strengthens learning and memory. When she studies a new score, she learns it physically in the fi ngering, aurally in the sound, visually in the notes on the score, and intellectually in the way she coaches herself through transitions.
Hunter has made some concessions to age. She never used to warm up before playing, but now she does. “My stamina is not as great as it used to be. My reach is not as big. Now, if I memorize something, I have to think about it. I never used to have to do that, I just worked through all the aspects of it and the memorizing came.”5 She visualizes the score and makes mental marginalia. “When I’m practicing, sometimes I say it out loud, ‘Up an octave, at this point,’ but in my mind’s eye I visualize the place on the sheet music, as well.” In comments that resonate with John McPhee’s observations about writing, Hunter says that at the point where a piece is almost memorized, “I’ll be driving, and I can think about the whole piece, which I do. The shape of it, as though I were a conductor, thinking, ‘Oh, that passage makes more sense if I speed it up. I have to practice that to get it faster.’
Those are the large things that I can think about away from the piano.”
Hunter’s practice regimen is daily, working through new pieces, slowing down to parse the diffi cult passages, and then, because she now often performs with a cellist and violinist, the ensemble works through the pieces together to synchro-nize their individual interpretations.
In Chapter 7 we describe Anders Ericsson’s research into how experts, through thousands of hours of solo, deliberate practice, build libraries of mental models that they can deploy to address a wide universe of situations they encounter in their area of expertise. Hunter describes experiences that would seem to manifest Ericsson’s theory. At times she must sit at the keyboard and devise a fi ngering plan for playing a diffi cult passage. Oddly, she says, after having been away from the piece
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for a week, she will sit down and play it through, using a fi ngering pattern that she had not planned but feels entirely natural to her and familiar. It’s a paradox, though perhaps not entirely surprising. She credits her subconscious, drawing from her long years of playing, with fi nding a more fl uent solution than what she has devised by puzzling it out at the keyboard. But perhaps it has been the effort at the keys, like McPhee wrestling his bear, that has set her mind to sorting through the closets of her memory for something a little more elegant and natural to fi t the occasion.
Tips for Teachers
Here again we are leery of being too prescriptive. Every teacher must fi nd what’s right in his or her classroom. Yet specifi cs can be helpful. So here are some basic strategies that in our judgment will go a long way toward helping students become stronger learners in the classroom. Brief descriptions follow of what some teachers are already doing along these lines.
Between the recommendations and the examples, we hope you will fi nd practical ideas you can adapt and put to work.
Explain to Students How Learning Works Students labor under many myths and illusions about learning that cause them to make some unfortunate choices about intellectual risk taking and about when and how to study. It’s the proper role of the teacher to explain what empirical studies have discovered about how people learn, so the student can better manage his or her own education.
In par tic u lar, students must be helped to understand such fundamental ideas as these:
• Some kinds of diffi culties during learning help to make the learning stronger and better remembered.
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• When learning is easy, it is often superfi cial and soon forgotten.
• Not all of our intellectual abilities are hardwired. In fact, when learning is effortful, it changes the brain, making new connections and increasing intellectual ability.
• You learn better when you wrestle with new problems before being shown the solution, rather than the other way around.
• To achieve excellence in any sphere, you must strive to surpass your current level of ability.
• Striving, by its nature, often results in setbacks, and setbacks are often what provide the essential information needed to adjust strategies to achieve mastery.
These topics, woven throughout the book, are discussed in depth in Chapters 4 and 7.
Teach Students How to Study
Students generally are not taught how to study, and when they are, they often get the wrong advice. As a result, they gravitate to activities that are far from optimal, like rereading, massed practice, and cramming.
At the beginning of this chapter we present effective study strategies. Students will benefi t from teachers who help them understand these strategies and stick with them long enough to experience their benefi ts, which may initially appear doubtful.
Create Desirable Diffi culties in the Classroom Where practical, use frequent quizzing to help students consolidate learning and interrupt the pro cess of forgetting. Make
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the ground rules acceptable to your students and yourself.
Students fi nd quizzing more acceptable when it is predictable and the stakes for any individual quiz are low. Teachers fi nd quizzing more acceptable when it is simple, quick, and does not lead to negotiating makeup quizzes. (For one example, consider the way Kathleen McDermott, whose work we describe below, uses daily quizzing in her university class on human learning and memory.)
Create study tools that incorporate retrieval practice, generation, and elaboration. These might be exercises that require students to wrestle with trying to solve a new kind of problem before coming to the class where the solution is taught; practice tests that students can download and use to review material and to calibrate their judgments of what they know and don’t know; writing exercises that require students to refl ect on past lesson material and relate it to other knowledge or other aspects of their lives; exercises that require students to generate short statements that summarize the key ideas of recent material covered in a text or lecture.
Make quizzing and practice exercises count toward the course grade, even if for very low stakes. Students in classes where practice exercises carry consequences for the course grade learn better than those in classes where the exercises are the same but carry no consequences.
Design quizzing and exercises to reach back to concepts and learning covered earlier in the term, so that retrieval practice continues and the learning is cumulative, helping students to construct more complex mental models, strengthen conceptual learning, and develop deeper understanding of the relationships between ideas or systems. (For an example, read in Chapter 2 how Andy Sobel uses cumulative low-stakes quizzing in his university-
level course in po
liti cal
economics.)
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Space, interleave, and vary topics and problems covered in class so that students are frequently shifting gears as they have to “reload” what they already know about each topic in order to fi gure out how the new material relates or differs.
Be Transparent
Help your students understand the ways you have incorporated desirable diffi culties into your lessons, and why. Be up front about some of the frustrations and diffi culties this kind of learning entails and explain why it’s worth persisting. Consider having them read the profi le earlier in this chapter of the medical student Michael Young, who vividly describes the diffi culties and ultimate benefi ts of using these strategies.
Mary Pat Wenderoth, Biology Professor,University of Washington
Mary Pat Wenderoth introduces desirable diffi culties in her classes to help students master their coursework. She also works at helping students learn how to be effective at managing their own learning— to be the capable student within the professional that they envision becoming. Along that path she tackles yet another challenge, helping students learn to judge where their grasp of course material stands on Bloom’s taxonomy of learning, and how to rise to the levels of synthesis and evaluation.
Bloom’s taxonomy classifi es cognitive learning on six levels. It was developed in 1956 by a committee of educators chaired by psychologist Benjamin Bloom. The six levels range from gaining knowledge (the most fundamental level) to developing comprehension of the underlying facts and ideas, being able to apply learning to solve problems, being able to analyze ideas and relationships so as to make inferences, be-
