Chapter 3D

Making It Stick

“Oh, Mr. Brock!” came the sing-song sound of Anna from around the corner.
I suppressed a smile as the three of them came into view and stood expectantly by my desk. Ah, my little 3rd period “Coffee Klatch” as I had come to think of them.
“Yes, ladies?” I replied.
“Are you available next period?” Caroline asked, as all three of them eagerly held out their study hall passes. “For help preparing for the test?”
I took their passes and began to sign them. “Yes,” I told them. “I can be available for academic help next period. I’ll meet you in the usual spot.” I said, gesturing with my head through the window at the other half of the science prep room.
They ran off to give their passes to their proctor, and I stood, thinking, “my how things change. Beginning of the year, I can barely get any of them to come get extra help. Now they practically live in this room.”
I went to refill my mug with water, and by the time I returned, the three of them were ensconced in their usual places, laptops, notebooks, and papers strewn across the table in front of them.
“I don’t have any specific questions just yet, Mr. Brock,” declared Anna. “But I’ll be sure to let you know when I do.”
“Me too,” said Caroline. “I don’t have any questions just yet. I just want to be able to work through the study guide with you available.”
“Well, I have a question!” Madison stated anxiously. “I don’t know what to write down in my Quizlet for number three.”
I walked around to where I could glance at the review sheet PDF on her screen and said “That’s because there is nothing to write for number three. Number three is a skill. The question is telling you that you have to be able to construct a cladogram and know what the required features are.” I pointed with my finger at her screen. “It’s why you have practice cladogram problems in number fifteen. The same thing is true of number thirteen.” I told her. “That’s a skill. You have to be able to take a collection of things and classify them into appropriate groups.”
“About cladograms, Mr. Brock,” Anna interjected. “I don’t know about those. The practice problems you gave us were kind of rough! I don’t know that I could do one of those on a test.”
There was a general murmur of assent from the other two.
“Okay,” I replied. “When we have something tough, how do we address that?”
“We practice.” All three of them sighed.
“Exactly.” I said. “So let’s practice.”
“But Mr. Brock, I’ve already done the ones you gave us.” Anna protested.
“Did you get them right?” I asked.
“Yes, but I need more.” She replied.
“Yes, we need more!” Madison and Caroline both pleaded.
“All right,” I answered, turning to the whiteboard to write the words box, tree, cardboard, pulp, paper. “There you go; make a cladogram.”
They turned toward one another.
“So the one at the bottom always has the property that everything else has, and the one at the top is the most different,” said Anna.
“And things usually get more complex as you move up the diagram,” added Caroline.
“But what do all of those things have in common?” Madison asked, plaintively.
They started to discuss the answer to that question, and I put out my hand.
“Stop.” I told them. “What have we learned about studying? Always try it on your own first all the way through? THEN share and talk things out with someone else? It’s why I keep telling all of you NOT to have one person in the class make a Quizlet and share it with everyone. Each of you should be making her own Quizlet and then take each other’s.”
I could tell they were thinking “But that’s so much work, Mr. Brock!” But they dutifully stopped communicating and each sketched out the answer in her own notebook. I walked around the table so that I could observe their work, and when I could tell all three of them were finished, I instructed them to talk it out.
“Don’t just immediately compare answers,” I told them. “Talk through how you reasoned out your answer.”
“Well, I noticed that a lot of the items are made of paper and paper is made of trees.” Anna said.
“And you have to crush up the tree to make paper,” added Caroline.
“And boxes are folded paper.” Madison contributed.
Steadily, they worked through their reasoning as I sketched their ideas on the whiteboard.
“So, is that what you think the correct answer is?” I queried, pointing at the board.
They all nodded.
“Congratulations,” I said. “That’s because that is the correct answer.”
“YES!” exclaimed Anna. Then she perked up in her chair. “Can we do more?” She asked.
“Yes, please Mr. Brock!” said the other two.
I replied that we certainly could, and for the next half hour, we worked on improving everyone’s cladogram skills. We started to move on to some of their other questions when suddenly Maia walk in to ask if she could join us.
“Whoa!” She said, looking at the board. “Can I take a picture of that with my phone?”
I started to respond when Madison exclaimed “No, Mr. Brock! You need to erase it! Otherwise, she won’t really learn!”
This time, I could not suppress the smile.

