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Small Teaching Lib/E: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning
A freshly updated edition featuring research-based teaching techniques that faculty in any discipline can easily implement Research into how we learn can help facilitate better student learning—if we know how to apply it. Small Teaching fills the gap in higher education literature between the primary research in cognitive theory and the classroom environment. In this book, James Lang presents a strategy for improving student learning with a series of small but powerful changes that make a big difference―many of which can be put into practice in a single class period. These are simple interventions that can be integrated into pre-existing techniques, along with clear descriptions of how to do so. Inside, you’ll find brief classroom or online learning activities, one-time interventions, and small modifications in course design or student communication. These small tweaks will bring your classroom into alignment with the latest evidence in cognitive research. Each chapter introduces a basic concept in cognitive research that has implications for classroom teaching, explains the rationale for offering it within a specific time period in a typical class, and then provides concrete examples of how this intervention has been used or could be used by faculty in a variety of disciplines. The second edition features revised and updated content including a newly authored preface, new examples and techniques, updated research, and updated resources. Higher education faculty and administrators, as well as K-12 teachers and teacher trainers, will love the easy-to-implement, evidence-based techniques in Small Teaching .
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First published March 14, 2016
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About the author
James M. Lang
19 books79 followersJames M. Lang is a nonfiction author whose work focuses on education, literature, and religion. His most recent books are Distracted: Why Students Can't Focus and What You Can Do About It (Basic Books, 2020), Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning (Wiley, 2016), and Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty (Harvard UP, 2013). He writes a monthly column for the Chronicle of Higher Education; his essays and reviews have appeared in Time, The Conversation, the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, and more.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 189 reviews
August 5, 2018
Updated in August 2018
James Lang is a frequent contributor to Chronicle of Higher Educationwhere I've always enjoyed his essays. I've read several books on teaching in the past year; Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons From the Science of Learning was one of the meatiest and thought-provoking, a nice palate cleanser as I prepare for the new semester.
Small Teaching was similarly enjoyable: well-written, easily read and digested, filled with concrete advice on a range of topics. He tells personal stories to make his point, both from the classroom and the rest of his life. He is generous, sharing both his successes and his failures.
Lang's thesis is that rather than attempt a radical redesign of your course, make small changes that can be successfully implemented even by tomorrow. He follows through with this promise by offering at least 40 small changes to engage and motivate students, and help them learn and understand more effectively. I have dog-eared my copy and scribbled my way through it, identifying many places where I was already following his suggestions, but also seeing a variety of tweaks that I plan to make in my courses next semester to make my teaching more effective.
Most books on teaching offer one big idea, which is developed over the course of the book, with many opportunities to think about the ideas raised therein. The only "problem" I have with Small Teaching is that it offers an embarrassment of riches, many of which will get lost in the next weeks and months without being implemented. I returned to it with a group of colleagues, then again later in the year.
Small Teaching is different in tone and style from Irvin Yalom's Gift of Therapy, but like it, should be placed on your desk and pulled out during quiet moments during the week. It should not be swallowed in a single gulp, as I did, although even that can be a pleasant and useful experience.
James Lang is a frequent contributor to Chronicle of Higher Educationwhere I've always enjoyed his essays. I've read several books on teaching in the past year; Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons From the Science of Learning was one of the meatiest and thought-provoking, a nice palate cleanser as I prepare for the new semester.
Small Teaching was similarly enjoyable: well-written, easily read and digested, filled with concrete advice on a range of topics. He tells personal stories to make his point, both from the classroom and the rest of his life. He is generous, sharing both his successes and his failures.
Lang's thesis is that rather than attempt a radical redesign of your course, make small changes that can be successfully implemented even by tomorrow. He follows through with this promise by offering at least 40 small changes to engage and motivate students, and help them learn and understand more effectively. I have dog-eared my copy and scribbled my way through it, identifying many places where I was already following his suggestions, but also seeing a variety of tweaks that I plan to make in my courses next semester to make my teaching more effective.
