I often drive to my father’s house in Penn Yan. As I approach the town of Gorham – right before the Old Gorham Cemetery on Country Road 18, there is a wonderful property with a few old barns. If I drive by around 8 am, I see a gentleman walking the perimeter of his property. For years I’ve seen this individual getting his daily exercise. It seems to me that he has been doing this ritual for decades; the path has been ossified into the ground. I just looked this place up on Google Earth and you can see the path that has been strengthened by the repetition over the years.
Some of the most influential findings about learning have happened over the past twenty years. If you haven’t read Make it Stick by Peter Brown, et al., you might want to consider putting it on your fall reading list. This is the book to read that disrupts everything we used to know about teaching and learning.
Brown and his collaborators point to a few tools that educators can use to dramatically increase learning in the classroom; they are all classified as uncomfortable. As it turns out, the more uncomfortable learning is, the more effective it is. Once a literal connection has been made between neurons in the brain, it is strengthened by repeated use. When tasked with recalling concepts, the neural network gets stronger. And stronger. And stronger. Much like the gentleman in Gorham, repeated use will solidify the pathways.
Retrieval Practice has an outsized return on investment for learners. In retrieval practice, the learner is tasked with recalling things that perhaps they haven’t thought about in a while. There are two strategies Brown suggests – interleaving and spacing. We looked at interleaving and spacing before, but the highlights are that if you mix up your learning (weave in concepts from previous chapters into your current studying) and also try to recall concepts studied in earlier chapters, the learning is pretty uncomfortable – and more potent! Michelle Miller dives deep in her recent book Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology.
And while we can’t control what our learners are doing, we can nudge them!
Outlook 365 has a brilliant tool called Polls – you can embed a poll right into an email. It’s frictionless for the recipients as the poll is embedded right in the message!
So why not leverage that and send weekly questions to your students? In Powerful Teaching, Pooja Agarwal draws on the concepts from Make it Stick and talks about the testing effect. She suggests that frequent, low-stakes (or no-stakes!) quizzes help learning. It’s the Gorham Gentleman walking his path every day.
Send an email once a week that has just one question (multiple choice or multiple select) that requires the student to retrieve some information.
STEP ONE – Use Outlook for Web
I’m not sure if the Outlook application for your computer has the Poll feature, but the web version does! Start crafting an email. I like to give just a bit of context to the students; I explain why I’m sending just one question that covers information from earlier in the semester.
Pro-Tip – you can go to my.flcc.edu, click on the Faculty tab and then click on a course you teach – you can email all the students from there. I prefer to BCC the students.
STEP TWO – Find the Polls Add-In
While composing your email, look to the upper right. There is a menu with three horizontal dots (in the biz, that’s called a Meatball Menu). One of the options is Polls. Click it; there might be a small wait as Outlook loads the tool. Craft your poll! You can choose to make it multiple select (the default is multiple choice). When you are through, click on “Add to email”. Outlook will insert some text into your email, though when recipients see the email, they will see the poll.
STEP THREE – Look at Results
When you create a poll, Outlook will automatically add you as a recipient – that’s your gateway into the poll! Wait a day or two and revisit that message. You’ll see the results. Note that students will see the poll in the message if they are on the desktop application or the web version of Outlook. If they are on mobile, there is a link to the poll:
I just started experimenting with this in some of my classes, so I don’t have any conclusions yet. But it seems to have the trappings of a low-effort, high-reward mechanism!
Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay
