For a long time, I resisted any attempt to educate myself about adult learning theory. I had been a competent pediatric specialist and had even won awards for teaching…albeit a long time ago. I prided myself on how well I organized material and put together presentations that I would deliver at Grand Rounds, and even in national venues in a credible, authoritative and articulate delivery style. In my mind, if I had thoroughly researched, organized and practiced the choreography of the presentation I had done my job as an educator. It was a production, a show…and it was all about me. I was not at all concerned whether anyone in my audience learned anything. After it was over, I would often ask, “how did I do?”, only reinforcing the self-centered, teacher-centric approach I had been using to “teach”, especially in classroom/auditorium settings.

I would suspect that many of you reading this have also taken a similar approach to make “teaching” presentations. How could you have known any better? It is the model that most of us grew up with, and we learned something. But could we have learned more effectively if our teachers and presenters had used learning science? Who has time to re-do lectures that we have crafted and fine-tuned over the years, flip our classrooms, and introduce gamification to our courses and presentations?  Besides, isn’t this “active learning” thing just a fad that will blow over soon. Well, learning science isn’t going anywhere. In fact, in 2014, the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) sanctioned the UofL School of Medicine, in part, for not having enough active learning in the curriculum. Clearly, we were not going to be able to ignore this one.

Well, into this dissonance enters the book by James Lang (2016), Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning to provide us with evidence-based practices from learning science to increase the likelihood that our learners actually learn something from us. Although the book is largely written for classroom teaching, the suggestions he makes are applicable to other teaching settings as well. Dr. Lang recognizes our dilemma when he writes in chapter one, “Reconceiving your courses from the ground up takes time and energy that most of us have in short supply…” (2016, p. 3). He then goes on to provide easy-to-implement solutions that were well-supported by research. He studied the learning science work of cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists and biologists, and how emotion and motivation play a role in our learning. His goal was to “spark positive change in higher education through small but powerful modifications to our course design and teaching practices” (Lang, 2016, p. 5). The book title refers to the small, incremental changes we can make in how we use our time with learners that make them learn better by bringing active learning into play.

So, what kind of small changes does Lang suggest? He recommends that we create our own small teaching techniques around four guiding principles:

1)      Retrieving: how can you give learners frequent opportunities to retrieve material and put it to use?

2)      Predicting: can you ask your learners to try their hand at the material before you teach it to them?

3)      Spacing: how can you provide repeated retrieval attempts days, weeks or even months after their first exposure to the material?

4)      Connecting: what will help your learners see the connections between your teaching content and the world around them?

These four principles are well-studied techniques for enhancing learning and durable memory. Think about getting this book and trying some of these strategies. HSC Faculty Development has developed a workshop around translating these small teaching principles from the classroom into teaching in the busy clinical environments we can find ourselves in, and this will be available to your department through the fall. Also, we are now offering a reading circle on this book (Small Teaching)…first session starts next week, Monday, September 16^th or Tuesday, September 17^th. Call or email if you would like to join us, but you will have to buy your own book.

References

Lang, J. M. (2016). Small teaching: Everyday lessons from the science of learning. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.