Most books on teaching offer one big idea, which is developed over the course of the book, with many opportunities to think about the ideas raised therein. The only "problem" I have with Small Teaching is that it offers an embarrassment of riches, many of which will get lost in the next weeks and months without being implemented. I returned to it with a group of colleagues, then again later in the year.
Small Teaching is different in tone and style from Irvin Yalom's Gift of Therapy, but like it, should be placed on your desk and pulled out during quiet moments during the week. It should not be swallowed in a single gulp, as I did, although even that can be a pleasant and useful experience.
June 6, 2018
Can’t get students’ attention at the beginning of class? Did they already forget what they learned two days ago? Two weeks ago? Feel like it’s too late to change anything at this point?
James Lang would beg to disagree. In Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning, he introduces strategies that we can implement tomorrow without too much planning and preparation. Here’s one: start class with a story. Whether it’s about a scientific discovery, a personal experience in a dysfunctional school, or a disastrous sailing expedition, the right story can open up a topic and its relevance for students.
Another good way to start: summarize the conclusions from the last class session. When Lang says “summarize,” he means “ask the students to summarize.” He also means, “without referring to their notes.” This strategy asks them to retrieve the information from their brains, thus reinforcing the neural pathways that they’ll need on exam day.
And what about the end of class? Lang would recommend closing with questions that prompt students to summarize and reflect on what they have learned. If students answer these questions in writing, they will begin to create the neural pathways that you will ask them to reinforce in the next class.
These are just three of many suggestions. They don’t take much time to plan and implement, and they can make a big impact on student learning. This is because they are all based on the science of learning. Therefore, each chapter includes a few pages about how students learn. Lang not only gives us some user-friendly tools, but he also explains why they work. (If he didn’t, he’d be violating his own rule about giving students some kind of framework for what they’re learning.)
Lang’s final suggestion: learn about teaching and learning. Every year, read at least one book about pedagogy. Use web resources; follow the experts on Twitter; attend a conference; participate in programs sponsored by your campus center for teaching and learning.
Did he really say that? Yes, he did.
James Lang would beg to disagree. In Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning, he introduces strategies that we can implement tomorrow without too much planning and preparation. Here’s one: start class with a story. Whether it’s about a scientific discovery, a personal experience in a dysfunctional school, or a disastrous sailing expedition, the right story can open up a topic and its relevance for students.
Another good way to start: summarize the conclusions from the last class session. When Lang says “summarize,” he means “ask the students to summarize.” He also means, “without referring to their notes.” This strategy asks them to retrieve the information from their brains, thus reinforcing the neural pathways that they’ll need on exam day.
And what about the end of class? Lang would recommend closing with questions that prompt students to summarize and reflect on what they have learned. If students answer these questions in writing, they will begin to create the neural pathways that you will ask them to reinforce in the next class.
These are just three of many suggestions. They don’t take much time to plan and implement, and they can make a big impact on student learning. This is because they are all based on the science of learning. Therefore, each chapter includes a few pages about how students learn. Lang not only gives us some user-friendly tools, but he also explains why they work. (If he didn’t, he’d be violating his own rule about giving students some kind of framework for what they’re learning.)
Lang’s final suggestion: learn about teaching and learning. Every year, read at least one book about pedagogy. Use web resources; follow the experts on Twitter; attend a conference; participate in programs sponsored by your campus center for teaching and learning.
Did he really say that? Yes, he did.
June 8, 2020
To the book's credit it's very readable. With such clearly-labled and bite-sized sections within equally bite-sized chapters it's definitely something one could easily pick up during a 15 minute break and skim and scan for ideas. If only it had ideas...
While you should never judge a book by it's cover, it's worth mentioning that this book misrepresents itself from the very beginning. Being called "Small Teaching" one might reasonably assume it is related to teaching at the K-12 level (where most teaching takes place), but it is actually focused on higher education. That said, much of the research drawn upon to validate the author's claims come from studies in K-12 classrooms. So what's the issue then? you might ask. Well the problem is that none of this research is new to any K-12 educator. Truly nothing. I can hardly imagine someone even receiving their teaching license without already knowing these things. If anything this book is a testament to the incredibly low standards for university professors who are often hired and evaluated based upon their research output rather than student satisfaction or education.