Why Practice Makes Perfect

To state the obvious, memory is where the process of learning actually happens.  It is the intersection of perception and attention that enables the transition from working or short-term memory (STM) to long-term memory (LTM), and it is—again to state the obvious—clearly the whole point of the educational process.  It is why you are reading any of this in the first place.  But, just as with perception and attention, the neuroscience again has much to inform us about how the brain’s hardwiring generates the process of memory, and thus, to engage children authentically in the classroom, we again need to be using knowledge of this process to be informing our teaching.  Let’s start with the basics.

First, when new input arrives in the brain, the brain takes this information and “acts like a blender left running with the lid off.”²⁹ Every element of the experience is dissected into discrete pieces, each of which gets its own set of neural pathways to process it into a perception of it.  For example, we know from studying victims of strokes, that even the consonants and vowels of each of these words you are reading are processed by different parts of the brain and that if the neural pathway for one becomes damaged, the rest of this sentence w_ _ ld  r_ _d  l_k_  th_s.³⁰

Also, when I say ‘every element,’ I mean every element.  The entire environment being experienced with the new input—including emotions and other internal states—is being discretely processed by its own neural network to generate a single perception of that information.  As I tell my own students when teaching this material, every thought has a feeling; every feeling has a thought. The knowledge that “2+2=4” has an emotional content to it.³¹

Once the brain has used its neural networks to encode an awareness of any new information, it will then store this information on those same neurons and pathways recruited for the perception of it, which is why “every time you learn something new, you change the brain [and] the residue of your experience is stored”³² on the very same neural pathways employed to have the experience in the first place.  The key word here, though, is “residue.”  The first time you encounter new information, it is like walking across a lawn only once; the grass will flatten for a brief time in the places where you have stepped but is highly likely to bounce back shortly thereafter.  To store that information permanently, the brain must re-experience it time and again, just as you must walk over the same patch of grass repeatedly before it becomes a dirt path.

One of the key ways the brain engages in this repetition process is through sleep.  Research has shown that following a learning event, the neural pathways recruited during that event fire repeatedly during certain portions of the sleep cycle and that if you wake someone up during one of those times, the individual has poorer recall of the learning event the next day than someone who was allowed to finish their sleep uninterrupted.  In fact:

Take an A student used to scoring in the top 10 percent of virtually everything she does.  If she gets just under seven hours of sleep on weekdays, and about 40 minutes more on weekends, her scores will begin to match the scores of the bottom 9 percent of individuals who are getting enough sleep [so poorly is she now learning any new material].³³

Therefore, the unconscious re-exposure to new information is just as critical as the conscious re-experiencing of it is, and it is only through a mixture of both that the brain generates a permanent memory of it; that it carves out a “dirt path.”

Until the brain does this, though, a memory is not stable, and since the barrage of constantly new input sometimes needs the same neural pathways as previous input, the transition from STM to LTM can sometimes take years.³⁴ Furthermore, as old neural pathways get used to recall a memory, the act of recall itself employs additional neural pathways, which means there is now a “new” memory of the “old” memory.  This memory instability is why each of us regularly get memories of similar events jumbled up together and why at family gatherings, people will sometimes descend into arguments about “what actually happened that one time at thanksgiving.”  It is also why, as every educator knows from firsthand experience, you do not truly learn something until you have to teach it to someone else.

Deliberate “Controlled Hallucinations”

Now that we have a better understanding of how the brain produces memory, let’s examine the implications for learning and then teaching.  First, the act of learning requires significant effort on the learner’s part.  The neural pathway encoding a memory must fire those neurons regularly and repeatedly to transition STM to LTM, and they must do so by actively interacting with the material because unless the brain creates a new perception of the material each time, the necessary genes will not be activated to induce the additional synaptic connections that turn “bent grass”  into the “dirt path” of a completed neural network. 

