Science of Teaching and Learning (STL)

It's a verb, not a noun! Science of Teaching and Learning (STL) is the dynamic process of applying research about how the brain learns to the complex environment of an organic classroom. STL was designed as an area of synthesis; a shared authority between teachers and researchers, as well as to provide a space for translation work to be completed. Translation work includes 2 way communication of research to practice AND practice to research. This website is not a comprehensive picture of STL, but it is a starting point of research informed concrete tools for teachers to quickly implement in their classrooms. Designed by teachers for teachers.

David Daniel, a psychology professor and founding father of MBE, (STL) uses a cooking analogy to describe the field. (D. Daniel, personal communication, June 22, 2020). Teachers are designed to be "chefs, not servers"; chefs need quality ingredients, the appropriate tools and the appropriate sequence of mixing the ingredients. When we first start out in our careers, we may need a cook book to rely on others' experience. However, as we move through our own lifelong learning curve, we begin to experiment with how we make our own "secret sauce". This includes diving deep to find the small and nuanced changes to provide the highest quality ingredients. As teachers, we can use the field of STL to help find the highest quality of ingredients (metacognition, feedback, analogy and memory strategies), knowledge of sequences helps when we start out with the students asking the questions first (promotes motivation for students to answer their own questions), and last but not least, we can share appropriate tools (explicit study strategy skills such as retrieval practice and spacing). STL helps teachers find quality ingredients, appropriate sequences and tools for the job of learning -- the "secret sauce" combination of these 3 leads to efficient and effective learning for all.

According to David Daniel, best practices don't exist (D. Daniel, personal communication, June 22, 2020). As a matter of fact he states that "best practices" should not be the goal and they can even be dangerous. Dangerous from the standpoint they lead us to believe that one strategy should work at all times with all kids -- which is simply not true. STL's goal is to promote a culture of classroom strategies and practices that are rooted in the science of learning as well as be informed by both classroom practice and evidence. An important distinction being research informed and not necessarily researched based (ie research can be misleading at times due to the limited context it was completed in, therefore the teacher needs to remain flexible and inform their practices by research, rather than base all decisions on one research study). Furthermore, a goal of the field of STL is to build "evidence generating" practices and encourage teachers to be "action researchers." Teachers are the experts in their classrooms, and should feel empowered to try and measure new strategies based on the science of learning and field of STL.

Typically teachers spend a majority of time encoding (putting information into students' brains). However, learning actually occurs when we pull information out of the brain (retrieval) or engage in activities that store information by connecting it to self and prior knowledge.

Ask yourself: How much time do I have my students Encode information? Store information? Retrieve information? It is typical that as educators we tend to spend significant amounts of time on encode and limited time on retrieval. Is it time to focus more on retrieval to promote more useable and durable memories?