Even worse than being ultimately useless for competent K-12 educators, if anyone truly was unfamiliar to such methods they would likely not learn much from this book without requiring supplemental internet searching to truly understand what the methods would look like in the classroom. In the chapter on "interleaving" James Lang introduces the idea of mixing together topics so that before mastering topic A the teacher will already start introducing B and C before later returning to A. It's not a bad method, but the author then proceeds to give an example of this where the teacher teaches half of A at the end of class 1, and then the other half of A at the beginning of class 2. That....that isn't interleaving. That's just offsetting one's lessons by half a class. How is anyone supposed to understand interleaving as a concept when the author's very example isn't an example? One would be better off just googling the 9 chapter titles along with the words "educational approach" and doing their own research than reading this book which spends far more time discussing the research behind an idea than the idea itself.
While I should let the review end there, there's a literary pet peeve that I want to address as well. It's one thing for, say, stand-up comedians to lie about their personal lives for the sake of a joke. That's fine. It's another thing for author's to lie about their lives for the sake of an introduction. James Lang, at the beginning of chapter 3, claims to have studied Latin, Greek, French, Italian, and Gaelic. He says that language learning is one of his favorite pastimes. He then goes on to say that while writing this book be started learning Spanish, and found that he was forgetting words as he continued to learn new ones. It then miraculously dawns on him that perhaps he should review old words while also learning new words. Stunning! Remarkable! What a discovery! This man has studied six languages in addition to his native English and only just now he realized that reviewing vocabulary helps one learn vocabulary? Either this is a fabrication for the sake of introducing the topic, or it explains why he thought this book needed to be written in the first place.
While you should never judge a book by it's cover, it's worth mentioning that this book misrepresents itself from the very beginning. Being called "Small Teaching" one might reasonably assume it is related to teaching at the K-12 level (where most teaching takes place), but it is actually focused on higher education. That said, much of the research drawn upon to validate the author's claims come from studies in K-12 classrooms. So what's the issue then? you might ask. Well the problem is that none of this research is new to any K-12 educator. Truly nothing. I can hardly imagine someone even receiving their teaching license without already knowing these things. If anything this book is a testament to the incredibly low standards for university professors who are often hired and evaluated based upon their research output rather than student satisfaction or education.
Even worse than being ultimately useless for competent K-12 educators, if anyone truly was unfamiliar to such methods they would likely not learn much from this book without requiring supplemental internet searching to truly understand what the methods would look like in the classroom. In the chapter on "interleaving" James Lang introduces the idea of mixing together topics so that before mastering topic A the teacher will already start introducing B and C before later returning to A. It's not a bad method, but the author then proceeds to give an example of this where the teacher teaches half of A at the end of class 1, and then the other half of A at the beginning of class 2. That....that isn't interleaving. That's just offsetting one's lessons by half a class. How is anyone supposed to understand interleaving as a concept when the author's very example isn't an example? One would be better off just googling the 9 chapter titles along with the words "educational approach" and doing their own research than reading this book which spends far more time discussing the research behind an idea than the idea itself.
While I should let the review end there, there's a literary pet peeve that I want to address as well. It's one thing for, say, stand-up comedians to lie about their personal lives for the sake of a joke. That's fine. It's another thing for author's to lie about their lives for the sake of an introduction. James Lang, at the beginning of chapter 3, claims to have studied Latin, Greek, French, Italian, and Gaelic. He says that language learning is one of his favorite pastimes. He then goes on to say that while writing this book be started learning Spanish, and found that he was forgetting words as he continued to learn new ones. It then miraculously dawns on him that perhaps he should review old words while also learning new words. Stunning! Remarkable! What a discovery! This man has studied six languages in addition to his native English and only just now he realized that reviewing vocabulary helps one learn vocabulary? Either this is a fabrication for the sake of introducing the topic, or it explains why he thought this book needed to be written in the first place.
September 30, 2017
Treasure trove of great teaching ideas.
