[00:01] Announcer:
Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.
[00:13] SPEAKER_01:
I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome back to the program Patrice Bain. Patrice Bain, EDS, is an award-winning teacher and author, and her research-based teaching strategies have proven successful for thousands of students. In addition to Powerful Teaching and A Parent's Guide to Powerful Teaching, she also co-authored Organizing Instruction and Study to Improve Student Learning with the Institute for Education Sciences. And she is the author of Powerful Classrooms, Evidence-Informed Strategies and Resources, which we're here to talk about today.
[00:45] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:47] SPEAKER_01:
Patrice, welcome back to Principal Center Radio.
[00:49] SPEAKER_00:
Oh, thank you so much for having me, Justin. It's a delight to be here.
[00:54] SPEAKER_01:
Well, I'm delighted to speak with you, and I think this is such an urgent topic to look at the evidence behind teaching and learning. I think we're in an era where we're starting to wake up to the fact that we've been driven by tradition, we've been driven by fads, we've been driven by hype in some cases, and we're starting to realize the only reliable guide to practice is evidence, right? We can try lots of things, we can have lots of ideas, but at the end of the day, Well, my story goes back a bit. I was teaching, and
[01:43] SPEAKER_00:
I had won some wonderful teaching awards, and it felt great to be in the classroom. I loved it. But I had questions, and I couldn't figure out, even with these teaching awards, why some of my students learned really well, but some just didn't. And I thought, I'm the teacher in the room. I know my curriculum. Everybody's getting the same information.
[02:12]
So why are some kids not getting it? And I realized there was no place for me to look to find this information. This was back in about 2006. And I was even teaching as adjunct faculty at two universities, and still information wasn't available. Well, I happened to meet two cognitive scientists, And they were studying memory. It was Dr. Mark McDaniel and Dr. Henry Roediger.
[02:44]
And they were studying memory, and I started to think, you know, I wonder if this goes along with my questions. So we met, and they wanted to conduct research in an authentic classroom, and I wanted to learn the answers. And so we started this research. They got a great grant. And, um, the research started in my classroom in 2007. And it was the first in the United States where this happened, because up until that time, most of the research was done on college campuses with college students in laboratories.
[03:25]
And so this was really a novel idea. And as this research, I worked with them for many years, I started to realize there's such a thing as evidence that answers the how and the why of learning. And the more I learned, the more strategies I created, and the more every single one of my students excelled. I worked in middle school in a public classroom. I had all students. Whether they had 504s, or they were in special education classrooms, or they lived in a mansion, or a mobile home, I had everybody.
[04:14]
And I saw that using evidence-based strategies improved learning for every single one of them. And so it was in 2018, I started writing Powerful Teaching with Dr. Pooja Agarwal, and that chronicles the journey that we had of the research in my classroom. And so that came out six years ago, which seems amazing. And what I found in those six years is I would be I would be contacted by people from all over the world who were using the strategies that I had created.
[05:05]
And I would bookmark them and save them and email them to myself. And one day, I realized,
[05:16]
Where are all of these? They were, like, everywhere. I had become this totally disorganized person. And I thought, what if I just put them all in one place? So I started to go on this hunt of all these people that had contacted me. And I realized something so important that really made an impact on me.
[05:41]
And that was... We are at a time where there are truly wonderful books out there that explain learning, that go into theory, that talk about evidence. But something that's really missing is the voice of the teachers who are using this in their classroom. And so, as I started pulling together all these strategies from teachers all over the world, I realized I...
[06:15]
I wanted to have a list, but I thought others might, too. And most importantly, I really wanted to amplify these voices. Like what you said earlier, the evidence is starting to change, and we are starting to change. But I think one of the best ways to do it is to really elevate...
[06:40]
The teachers who are using this to make it so common, so commonplace, that the evidence isn't scary, it isn't foreign, but it's something we all have access to. And so that's how powerful classrooms came out.
[07:01] SPEAKER_01:
That's a fabulous story. And I want to make sure our listeners know who Roddy Rediger is. He's the author of Make It Stick and is a world-renowned memory researcher. We did an interview many years ago here on Principal Center Radio. You just search for Make It Stick. And I feel like memory is something that we've not really paid much attention to in recent years.
