Learning by teaching is great! Great method and also shows leadership amongst students. Hands down one of the best strategies.
I think writing notes is good, but the issue is, it assumes the student is engaged with the learning and they are motivated to write notes. This leads to the question that teachers might have, how to convince students to write notes or be engaged in the class. If all students wrote notes and stayed engaged in class that would be amazing. I think that is a bigger question.
Jack, thank you so much for engaging with the Edu-Snippets on our blog. Learning by teaching is truly a very effective strategy. I am consciously trying to integrate it more in my practice.
We also agree with your comment about note-taking. It indeed is challenging to motivate students to take notes in class. Developing meta-cognitive awareness among students about the benefits of note-taking is a good place to start. Explicitly communicating the benefits might help. Here's a useful blog by Cult of Pedagogy exploring this theme - https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/note-taking/
Another associated challenge is the actual act of effective note-taking. I am not sure about others but I never explicitly learned how to take good notes in school. There was a lot of learning by doing.
One of the things I started doing in my teaching practice (I teach German among other languages and courses) is to have dedicated note-taking time integrated in my lesson plan. Essentially, I ask my students to first just listen and pay attention while I teach. Once I am done my explicit instruction piece, I'd give them some time to take notes. And most of them do without feeling rushed. Hope this helps a bit.
Might you have some ideas to share with us? Thanks again for your engagement here.
As "an old man with a young age", I often find myself resorting to good, old, and reliable methods of doing things, including taking notes by hand. The first section of this article resonates with the reason why retrieval practice and interleaving are effective: these methods require the brain to work harder, hence more effectively transfer information from the working memory to the long term memory.
For learning-by-teaching, I realized its benefits since a very young age. I often explained homeworks and course materials to my classmates since primary school. What I did not realize is that teaching in front of an imaginary audience is more effective than doing so in front of actual audience. The explanation regarding cognitive load on the working memory makes sense, and the proposed application worked perfectly: while I was creating the microlesson and a courtesy online course, I was able to sense the skill-honing effect!
I have always excluded decoratives in PPT since CTL1620. I did this during my microteaching session in the Advanced University Teaching Preparation Certificate program, and it worked well. One of the students in the microteaching session mentioned that light text in a dark background works better than dark text in a light background, because the human eyes tend to focus on illuminated objects. What are your thoughts on this?
Re. Light text on dark background vs dark text on light background: I don't know! That's a good question. I poked around a bit and I do think there is some evidence that dark backgrounds are easier on the eyes, particularly in dimly lit environments:
Personally, I'm not a huge fan of the "dark mode" settings on computers, but I can kind of appreciate the rationale for it. If you're in a dimly lit room late at night, then your pupils are going to be larger, letting in more light, and a bright white background on a computer display could be uncomfortable.
Dimly lit makes sense. Movie theaters are dark and the credits are almost always white on black. Also I know David Phillips has done a lot of work on this. He has a TedTalk called "Death by PowerPoint", check it out.
Thank you for checking this for me, Jim! I have the same feeling: the "dark mode" does feel a little bit weird. After reversing the colour of the PPT slides, I felt uncomfortable. The text was almost "yelling at my eyes". For my own teaching, I'll follow the style you have used in 1620 👍
I work with learners in their early 20s and I'd estimate that taking pictures of the whiteboard is the predominant method of note taking. I sometimes ask them what they actually do with the pics. Some students claim that they study directly from the pics on their phone. Others claim that they use the pics to write real notes later. So I might suggest that taking the pics in and of itself is not the problem. The real question is what the learner does with the pics.
Theoretically, after taking the pic, the student could go home and (without looking at the pic) do some retrieval of what they learners that day. Maybe the could simply try to recall that they discussed in class. Then they could use the pics to double check their memory.
In real life however, the aforementioned scenario probably doesn't happen often. So I think educators should at least take a few minutes and challenge their students, even by simply asking 'what are you going to do with those pics once you get home?'. A bit of discussion might help them reflect on the value of real life note taking vs. whiteboard pics.
Ideally they would be writing longhand notes, but as we know, not everything in the education world is ideal.
That's such a great point Steve. I agree with you. Since learning more about this research, I have been taking a bit of time in class addressing the research with my students and I do also invite them to write their notes. And yes if they do take pictures, then asking them "what you are going to do with them" is a great place to start as we support healthy study habits among our students. Thank you engaging with this piece.