December 24, 2024
A solid meditation on certain aspects of good teaching practices. I am avoiding admonishing the book for offering “nothing new”; instead I found his ideas providing me opportunities to reflect on my own teaching practices and often stopped to consider how I already build his suggestions in my classroom practice. Although he is a teacher in higher ed, he has come to the conclusion that good classroom teaching should not stop after high school. So his methods are very well known to secondary teachers already, for that reason you have to be a bit patient and let him cook. But what I like is that his ideas are grounded in cognitive science and research on how the brain learns. So although these ideas could be cast off as “yeah, no shit” ideas, it’s important to remember that they work and we should continue to creatively implement them and evolve them. I will be recommending this to new teachers.
September 14, 2024
Entering my professor era in a few days and this was a great companion as I finished class prep for the semester!
I loved the research and cognitive psych grounding and found the application points thoughtful and accessible. Now gotta go finish my sylly!
I loved the research and cognitive psych grounding and found the application points thoughtful and accessible. Now gotta go finish my sylly!
March 8, 2020
Although geared towards a more academic and educational audience, I was constantly evaluating the way I learn and how I pursue things. It's a concise guide to teaching and learning with a lot of good insight.
March 5, 2019
I have read much by James Lang in the Chronicle of Higher Education and was interested to see that he had a volume out on teaching strategies for classroom professors based on current science of learning. Overall, this small volume on "Small Teaching" succeeds on many levels and would make an excellent jumpstart summer-read for teachers who feel that perhaps some of their courses and teaching have stagnated in recent years.
Based on the strategy of "small ball" from baseball where rather than relying on heavy-hitters knocking it out of the park, you focus on strategic incremental base-by-base techniques to drive up the score; Lang's suggestions here won't completely revamp or change your classroom process, rather, they provide several meaningful additions to what you're currently doing that have been shown to be productive in the minds of young adults.
Where many volumes such as this give you an endless list of philosophies and methods that couldn't be incorporated into 100 courses let alone one, Lang is very careful to at all times make sure that the strategy discussed is immediately applicable and practical for a wide variety of classroom scenarios. As such, especially for the reflective educator, many of these things are like strategies you have employed before or at the very least thought of. Lang provides you with the method to effectively work them into your current framework/syllabus.
The main strategies of retrieving, predicting, interleaving, connecting, practicing, and self-explaining (which many readers in the field are likely already familiar with) are followed by discussions of the most helpful ways to motivate students, manage their intellectual growth, and to expand the expectations you may have for your course(s).
Definitely recommended for classroom teachers as a cogent summary of current data on learning but mainly as a very usable set of strategies and mindsets to rejuvenate - in manageable fashion - your existing courses.
Based on the strategy of "small ball" from baseball where rather than relying on heavy-hitters knocking it out of the park, you focus on strategic incremental base-by-base techniques to drive up the score; Lang's suggestions here won't completely revamp or change your classroom process, rather, they provide several meaningful additions to what you're currently doing that have been shown to be productive in the minds of young adults.
Where many volumes such as this give you an endless list of philosophies and methods that couldn't be incorporated into 100 courses let alone one, Lang is very careful to at all times make sure that the strategy discussed is immediately applicable and practical for a wide variety of classroom scenarios. As such, especially for the reflective educator, many of these things are like strategies you have employed before or at the very least thought of. Lang provides you with the method to effectively work them into your current framework/syllabus.
The main strategies of retrieving, predicting, interleaving, connecting, practicing, and self-explaining (which many readers in the field are likely already familiar with) are followed by discussions of the most helpful ways to motivate students, manage their intellectual growth, and to expand the expectations you may have for your course(s).
Definitely recommended for classroom teachers as a cogent summary of current data on learning but mainly as a very usable set of strategies and mindsets to rejuvenate - in manageable fashion - your existing courses.
September 16, 2025
This book felt too elementary for me - someone who has been teaching for twenty years and had an educational background in the field of eduction. However there are good simple ideas that aren’t things that people are likely to think about and the new faculty in our reading group all said they thought it was helpful - so I highly recommend as an accessible way to get ready for the higher education classroom for new faculty.
