Too Much Teaching is Wasted

An interesting blog post on attempting to embed learning so it’s not just surface learning. This is key in helping our students to achieve success longer term. The key here is ‘retrieval practice’ - keep expecting students to recall information to create more links in their memory.

Here’s an extract from the blog and the link to the post in full:

Link to full blog post

Let me give you some information: (Try to imagine that you’re going to learn it.)

• The Earth-Sun distance is used as unit of distance called the Astronomical Unit. 1 AU.
• The Earth-Moon distance is 0.0026 AU to 2 significant figures.
• The nearest Star is Proxima Centauri (part of the Alpha Centauri system. Pronounced ‘Sen-TOR-eye’). The distance to Proxima Centauri is 270,000 AU to 2 significant figures.
• On a scale we can relate to, let’s say 1 AU is 1 metre. The length of a metre ruler.
• This makes the Earth-Moon distance 2.6 mm; the Earth-Sun distance, 1 metre, and Proxima Centauri 270km – on our scale model.
• In fact the Moon is 384,400km away.  This is about 30 times the diameter of the Earth.
• The International Space Station orbits 400km above the Earth which has a radius of 6371km.
• The moon is about 1000 times further away than the ISS.
  

It’s quite easy to imagine the gap-fill worksheet in a typical classroom:

1. The nearest star is called  ____________  _____________  
2. The distance to the moon is  about 10 / 30 / 100/ 3000 times the Earth’s diameter.
3. If the Sun is 1 metre away in a scale model, the distance to the moon is 0.26mm / 2.6 mm/ 2.6 cm/ 26cm.

Students who complete this worksheet during the lesson minutes after being taught about the information will happily fill in their sheet, answer a few questions, stick the sheet in their books and skip off to break.   They may never encounter this information ever again. Even if they were asked to pronounce Proxima Centauri in class, they may never say the words again.  They may never be asked to recall the distances, in absolute or relative terms ever again.  What have they learned? … What will they remember in an hour, a week, a month, a year?