Make It Stick Book Club Experience

Let me start by saying EVERY educator should read this book.  Entering this 2018-19 school year, my district has introduced Flex PD for their teachers or 6 hours of PD on your own.  As this Flex PD has to relate to a goal, I chose to further explore my Student Learning Goal of retrieval practice.  Luckily for me, retrievalpractice.org was offering a book club for Make It Stick.

They even provided materials and resources available to be shared on their website CLICK HERE :

• Discussion questions (via a PDF and slides)
• Sketchnotes
• Facebook group to connect with other educators around the world

During the book club I became aware that every time you learn something new your change your brain.  That is when you learn you make connections between new information and prior knowledge. The book proves the point that when you mass practice (or cram) it may lead to higher test scores, but 2 days after only 50% of the information is retained.  They suggest a proven strategy, retrieval practice,  where learners are asked to take frequency, short, low stakes quizzes to challenge them to retrieve the information.  While I have been utilizing RP the last 1.5 years, I learned that my multiple choice quizzes are not as effective as fill in the blank (generation) where the learner is more challenged to retrieve the concepts.  

Why is this a better strategy?  Inference is learning from mass practice is encoded in a simpler representation whereas more challenging retrieval practice demands more brain power and encodes in a more flexible representation the can be applied more broadly.  In other words - learning is hard.  There is no limit to the amount of learning provided we relate it to what we already know.  

During my 5 years thus far of flipped learning, I have been in the practice of the WSQ method.  The WSQ method is where students first WATCH the video lesson, then SUMMARIZE the concepts presented, and then have the opportunity to ask a QUESTION.   After reading the book, I know I want to improve the SUMMARIZE part of this by asking more specific questions - 

• What are the key ideas?  
• What are some examples?  
• How do these concepts relate to what you already know?

In studies they observed students performed a half letter grade higher than others when they wrote their own summaries after reading a text.

The book also describe mastery as a "bundling of incremental steps required to solve different kinds of problems."  As someone approaches mastery it is harder to teach others as their mental models become more complex, thus in the classroom the person best to help a student is ANOTHER STUDENT.  "Students know best what they need to study to master a subject and what pace and methods work the best for them."

Of course the complement to these strategies is promoting a growth mindset.  Make It Stick defines it as, "as the belief that your level of intellectual ability is not fixed, but rests to a large degree in your own hands."  Intelligence results from new connections formed through effort and learning and should be praised as such.  

Make It Stick is a very thorough read on the research proven strategies of successful learning.  The main 3 strategies are:

1. Retrieval Practice - self-quizzing to replace re-reading; frequency, short, low stakes
2. Spaced Practice - doing the RP after a reading, the next day, etc. 
3. Interleaving - study more than 1 concept at a time, may even mix-up concepts from different subjects (as the goal is to make retrieval challenging so that the learning sticks)

So what is a teacher to do?  Well, I plan in the First 5 Days of my classes this Fall to explain how learning works and teach my students how to better study.  Throughout a unit, term, etc. I plan to do more frequent quizzing and make them more cumulative (from a unit, term, semester, full year).  I also want to try more generative learning by giving students a problem to solve before teaching them how to solve it.  I also want to edit my WSQs for video lessons and improve the summaries as earlier stated.  

For more information on my responses to the discussion questions CLICK HERE for the Google Doc (access only to NSBoro).

Or check out the Facebook group Make It Stick Book Club!  Here are some of my posts: