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If you’ve opened this post hoping to read something brand-new, you might be disappointed. There will be no fancy bells or whistles here.
That’s because a lot of the strategies we’re going to talk about are things you’ve already done; some teachers have probably been doing them for decades. You just might not have known exactly why they worked or how to harness them in the most optimal way.
That’s what cognitive scientists have been doing, trying to pinpoint exactly which activities work best for storing concepts in long-term memory. Over the past few years, we’ve been following their progress: In our 2015 study of the book Make it Stick, we first talked about the concepts of retrieval practice, spaced practice, and interleaving. These concepts were also addressed in the 2016 post Six Powerful Learning Strategies You Must Share with Students, and in 2017, where I made a strong push again for using more retrieval practice in our teaching.
