I think one of the most frustrating experiences for both students and teachers is when we work together to learn something (let’s say adding fractions with different denominators or multiplying integers with different signs) and we all feel like we “get it” in class. Then, come test time, it’s like what we “learned” went up in a puff of smoke. If I had a loonie for every time I said, “But they got it in class!” to myself, I’d be rich. I don’t think it’s just me. I’ve had these discussions with other teachers. And students are frustrated with this experience too, I know. This is what Einstein calls "insanity": doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

It’s the trap of thinking you understand something versus having deep, enduring understanding that you can apply in different situations to solve problems.

Six years ago, one of my mentors (and gifted DSBN math consultant) Liisa Suurtaam, shared the book, Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter Brown, Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel. It was one of those books that changes your thinking in such profound ways that you have to share it with others.

Here are a few of the key ideas from Make it Stick:

• Reading about a difficult concept leads to the illusion that we “get it” and the concept is actually simpler than it is. This leads us to overestimate our level of competency.

• We lose 70% of what we've just heard right away. To interrupt forgetting, we need to constantly retrieve. For example in the “old days", we had to memorize peoples’ phone numbers. The simple act of having to retrieve the phone number from our memory on a frequent basis meant that we were less likely to forget it.

• Learning changes our brains by building new synapses.

• Learning is deeper and longer-lasting when it's difficult. In other words, when we struggle, it is more likely that what we’re learning will stick.

• Mistakes are important for us to master a concept. This next part is really interesting ... If we are preoccupied with a fear of making mistakes, we actually do worse on tests because our working memory capacity is used to monitor our performance (“How am I doing?”, "Am I making mistakes?”)

• Expressing what we are learning in our own words and making connections to what we already know helps learning stick

How does this impact what I believe as a teacher and how I structure my classes?

• Frequent, low-stakes tests are important in order to prevent us from forgetting.

• “Interleaving” practice is kind of like Crossfit for our brains. In Math, for example, this means that tests have questions that cover everything we have learned, not just the most recent concepts.

• We work on challenging problems that cause us to struggle while we’re learning.

• We keep a reflection journal in which we reflect on not only what and how we learn, but what we learn from the mistakes we make.

A year ago, my students helped me recognize a mistake I was making that was at odds with my Make it Stick values.

I always write my own Math and Science questions. This allows me to tailor the questions to the interests of my students and include “real-life” situations. I work hard to make sure there is no ambiguity in the questions (ie. the wording and vocabulary are clear etc). This way, I thought, students could focus on solving the actual problem, not decoding the language.

I was away for a day and left a variety of textbook problems (ie. ones not written by me) for my students. When I returned, I was greeted with a chorus of, “These questions were so confusing! We didn’t understand what they were asking! They weren’t like any of the other ones you give us!”

I had inadvertently been making learning easy and disadvantaging my students by removing any struggle they would need to make to decode a problem. You can bet that I changed that up pretty quickly!

The biggest take-away from Make it Stick and what we need to keep reminding ourselves, is that when learning is difficult, we are doing important work.

There are several good summaries of the main ideas in Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning that you can find (click here), (click here) and an 8-minute video (click here).