Second, “regularly and repeatedly” does not mean continuously.  As we saw with attention, the brain uses up a tremendous amount of energy.  Actively engaging with the material for short periods of time, followed by a break, followed by another short period of engagement, and so forth allows the neurons doing the encoding to rest, clean out their metabolic wastes, and reset to fire their signals again.³⁵  That is why cramming doesn’t work for actual mastery of new material (and why so much is forgotten over summers):  racing back and forth across the “lawn” for a while isn’t going to wear out a “dirt path,” but it will wear out you.

Third and finally, a learner must truly understand a body of new material for the brain to remember it.  A faulty “hallucination” is going to produce at best a “dirt path” where it is not wanted (and unlearning something wrong is as difficult as my analogy of needing to “reseed” and then trace a new “path” suggests).  But more likely, if the perception does not match reality (which is the brain definition for “understanding”), the brain is not going to keep that neural pathway at all and will employ it for future input it that does make sense. It is why “trying to solve a problem before being taught the solution leads to better learning, even when errors are made in the attempt”³⁶ because the brain wrestling to produce the initial perception of an answer sets up a pre-existing neural pathway that can then incorporate the additional knowledge of the solution later.  To use my analogy of the “lawn,” by bending down the “grass” with the initial attempt at problem-solving, the brain knows already where to dig up its “turf” to make the “dirt path” of the solution.

As for the other side of the educational coin, teaching, the implications from how memory works for our classroom practice are significant.  For starters, teachers need to present material in a manner so compelling and appropriately stressful that the students spontaneously engage in deep and elaborate encoding.³⁷ Thus, we have got to stop the common practice of “death by PowerPoint.”  Not only is it bad for attention, it does not present material in an active manner that will make the hippocampus “sit up and take notice.”  Next, we need to provide plenty of opportunities to practice what we are teaching at appropriate intervals.  For example, in my 9^th grade classes where we learn experimental design, we perform the design process starting at the beginning of the year, and then do the next one about every two weeks throughout the year.  That way, my students are re-engaging the concepts of variables, controls, etc. over and over as they steadily master this investigational process, and when I get many of them back three years later in my AP Biology class, I have never had to reteach this material.  Lastly, teachers also need to be actively reviewing as we go along.  I provide access to any test review materials at the beginning of the unit, not the end, and whenever we revisit the concept map we steadily build and enlarge throughout the year (what my students have nicknamed, “The Big Picture”), we start from scratch at its very beginning each time and fully reconstruct what we have learned so far before adding the next element to it—which is why there are alumni who can still talk about it intelligibly at reunions 15 years later.

Final Thoughts

As I said near the start of this chapter, we have only scratched the surface of how neuroscience can and should be informing what is taking place in schools, and I encourage the reader to take a deeper dive into the books heavily referenced so far (as well as the research referenced in those books).  My goal at this point is simply to demonstrate how and why employing a full understanding of the tension between the brain’s plasticity and its hardwiring is essential for authentic engagement in the classroom.

However, now that we do have a better working grasp of what the brain is doing during the learning process, we can also begin to see how this knowledge fits in with the other two properties I have set forth as being essential for good teaching.  For example, as we generate appropriately intimate rapport with our students, we also generate the trust necessary for the deliberate conditions of stress which we must create to actually work to produce the learning we want; a child who genuinely knows and feels their teachers’ caring will risk the stress of learning something new (and potentially uncomfortable) and not feel overwhelmed while doing so. 

Moreover, as we embrace our role as co-learner, students get to witness first-hand our own struggles with the material.  When children see for themselves how much effort and attention we as teachers must engage in to learn our craft better—the effort to find a new analogy for a difficult concept; the risk-taking of a new lesson and the adjustments we make when it doesn’t quite work out as intended—they, too, will more willingly embrace their own need for a “growth mindset” over a “fixed mindset”³⁸ and make the real effort to learn what we are asking them.

Together, then, the three properties of the authentically engaged teacher intertwine to generate successful education.  By working to practice them in our own classrooms and in this profession, we can transform our schools into places where true mastery learning takes place and where, as I once overheard a student put it, “I actually want to go to class.”