THE BEST OF THE MARSHALL MEMO
Carefully chosen summaries to energize leadership, teaching, and learning
Making Learning Stick
If you've downloaded the PDF or listened to the audio recording, have the ideas been helpful? If so, please write a brief description of how you’ve put them to work, reactions from colleagues, and further suggestions. Our goal is to foster an ongoing peer-to-peer exchange of effective practices in this area.
Click here to share follow-up and suggestions
Discussion thread so far
Marta Dospiva Legan New York City Department of Education [email protected] April 21 2021 During the breakout session of Kim and Jenn's 11/18/20 �chapter chat� on What Makes Learning Stick, I was interested in section 9, "How Can We Help Students Remember More?" I shared with teachers that is is helpful to give students students a specific task that will force them to think about meaning as they study, and the example of having students ask WHY, for example, was very useful. This is a wonderful strategy that helps all learners retain information that they form a meaningful connection with. Pretests are also helpful to support retention. There were many other useful strategies in the chapter that I appreciated having available. |
Christopher Lundgren, Soc. Stud. Dept. Chair KIPP Nashville, Tennessee [email protected] April 20 2021 My whole department read the chapter on student recall and worked to implement some of the ideas in the section. Specifically, we worked to write more low-stakes formative assessments so that students needed to apply concepts in almost every class. Additionally, we plan to pre-load end-of-course expectations in the Social Sciences Dept. next year by having all AP teachers (9-12) administer a mock AP Exam (perhaps a pared-down version) in the first week of the 2021-22 academic year. As a department we plan to revisit that section over the summer and develop additional avenues to boost student recall, which remains one of the most intractable hurdles to student success on AP Exams at our school. I'll be happy to pass along anything else we develop, and you should feel free to reach back out in the second half of July if it would be helpful. |
Beth Wartzenluft Stone Bank School, Wisconsin [email protected] April 20 2021 As an instructional coach and the head of Teaching and Learning of our school/district, I found this material full of impactful implications for educators. "Not Overloading Working Memory" was fascinating! Quizzing early, retrieval practice, and understanding the different types of memory got me really thinking about how intentionally, or unintentionally, we plan lessons with this knowledge. We have something called OTLs (opportunities to learn) at our school as sort of a "bite size" professional learning. The intent is to have staff share something they are trying, doing, or want to share (or teach) colleagues. We meet after school one day a week for a half hour for OTLs. This year, OTLs just didn't get off the ground much. People just were not showing up...exhausted, trying to find work-life balance, COVID, etc... So... Next year we will start our OTL series with these bite size nuggets. I am excited to share with colleagues your work, and I know that everything I read in this collection of Marshall Memo summaries is both doable, and provides actionable steps teachers can take to energize learners, and learning, to make learning stick. We will plan the WHAT MAKES LEARNING STICK OTL series this summer, to be ready to kick off the 2021-22 year with it. I am thinking of how we can make a "cheat sheet" for teachers to use while planning. A quick sheet to remind them what to embed, and why, and then to intentionally plan to measure the learner, and learning, impact. |