July 23, 2020
Great tips for small adjustments anyone can make to improve learning. Love the organization of the chapters by making clear lists of actionable tasks and diving deeper into the theory and learning science. Recommend to any educator!
July 4, 2021
Really excellent book of evidence-based techniques you can easily throw into your class to improve student learning. Will keep for reference purposes and I'm looking forward to designing my classes with these techniques in mind.
June 20, 2025
Read this for my masters degree, but thoroughly enjoyed it! There is a lot of really incredible and applicable content in here and I think there are lots of opportunities for this to improve my classroom and my students’ learning. I’m getting excited to get back to work in August!
March 27, 2017
I loved this book as it is in line with other texts I have been reading, as well as changes I have made to my classes over the past few years. I got a lot of ideas about teaching and how to change my classroom.
I'll be writing a longer review and posting it to my professional portfolio.
I'll be writing a longer review and posting it to my professional portfolio.
July 28, 2022
I really enjoyed and benefited from this book. It was very easy to read and included excellent strategies that I plan to begin using in the fall.
April 17, 2024
Great read for teachers with great references and recommendations of other books for teachers in the conclusion.
October 2, 2025
Creo que todo profesor/a debería leer este libro.
October 20, 2025
a MUST read for anyone in education, or anyone going into education. has made me rethink all my current teaching philosophies and I already started implementing techniques from this book in both of my classes last week.
July 18, 2018
Definitely a book I would recommend to any educator, not just college profs.
4.5 stars and deserving of a fuller review.
4.5 stars and deserving of a fuller review.
May 18, 2022
I have learned alot from this book and use a number of those things in my courses with positive response from students.
March 20, 2017
Good info, but every chapter seemed to extensively quote from the same couple of sources. I found myself wondering why I just didn't read those books instead.
July 5, 2025
Excellent points on how to create more successful learning environments for students. I much prefer Make it Stick as it was more research-focused and practical to medical education.
March 21, 2021
This is a useful book for teachers because it presents (fairly) specific strategies teachers can use to improve their teaching practices without requiring major overhauls or rethinking of a class. Lang draws on cognitive science, learning theory, etc. and has experienced all of the learning practices he promotes (either as a teacher, a student, or an observer). The recommendations here are based around helping students retain information, build cognitive and memory networks, and increasing motivation.
February 15, 2025
This is a good distillation of the latest research on learning, but it is specifically targeted towards college professors. I was able to take away some ideas to implement in my professional training, but a lot is more for traditional classroom applications.
February 17, 2023
This was one of the better PD books I’ve read for higher ed instructors in a while. Lang gives lots of practical tips that are easy to implement.
Read
February 6, 2018Small Teaching is a great resource for educators. It’s very readable, but, more importantly, it gave me great new ideas that I can immediately use in the classroom and provided scientific research that allowed me to reflect on past successful activities I’ve used. Now I know why those activities worked, which is invaluable. I would recommend this to anyone who is looking to de-center their classes and focus their class time through a variety of learning strategies.
Update: My blog post inspired by Small Teaching was posted this morning! I’m really proud to continue Jim’s conversation with the PALS community:
https://teachingpals.wordpress.com/20...
Update: My blog post inspired by Small Teaching was posted this morning! I’m really proud to continue Jim’s conversation with the PALS community:
https://teachingpals.wordpress.com/20...
May 29, 2020
I am a high school teacher, but I still found the information in this book (which is geared more toward university professors) to be highly relevant and helpful. It was great to get such a thorough overview of the research on so many strategies that we employ as teachers. This book gave me several concrete ideas for things I can do to improve my classes. I was aware of many of the strategies and ideas presented in this book, but seeing the research behind them made me feel more committed to implementing them in an intentional way.
Here are a few of my takeaways and plans:
1. Be very transparent with my students about the research/purpose behind the things we do in education. Help them to understand why it is important to have pretests, cumulative tests, and continually review older material.
2. Retrieving: Students need to practice retrieving information that they have learned. I will continue to implement quizzes at the beginning of class (not always, but often) and will have unlimited attempts on these quizzes so that students get multiple opportunities to retrieve the information. I will also have a short writing assignment at the end of class where students have to answer a question or summarize the important takeaways for the day.