[07:18]
We've kind of downplayed memory. Memorization has almost become a bad word to a lot of people. And we have forgotten, largely, that learning involves the memory. It's really a core element of learning. So, how did the importance of memory factor into what you decided to include in this book?
[07:37] SPEAKER_00:
Through my research, I started to learn that there's something called working memory and long-term memory and cognitive overload. And what this means is... We can hold, on average, about four to seven new things at a time. And if it's more than that, we start to feel this cognitive overload.
[08:08]
And I think every teacher, even if they don't know those terms, know what it's like when you are teaching and you suddenly see students just kind of... lose interest. There's, like, too much going on and they stop paying attention. And so learning about memory and how to really use it to our advantage with the working memory, what we want to do is get it into our long-term memory.
[08:47]
And so there's keys to doing that. One is not to overload the working memory, but as Dan Willingham calls it, being able to chunk information together. So when you are providing new information, being able to weave that in what students already know helps prevent some of that cognitive overload and helps get those memories into your long-term memory. It's called creating a schema. And so, memory has a lot to do. And I agree, it's too often not taught in our teacher ed programs.
[09:35]
It's too often not taught in our PD. And it really helps... Teachers understand how best to get information to their students so that our students really learn.
[09:53] SPEAKER_01:
Yeah, it seems obvious in retrospect, you know, having seen you make the case for this, that long-term memory is ultimately where what we're teaching needs to end up, right? It's not, we do some stuff in class, students have the creative experience, and then it doesn't live anywhere. It lives in long-term memory, or else students haven't really learned. Take us into a little bit of the process of getting information into long-term memory, And could you share with us some of the strategies that you talk about in the book for helping students get information into long-term memory? Because, again, I think we've downplayed this as a profession. We've thought, well, drill and kill, and memorization's bad, and, you know, we don't really need to worry about that.
[10:31]
But if students are going to actually learn things, those things need to make their way into long-term memory. That's not as straightforward as we might like it to be.
[10:40] SPEAKER_00:
Well, let me start with a story, and then I'll backtrack how. So, this happened this spring. I happened to run into a student that I had not seen for 22 years. Now, keep in mind, I teach middle school. And most of the fellas that I taught in sixth grade did not have facial hair, were not over six feet tall. So when it's 22 years since I see somebody, it's like, oh my goodness.
[11:12]
And so I ran into him and he said, Mrs. Bain, do you remember me? It's like, oh my goodness, do I? And I peered into his eyes, and I said, it's Robbie! And he said, yes! As soon as we made that connection, he started rattling off so many things that he remembered from my class when he was in sixth grade, 11 years old, 22 years earlier.
[11:47]
And to me, I think that was one of my joyous moments. Because as a teacher, we want our students to remember. We work so, so hard. And not to have them forget it after a test, but to really get this into long-term memory. So how did I do it? There are four key principles that we talk about in powerful teaching.
[12:15]
And we call them that because they're truly so powerful. One is retrieval. And retrieval is the process, my definition, is the process of pulling information out. A quote that is in Powerful Teaching is, too often as teachers, we concentrate on putting information into our students' heads. But what if instead the focus was on pulling information out? And that's retrieval.
[12:47]
Well, we know that as soon as we learn something, we start forgetting it. And that's called the forgetting curve. It happens. It's a reality. We start forgetting as soon as we learn it. And so what you have to do is as soon as students begin to forget the information, you want to have them retrieve it again.
[13:12]
And what happens, it bumps it up Into their memory, so they're thinking about it again. And once they start forgetting about it again, bump it up. And so, every time you do that, that's called spacing or spaced retrieval. So, the first power tool is retrieval. The second one is spacing. The third one I'm going to talk about is metacognition.
[13:37]
And I define that as being able to discriminate what we know... from what we don't. And too often, we as teachers don't do that. Too often, students don't get the opportunity to figure out if they know something or not until it's a big test.
[14:01]
And so we need to provide the strategies throughout the course of study. So we have retrieval, we have spacing, we have metacognition, and the fourth one is called interleaving. And this is where you compare and you contrast similar items. So, strategies. How would I do this? I knew that in order to get information into my students' long-term memory, I needed to use strategies that incorporated those power tools.
