Good Teaching Attributes

"Ongoing practice of learned skills Unpracticed skills atrophy. New and complex skills need to be built on solid former skills. Learners need to be able to apply skills in new situations."

It has been a common problem for my students that they fail to remember what they learned previously and have trouble applying existing knowledge into a new situation. This attribute of "ongoing practice of learned skills" caught my attention because it is one of the most effective approaches that ensure life-long learning and higher levels of cognitive thinking.

Skillful teaching is what helps students learn (Brookfield, 2006, p17). Only when students consistently practice the learned skills, can they deepen their understandings, and strengthen long term memories, to help students learn better. It is easy to drift into mindless practice mode. To help students improve learning efficiency, a clear learning outcome needs to be established first. What is the purpose of practice, what learning outcomes are students expected to achieve, how we evaluate students' learning at the end of the practice - such questions need to be answered before designing the practicing activities.

A thoughtful practice also asks students to deepen their understanding through applying the knowledge, and reflect on what they've achieved. For science disciplines, the laboratory portion of the course is designed hands-on practice to enhance students' learning. A well designed lab should be matching the lecture portion in pace, with clear connections to core concepts being introduced in the lecture. In order to help students to connect to prior learning, I often explicitly point out, which PowerPoint slide, which chapter the lab is built on, and where to find additional information if a student needs to refresh his mind. Also because of the nature of the lab, there are skills being practiced in a repeating way, I also think it is a good idea to lead students to independent problem solving. Guiding questions such as, "remember how you solved the problem last time, the only difference here is…, how would you use a similar strategy to solve this new problem?" will help students eventually apply the existing knowledge in the new problem solving scenario.

Practice needs to be frequent It is human natural that people forget. According to the forgetting curve (Loftus, 1985), most of the memories are lost in the first few hours after learning. However, each repetition in learning increases the optimum interval before the next repetition is needed. Reviewing materials in the first 24 hours after learning information will greatly reduce the amount of the knowledge forgotten. Although remembering is perhaps the lowest level of cognitive domain in Bloom's taxonomy, it sets the foundation for higher levels of mastery.

Practice does not have to be formal assessment. But it is better for us instructors to have a clear picture how we can assess student's skills before and after practice and also give valuable feedback to students for future learning activities. It is also helpful if we can get feedback from students, in order to know how well the practice fits into their learning curve, and how effective the practice is.
Reference

Brookfield, S. (2006). Chapter 2 The core assumptions of skillful teaching. In The skillful teacher: On technique, trust, and responsiveness in the classroom (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Loftus, G. R. (1985). Evaluating Forgetting Curves. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 11. 2 : 397