3. Predicting: Use pretests as a learning tool to help students see where the unit is going. Use prediction more intentionally as a way to help students activate prior knowledge so that new learning "sticks"
4. Interleaving: Daily quizzes and tests should occasionally include older material to strengthen students' connection to that material. Even though students won't like it, tests should be cumulative. This is especially important for problem-solving skills. If content is not interleaved, students will be less able to apply their skills to different situations. Massed practice is very effective in the short term, but not in the long term. Spaced practice is less effective in the short term, but more effective in the long term. When students have to use effort to retrieve old concepts, it helps consolidate the learning.
5. Connecting: Experts have a complex network of knowledge and so they learn new things quickly because they can make so many connections. Novices have less connections and the more we can help them make, the more the learning will stick and feel meaningful. At the beginning of a unit, I will ask students to make concept maps, do short writing assignments, or have short discussions about what they already know about the topic. I will write the skeletal outline and key terms on the board during each class so that there is a scaffold available for students. I will use the minute thesis idea with experimental design. This involves having different concepts on the board (mass, length, time, volume, etc.) and having students connect them and then give a short explanation on how those connections make sense.
6. Practicing: Students should engage in mindful learning, which involves practicing, but not the type of practicing that causes the activity to become rote and mindless. I need to help students learn to continually monitor why they are doing things, what they could do differently, how the problem would turn out if they took a different approach. Much of this will need to be done via discussion (with me and other students in the class). Providing students feedback while they are working is the key to helping students become mindful learners. Helping students understand that getting feedback from me is normal and part of class culture is also important. I also need to look at my assessments and figure out what skills students will need to use on those assessments and then give them time to practice those skills. To help students practice presentations, I will give a few assignments where all they are required to do is to create a single slide and practice presenting it.
7. Self Explaining: Good students monitor their own comprehension. They know when they don't understand something. I create practice assignments where students have to perform tasks and explain why they are performing them. I need to help them understand that if they can't explain why they are doing something, they have more work to do. I should tell students from the beginning that I want each of them to come to a point where they don't understand why they are doing something, recognize that they don't understand, and then ask about it. A self explaining activity could involve having students do problems on whiteboards individually, explain their solution to their neighbor, review their own solution, and then hold up their answer. Ask students "How do you know that?" Asking for too much explanation at early stages can make learning more difficult, so in early stages, self-explaining can start with something as simple as selecting from several approaches. "Backwards fading" worksheets (where students start with example problems and then are given less and less help) are a good way to scaffold as well.
8. Motivating: Instructor enthusiasm is hugely important in student enjoyment of and value of subject matter. I can increase enthusiasm by projecting an interesting picture, fact, or news story each day at the beginning of class. I can also make an effort to speak to every student individually at least once. I can also be more deliberate about using stories. Stories evoke emotions and help learning happen. Present material as the answer to a question. On the disclosure, I can include the promises that my class makes to the students. I can connect to what I am enthusiastic about for each day's material. I should ask myself what the emotional heart of what I am teaching is.
9. Growing: Help students believe that they can grow in their abilities in my course. Make sure this is included on the disclosure, discussed on the first day, and obvious in the way I praise and encourage students.
Here are a few of my takeaways and plans:
1. Be very transparent with my students about the research/purpose behind the things we do in education. Help them to understand why it is important to have pretests, cumulative tests, and continually review older material.
2. Retrieving: Students need to practice retrieving information that they have learned. I will continue to implement quizzes at the beginning of class (not always, but often) and will have unlimited attempts on these quizzes so that students get multiple opportunities to retrieve the information. I will also have a short writing assignment at the end of class where students have to answer a question or summarize the important takeaways for the day.
