Summary of James M. Lang's Small Teaching

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

Book Preview:

#1 The media storm that erupted in 1956 upon the publication of a book titled Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals, Handbook I: Cognitive Domain, was largely the result of a misused pyramid visual image. Today's college instructors often believe that the learning of facts and concepts comes beneath them, while higher cognitive activities like critical thinking and judgment are their primary concerns.

#2 We can't offload the responsibility for teaching our students basic knowledge to their elementary school teachers or to Google. We must develop a rich body of knowledge in our content areas, and this will help students engage in cognitive activities like thinking and evaluating and creating.

#3 We can't offload the responsibility for teaching our students basic knowledge to their elementary school teachers or to Google. We must develop a rich body of knowledge in our content areas, and this will help our students engage in cognitive activities like thinking and evaluating.

#4 If you want your students to have knowledge that they can use to practice their higher order cognitive skills, you must help them acquire that knowledge. Simple tweaks to the organization of your course and the order in which you introduce new material and review older material can provide a powerful boost to student mastery of knowledge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Oct 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9798350040050

IRB Media

With IRB books, you can get the key takeaways and analysis of a book in 15 minutes. We read every chapter, identify the key takeaways and analyze them for your convenience.

Book preview

Insights on James M. Lang's Small Teaching

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The taxonomy created by psychologist Benjamin Bloom is often depicted as a pyramid, with knowledge at the bottom and evaluation or creation at the apex. However, many college instructors seem to believe that the learning of facts or concepts falls beneath them.

#2

The first and most important task of a teacher is to help students develop a rich body of knowledge in the areas of content they are studying. Without this, they will never be able to engage in cognitive activities like thinking and evaluating.

#3

We must remember that students are not always capable of memorizing information on their own. In fact, research shows that students typically make poor choices when they attempt to learn new information.

#4

Small teaching helps students remember course material, which they can use to practice their higher order cognitive skills. You can help students acquire this knowledge by focusing on the first and final minutes of your class session, and by making simple tweaks to the organization of your course and the order in which you introduce new material and review older material.

#5

The retrieval effect is the idea that if you want to recall knowledge from your memory, you must practice retrieving it. The more times you practice remembering something, the more capable you become of remembering it in the future.

#6

The retrieval effect is the process of recalling something you learned, and it improves your memory. It is called the testing effect because it is typically used to measure student learning, but it can also be used to improve it.

#7

The most recent real-world experiments have been conducted by the Memory Lab at Washington University in St. Louis, which involves the use of multiple researchers exploring the educational implications of their work on learning, cognition, and memory. They used a sixth-grade social studies class to see if a structured set of retrieval practice activities would improve student learning.

#8

The experiment showed the power of retrieval practice. It demonstrated that additional study time did not provide any additional learning benefit. The positive results extended far out in time.

#9

The power of retrieval practice was demonstrated by Roediger and Butler (2007) when they had students take a short-answer test on the material they had just learned, after watching three 30-minute lectures on art history. The students who took