[14:40]
And so, they can so easily be done. And teachers, oh my gosh, teachers are so busy. I know they're probably thinking right now, I cannot do one more thing in my classroom. I can't add any more to my overcrowded plate. But when you deez, it actually takes things off your plate. So, for example, when I was beginning, you know, a new chapter, a new unit, I would always begin with front-loading.
[15:13]
And I would do that by having pre-questions or pre-tests, and it was my way, number one, to set the stage of what we would be learning, but it was also a way to connect with what they already knew, to start building the schema for this new information. And so, as we studied, say, we have a day and we're studying the information, What I would do the following day is we would begin class with a mini quiz where I would simply have clues of things we had discussed and had them in a little bin and I would just pick out five and randomly ask five and they would answer them, they would turn them in, I would go over the answers. But what we were doing is we were using retrieval and we were using spacing
[16:08]
And it was giving students the opportunity to test their metacognition. Do they know it or not? And other strategies, so simple, would be a turn and talk or a think-pair-share. But it's always important to not shrink the think. You need to give them time To think about the information, I would often have them use whiteboards or a piece of paper and just write down their thoughts and then share with a neighbor. And then I would do a group share.
[16:46]
And I always use cold calling because students had opportunities before I did the cold calling to make sure they could answer the question. And students started feeling so much more confident. The mini quizzes helped them understand what they didn't know, so where to focus. Just all worked. Other strategies I used, one I created was called Retrieve Taking. And that was, if we were reading a book, or I had something up on the slides, on the whiteboard, I would simply stop, close the book, put up a blank screen, I then have students, I would give them a prompt, and they would write down the information.
[17:33]
They're retrieving. Do a quick share. So, again, we're using the power tools. And what's so nice about that is, number one, I didn't have to create any materials beforehand. Number two, because I'm the teacher, I knew precisely what the important information was that I wanted my students to have. So I knew exactly the times to stop.
[18:02]
A procedure in my class was if someone is talking, all writing utensils are down. And so my students gained the confidence that they could listen because they knew I would stop and give them the time to retrieve. And the beautiful thing about that is when you have finished class, students have perfectly organized notes of everything you wanted them to have. So, right there, you are saving so much time as a teacher being able to do a simple procedure like that. Doing a turn and talk, which does not need any extra work. To do, uh, retrieval... My mini quizzes.
[18:47]
I called them mini because they were on 2x3 inch recycled paper. You know, doing these things helps create... the memories in your students so you don't have to spend days before a big test reviewing because they already know it.
[19:07] SPEAKER_01:
Love it. I was going to ask about quizzes, but you went right into talking about them, and I want to highlight the importance of spacing here, because spacing seems like maybe a waste of time, right? We want students to get to mastery quickly so we can move on and they can master more things, and if we stop and give students a chance to forget, that sounds like a bad thing, but you're saying spacing and forgetting are actually key to the process of forming long-term memories? Help us understand that a little bit more.
[19:36] SPEAKER_00:
So, here's a little example. Say I'm going to compare learning to a ride on a train. So, when you get on the train, this is like your opening of your new chapter or whatever. And the destination is going to be your exam. But the train stops several times. And those, I think, are the times that I like to space information out.
[20:07]
Because as you let them forget, and we all do, if we don't go back to it, it's virtually gone. So when you get to that final destination, to the test, you have to go back and reteach it all again. What if, instead, you do these strategies, which, again, don't take a lot of time? Even something as simple as what I call a blast from the past, where I might be teaching and I'll pause and I'll say, do you remember when we talked about... Or I'll ask him a question and get a group response.
[20:50]
Maybe, what, 30 seconds, 45 seconds, and you have just spaced retrieval. So, it's something that can be easily done, but as long as you have to keep bringing it up. And once you do, you can keep going longer and longer until you teach something in sixth grade, and they still remember it 22 years later without any review.
[21:17] SPEAKER_01:
Well, I love that metaphor, Patrice, of the train with different stops and the importance of forcing students to retrieve information, giving them a chance to forget it, and you're saying it's in that process of forgetting and retrieving and reviewing and bringing things back up, that long-term memory really gets cemented. Is that right?
[21:35] SPEAKER_00:
Yes, and to me, one of the absolute keys was teaching the students about this. I always start every first day of class saying, I'm your teacher, and I'm going to teach you how to learn. And this is going to be the most important thing I do all year long. And as we're doing the spacing, it's students understood why. When I celebrated errors, it's like, Errors are a good thing. They're roadmaps that show us we just need to go this direction instead.