3. Predicting: Use pretests as a learning tool to help students see where the unit is going. Use prediction more intentionally as a way to help students activate prior knowledge so that new learning "sticks"
4. Interleaving: Daily quizzes and tests should occasionally include older material to strengthen students' connection to that material. Even though students won't like it, tests should be cumulative. This is especially important for problem-solving skills. If content is not interleaved, students will be less able to apply their skills to different situations. Massed practice is very effective in the short term, but not in the long term. Spaced practice is less effective in the short term, but more effective in the long term. When students have to use effort to retrieve old concepts, it helps consolidate the learning.
5. Connecting: Experts have a complex network of knowledge and so they learn new things quickly because they can make so many connections. Novices have less connections and the more we can help them make, the more the learning will stick and feel meaningful. At the beginning of a unit, I will ask students to make concept maps, do short writing assignments, or have short discussions about what they already know about the topic. I will write the skeletal outline and key terms on the board during each class so that there is a scaffold available for students. I will use the minute thesis idea with experimental design. This involves having different concepts on the board (mass, length, time, volume, etc.) and having students connect them and then give a short explanation on how those connections make sense.
6. Practicing: Students should engage in mindful learning, which involves practicing, but not the type of practicing that causes the activity to become rote and mindless. I need to help students learn to continually monitor why they are doing things, what they could do differently, how the problem would turn out if they took a different approach. Much of this will need to be done via discussion (with me and other students in the class). Providing students feedback while they are working is the key to helping students become mindful learners. Helping students understand that getting feedback from me is normal and part of class culture is also important. I also need to look at my assessments and figure out what skills students will need to use on those assessments and then give them time to practice those skills. To help students practice presentations, I will give a few assignments where all they are required to do is to create a single slide and practice presenting it.
7. Self Explaining: Good students monitor their own comprehension. They know when they don't understand something. I create practice assignments where students have to perform tasks and explain why they are performing them. I need to help them understand that if they can't explain why they are doing something, they have more work to do. I should tell students from the beginning that I want each of them to come to a point where they don't understand why they are doing something, recognize that they don't understand, and then ask about it. A self explaining activity could involve having students do problems on whiteboards individually, explain their solution to their neighbor, review their own solution, and then hold up their answer. Ask students "How do you know that?" Asking for too much explanation at early stages can make learning more difficult, so in early stages, self-explaining can start with something as simple as selecting from several approaches. "Backwards fading" worksheets (where students start with example problems and then are given less and less help) are a good way to scaffold as well.
8. Motivating: Instructor enthusiasm is hugely important in student enjoyment of and value of subject matter. I can increase enthusiasm by projecting an interesting picture, fact, or news story each day at the beginning of class. I can also make an effort to speak to every student individually at least once. I can also be more deliberate about using stories. Stories evoke emotions and help learning happen. Present material as the answer to a question. On the disclosure, I can include the promises that my class makes to the students. I can connect to what I am enthusiastic about for each day's material. I should ask myself what the emotional heart of what I am teaching is.
9. Growing: Help students believe that they can grow in their abilities in my course. Make sure this is included on the disclosure, discussed on the first day, and obvious in the way I praise and encourage students.
November 7, 2017
A good text for a book group discussion with college professors - which is why I read it - but not particularly revelatory to someone who focuses on pedagogy. More often than not, my addition to the conversation consisted of something along the lines of "Well, no, this isn't new; we've been addressing engagement/making connections/motivation/activity-based learning in secondary education for years..." with a forced smile on my face.
February 22, 2019
I love that this book is structured in a way that you can read it from beginning to end, or read a summary at the end of the chapter. There are so many great ideas for small changes in teaching that can have a large impact on student learning. Teachers from all disciplines and levels will get something from this book.
June 9, 2020
Excellent book. Full of practical advice, tips, and techniques that you can use right now to improve learning in your classroom.
A year after my first reading I listened to the audio book as a refresher. It was good to come back and re-think the ideas. I got some new ideas to try. Excellent book.
A year after my first reading I listened to the audio book as a refresher. It was good to come back and re-think the ideas. I got some new ideas to try. Excellent book.
August 24, 2019
Small teaching
James M. Lang
Some books about teaching and learning are so generally broad as to be almost useless (or worst, harmful.) How many times did I find myself plodding through examples after examples of teaching strategies fit for elementary students, so far removed from my professional context that I can’t connect them to anything I do? From a publisher standpoint, I fully understand the attraction of a K-12 book, after all the wider the audience, the better the prospective sales. Even, it seems, if it comes at the cost of a frustrating reading experience for the (often) time-strapped teacher.
This is just a nuisance, however. Real harm is done when such books are presenting models or strategies that are so time-consuming as to be impractical, or downright impossible. Good teachers do not spend five hours every evening writing detailed lesson plans for the three or four different subjects they teach. Instead, they spend time with their own kids, recharging and partaking in their own passions and interests, so they can be in a mind frame to be fully engaged with their students the next day. At least, this is how I see it. A particularly irritant for me has been the many egregious lessons plans models I have seen circulating through the year. Most of them are great, if your ONLY job is to write lesson plans. This is also detrimental because it can guilt teachers (particularly novice teachers, or those with a precarious position) into thinking they are not doing enough.
Anyway, I mention all this because in some ways, Small Teaching by James M. Lang is the antidote. Lang really delivers what he promises, by proposing mostly small, incremental changes that one can make practically overnight, easily and with very little investment of class time or personal time. Even the last section does not see him veer too far away from his principles. This is great, and I will use some of his strategies in the upcoming school year; of specific interest to me where the sections on retrieving and connecting. I am confident that the clarity, simplicity and consistency with which he structured his book will actually help me find fairly easily the information I need.
In quoting research, Lang does not overwhelm the reader with a bunch of names and dates, but rather select carefully the material he quotes, and takes the time to explain the nature of the study. He uses personal experiences to illustrate his ideas, but he never made me feel that I was reading a book about him. His target audience is university professors (or whatever name those institutions tend to give their teaching staff to save money- instructor, assistant, associate, lecturer or whatnot…) but as a high school teacher (who teaches upper grade) I found the book extremely useful. If you are in my position, I suspect you might as well.
I am also using one of his suggestions for my next professional reading.
James M. Lang
Some books about teaching and learning are so generally broad as to be almost useless (or worst, harmful.) How many times did I find myself plodding through examples after examples of teaching strategies fit for elementary students, so far removed from my professional context that I can’t connect them to anything I do? From a publisher standpoint, I fully understand the attraction of a K-12 book, after all the wider the audience, the better the prospective sales. Even, it seems, if it comes at the cost of a frustrating reading experience for the (often) time-strapped teacher.
This is just a nuisance, however. Real harm is done when such books are presenting models or strategies that are so time-consuming as to be impractical, or downright impossible. Good teachers do not spend five hours every evening writing detailed lesson plans for the three or four different subjects they teach. Instead, they spend time with their own kids, recharging and partaking in their own passions and interests, so they can be in a mind frame to be fully engaged with their students the next day. At least, this is how I see it. A particularly irritant for me has been the many egregious lessons plans models I have seen circulating through the year. Most of them are great, if your ONLY job is to write lesson plans. This is also detrimental because it can guilt teachers (particularly novice teachers, or those with a precarious position) into thinking they are not doing enough.
Anyway, I mention all this because in some ways, Small Teaching by James M. Lang is the antidote. Lang really delivers what he promises, by proposing mostly small, incremental changes that one can make practically overnight, easily and with very little investment of class time or personal time. Even the last section does not see him veer too far away from his principles. This is great, and I will use some of his strategies in the upcoming school year; of specific interest to me where the sections on retrieving and connecting. I am confident that the clarity, simplicity and consistency with which he structured his book will actually help me find fairly easily the information I need.
In quoting research, Lang does not overwhelm the reader with a bunch of names and dates, but rather select carefully the material he quotes, and takes the time to explain the nature of the study. He uses personal experiences to illustrate his ideas, but he never made me feel that I was reading a book about him. His target audience is university professors (or whatever name those institutions tend to give their teaching staff to save money- instructor, assistant, associate, lecturer or whatnot…) but as a high school teacher (who teaches upper grade) I found the book extremely useful. If you are in my position, I suspect you might as well.
I am also using one of his suggestions for my next professional reading.
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