Are You Doing All the Work?

If someone were to peek into your classroom during a typical class session, what would they see? Research suggests (and experience confirms) that they’d see most of us standing at the front of the room doing all the work—writing on the board, describing, explaining, solving problems--and students sitting quietly, taking notes.

Unfortunately, as Terry Doyle (2011) points out, “the one who does the work does the learning.” The more students have to do—the more they have to think through, puzzle out, solve, inquire, explore—the more they’ll learn, and the better they’ll remember it. Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel (2014) point out that frustration and struggle are attendant to deep learning.

This means that if we want our students to learn more, we have to resist the temptation to tell. We need to deploy our expertise differently, designing experiences and activities that lead to learning, building opportunities for practice and feedback. When we let students do the work, we guide them through the thinking processes we want them to practice, but they have to do the thinking for themselves.

This will probably involve lots of talking, writing, and collaborating, as students explore new concepts. Informal, low-stakes opportunities for you and your students to find out whether (and how much) they’re “getting it” are sometimes called Classroom Assessment Techniques (another kind of CATs) and are also great ways to use class time. You might want to use think-pair-share, or Conceptests, followed by small group discussion. (Great tips on group work, including how to form the groups and design effective assignments, are available here.) Clickers and games like Kahoot can help you create a loop of immediate feedback, letting you and your students gauge their progress and identify trouble spots.