Learning by teaching is great! Great method and also shows leadership amongst students. Hands down one of the best strategies.
I think writing notes is good, but the issue is, it assumes the student is engaged with the learning and they are motivated to write notes. This leads to the question that teachers might have, how to convince students to write notes or be engaged in the class. If all students wrote notes and stayed engaged in class that would be amazing. I think that is a bigger question.
Jack, thank you so much for engaging with the Edu-Snippets on our blog. Learning by teaching is truly a very effective strategy. I am consciously trying to integrate it more in my practice.
We also agree with your comment about note-taking. It indeed is challenging to motivate students to take notes in class. Developing meta-cognitive awareness among students about the benefits of note-taking is a good place to start. Explicitly communicating the benefits might help. Here's a useful blog by Cult of Pedagogy exploring this theme - https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/note-taking/
Another associated challenge is the actual act of effective note-taking. I am not sure about others but I never explicitly learned how to take good notes in school. There was a lot of learning by doing.
One of the things I started doing in my teaching practice (I teach German among other languages and courses) is to have dedicated note-taking time integrated in my lesson plan. Essentially, I ask my students to first just listen and pay attention while I teach. Once I am done my explicit instruction piece, I'd give them some time to take notes. And most of them do without feeling rushed. Hope this helps a bit.
Might you have some ideas to share with us? Thanks again for your engagement here.
As "an old man with a young age", I often find myself resorting to good, old, and reliable methods of doing things, including taking notes by hand. The first section of this article resonates with the reason why retrieval practice and interleaving are effective: these methods require the brain to work harder, hence more effectively transfer information from the working memory to the long term memory.
For learning-by-teaching, I realized its benefits since a very young age. I often explained homeworks and course materials to my classmates since primary school. What I did not realize is that teaching in front of an imaginary audience is more effective than doing so in front of actual audience. The explanation regarding cognitive load on the working memory makes sense, and the proposed application worked perfectly: while I was creating the microlesson and a courtesy online course, I was able to sense the skill-honing effect!
I have always excluded decoratives in PPT since CTL1620. I did this during my microteaching session in the Advanced University Teaching Preparation Certificate program, and it worked well. One of the students in the microteaching session mentioned that light text in a dark background works better than dark text in a light background, because the human eyes tend to focus on illuminated objects. What are your thoughts on this?
Thanks Linyi, good to hear from you!
Re. Light text on dark background vs dark text on light background: I don't know! That's a good question. I poked around a bit and I do think there is some evidence that dark backgrounds are easier on the eyes, particularly in dimly lit environments:
https://tinyurl.com/3dtwjpjf
Personally, I'm not a huge fan of the "dark mode" settings on computers, but I can kind of appreciate the rationale for it. If you're in a dimly lit room late at night, then your pupils are going to be larger, letting in more light, and a bright white background on a computer display could be uncomfortable.
Dimly lit makes sense. Movie theaters are dark and the credits are almost always white on black. Also I know David Phillips has done a lot of work on this. He has a TedTalk called "Death by PowerPoint", check it out.
Thank you for checking this for me, Jim! I have the same feeling: the "dark mode" does feel a little bit weird. After reversing the colour of the PPT slides, I felt uncomfortable. The text was almost "yelling at my eyes". For my own teaching, I'll follow the style you have used in 1620 👍
I work with learners in their early 20s and I'd estimate that taking pictures of the whiteboard is the predominant method of note taking. I sometimes ask them what they actually do with the pics. Some students claim that they study directly from the pics on their phone. Others claim that they use the pics to write real notes later. So I might suggest that taking the pics in and of itself is not the problem. The real question is what the learner does with the pics.
Theoretically, after taking the pic, the student could go home and (without looking at the pic) do some retrieval of what they learners that day. Maybe the could simply try to recall that they discussed in class. Then they could use the pics to double check their memory.
In real life however, the aforementioned scenario probably doesn't happen often. So I think educators should at least take a few minutes and challenge their students, even by simply asking 'what are you going to do with those pics once you get home?'. A bit of discussion might help them reflect on the value of real life note taking vs. whiteboard pics.
Ideally they would be writing longhand notes, but as we know, not everything in the education world is ideal.
That's such a great point Steve. I agree with you. Since learning more about this research, I have been taking a bit of time in class addressing the research with my students and I do also invite them to write their notes. And yes if they do take pictures, then asking them "what you are going to do with them" is a great place to start as we support healthy study habits among our students. Thank you engaging with this piece.