[22:14]
And so, having a class where students are really understanding working memory and long-term memory and the strategies and the power tools, they become part of your team. And what I especially like is students no longer internalize failure. Too often, I would have students come to me at the age of 11 who were basically ready to give up because they did poorly for so many years. And to me, learning, the teacher issues the invitation to learn. And so I would always let my students know, I'm inviting you into this wonderful world of learning.
[23:07]
And as students understood this, they realized that when they got something wrong, it was not to be internalized. It was like, oh, well, I need to use a different strategy. And kids who were just so turned off to school at the beginning of the year... Just walked straighter and had A's and it was incredible watching transformations.
[23:37]
And I've always thought, why don't we just start this in primary grades before students ever have an opportunity to internalize failure? Because once they know how to learn, it's such a game changer. Yeah.
[23:58] SPEAKER_01:
Therese, do you think part of the answer to that rhetorical why not question is because we think it's mean to give quizzes? Do you ever get that reaction from people, oh, a quiz? Are you going to put kids on the spot, give them a pop quiz, make them, you know, feel bad that they don't remember what we talked about yesterday? What's the pushback against these ideas about retrieval and quizzes in particular? Because I feel like they're not very popular right now in our profession.
[24:22] SPEAKER_00:
You know, it's all in setting the stage, right? My students knew if I gave a pop quiz, it was never a gotcha. It was, let's look at where we need to go. And I think when you, as the teacher, know about learning, and you help your students learn about learning, they see that these are ways to really help them. And again, these quizzes are low stakes or no stakes. It's simply a way for them to...
[24:55]
to find out if they know it or not. And when students have an opportunity to miss several during the course of study, But then they ace the test, you know? That's such a big difference. Here's another story. I had a parent come during parent-teacher conferences one year, and she was not happy. And she just came right out and said, my son does not do well on these mini-quizzes.
[25:25]
He brings them home, and I see that he has them wrong. And she asked, why? Why are you not doing better on these? And he said...
[25:33]
Oh, Mom, it's okay. It's just my metacognition showing me I wasn't able to retrieve it yet. He was 11. And she said, what kind of an answer is that? And I said, oh, the very best kind. And so, I pulled up his grades and showed her every single test he had gotten 100%.
[25:56]
And I explained, these mini quizzes... These are the ways that help him know where to focus the study. Because, again, for all teachers, we know we'll have those students who come and say, oh, I studied so hard last night, I'm going to ace this. And they don't.
[26:16]
And you think, you know they studied, and the parents saw them sitting there studying, and they don't do well? Well, it's because, for the most part, we all tend to study what we already know. Because it makes us feel confident. And we just kind of ignore what we don't. And that's why metacognition is so important. Having them realize before they ever get to that big test at the end...
[26:46]
And the test is no longer scary. We did a study at our high school and asked over 1,500 high school students, does using retrieval practice make you more or less anxious for unit tests? Only 8% said they were nervous for the tests. I mean, this is huge. This is huge.
[27:15] SPEAKER_01:
Yeah, and yet we avoid giving quizzes because we're worried that it's going to make students anxious, that it's going to make them shut down, that it's going to put them on the spot. But it's precisely that retrieval that gives them the confidence they need and the recall that they need to do well on that test. Is that right?
[27:34] SPEAKER_00:
Absolutely, yes.
[27:36] SPEAKER_01:
Well, I love the way you have spent the last couple of decades internalizing this research Which, by the way, none of this research is especially new, right? There's been no major revolution in this field recently. Like, this is very well-established science on memory and how the brain works and how learning works. It's just something that we as a profession have been distracted from, that we have not paid attention to. And I'm reading some of the endorsements for your book from different learning scientists, some of who we've mentioned on this podcast already. But none of this is new research.
[28:06]
It's things we've known for a very long time. Yes. Well, again, starting...
[28:37] SPEAKER_00:
with teaching students how to learn, because I think that is so powerful. And something else that, to me, was so important about teaching my students how to learn was not all teachers do this, but once you teach a student how to learn, they understand how to study, and they understand how to do well. So that is something that they take with them for future years. I would use all the strategies. I switched from, you know, doing flashcards, the traditional flashcards where you would give a term or definition and they would copy out of a book and get 100% because it was accurate and couldn't even define it in their own words because it had been copied.
