientific research however proposes that quality of practice is more important than the quantity of practice.
Regular feedback enables the learners to understand how they are getting on and which areas they need to focus on in order to improve.
10. Harness the power of visualisation
Guide learners through a visualisation exercise to help them internalise a topic or skill and imagine themselves successfully applying it in real-life situations.
Many top athletes use visualisation to imagine themselves reaching the finish line in first place. Research has also shown that people who visualise themselves learning to play a musical instrument can show better improvements to those who just physically practice playing.
A study published in the "Journal of Research in Music Education" (2005) examined the effects of mental practice on piano performance. Participants who used visualization techniques to practice a musical piece showed comparable improvements to those who physically practiced.
Which of these techniques do you use in your teaching? Has this blog inspired you to use any additional techniques to help your learners retain the knowledge and skills they have learned? Let me know in the comments below.