[29:28]
And so I created what I called retrieval cards. Where, again, I would have the, I would have a term or a definition, but I created what I call the four steps to metacognition, and here's what the steps are. Without using any books or notes, identify if you know something. So, on this card, they had a term or a definition. Step one, identify if you know it by putting a star if you know it or a question mark if you don't. Step two, now go ahead and answer all those that you thought you knew.
[30:09]
Step three, now get out your books and notes. Look up those that you don't. And step four, verify that what you thought you knew. And so, suddenly, now students have a tool where they have been retrieving. And better yet, as it became close to a test...
[30:30]
They would have all these cards, and the ones that they had identified originally with a question mark, those are the ones that they need to study for the test. So, it's creating all of this. And something else I want to talk about is, too often, people think retrieval is simply a regurgitation of facts. We need to have facts in order to move on to critical thinking. And the way I would do that is I would interleave. So let me talk about this a little bit.
[31:03]
I would always begin a chapter with an essential question, such as when I was teaching revolutions, whether it's the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the U.S. Revolution, I would have a question. How did the lives of working people change as a result of the revolutions? And as we would study each revolution, I would keep going back to that question. So, at the end of this unit, studying all these different revolutions, I would just have an essay about, tell me how the lives of working people, and they could just go back and forth and write these incredible essays in class, describing these, using wonderful, deep, critical thinking.
[31:55]
So, I think teaching in this way is truly what gets information to stick. The very first year that we started studying retrieval, Dr. Agarwal was in my class every day, and we decided to do a pop final at the end of the school year. And it was unannounced. Because we didn't want anybody to know about it because we didn't want anybody to study for it. We just wanted to see how much could they retrieve at the end of the year if there was no studying.
[32:34]
It didn't go in the gradebook. That wouldn't have been fair. But the kids, because they had been studying about learning, they were totally game for it. And the results...
[32:45]
Wow. A pop final. A final! Without any studying. What teacher...
[33:02]
Wouldn't want their students to remember 79% of what was taught without having to do any study or any review.
[33:12] SPEAKER_01:
So the book is Powerful Classrooms, Evidence-Informed Strategies and Resources.
[33:18] SPEAKER_00:
So, as I was writing, I started to think of all these people who had influenced me. Like... Dr. Mark McDaniel and Dr. Roddy Roderick, Daniel Willingham, Zach Groeschel, all these people who, to me, you know, Blake Harvard, Tom Sherrington, Emma Turner, you know, people from all over the world.
[33:43]
And they had all influenced me. And I had a question, and it was, who influences them? So, the second part of my book, I wrote to all these people. And I asked them three questions. One, of your own work, what do you think is the most important? The second question, of other people's work, what would you recommend?
[34:10]
What do you think is important? And third, who influences you? And so, here are these... To me, my eduheroes from all over giving all this information.
[34:24]
So, the book, How Powerful Classrooms, not only amplifies the voices of teachers all over who are using this in their classroom, but then these eduheroes of mine just giving all these resources. So, I was... Very excited. It's a book like no other.
[34:48]
It's very practical. It has, oh gosh, I never really counted. I'm sure there's over 50 strategies in there. It's a companion to powerful teaching, but it's just something to have on your desk that you can just go to and pull up a strategy that you want for the next class.
[35:07] SPEAKER_01:
So, Patrice, if people want to find out more about your books or get in touch with you, where's the best place for them to go online?
[35:14] SPEAKER_00:
They can go to my site, which is patricebane.com. I'm on social media. I'm on X. I'm on Blue Sky. I'm on LinkedIn.
[35:23]
I love to connect with people. I love to hear what teachers are doing. I love to be on podcasts and share podcasts. I do a lot of professional development. Last month, I was in Dubai. I've been all over giving professional development around the country.
[35:43]
I've been in England, Toronto. One of my most passionate things is being able to speak to teachers and just share my passion for learning.
[35:56] SPEAKER_01:
Patrice, it's been a pleasure to catch up with you and talk about your new book. Thank you so much for joining me again on Principal Center Radio.
[36:03] SPEAKER_00:
Oh, Justin, thank you, thank you, thank you.
[36:06] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
