Making Your Teaching Stick

Years ago, a dear friend of mine, Susan, gifted me with a little book called Making Your Teaching Stick by Shanna Schwartz. Unbeknownst to me, this book would begin my love affair with Teacher College, especially Shanna Schwartz. Attending professional development at Teacher College  inspired me to leave the classroom and become a literacy specialist. I wanted to support teachers with workshop teaching.  However, I miss having my own classroom, especially when I go into kindergarten rooms! Although I am a firm believer in workshop teaching, I think there are a lot  of different approaches to teaching our kids. 

 

The most important approach is the one the that works for you and your students!  Like many teachers all over the world, the spring semester of teaching was challenging. I spent hours upon hours, with no materials provided, making asynchronous videos for grade-one teachers. My Screencastify account has over seventy or eighty videos. I will no longer allow any teacher in my building to tell me they can’t teach a TC lesson in less than ten minutes because it is absolutely possible!  

 

I can show them how it is done and support them as they too turn their unit of studies  into learning lessons that STICK!

Okay, now we are heading into a new school year. Next week, I am meeting with all grade level teachers to make plans for the upcoming school year. Massachusetts has a delayed start,  so students will not be starting school until the end of September. Since many of us are heading into uncharted waters with remote learning, I thought it would be helpful to remind myself and the teachers in my building of Shanna’s stickiness principles.  

 

 Funny enough, I am reading an adult book on learning called Limitless by Jim Kwik and many of his suggestions for adult learning are very similar.  

  I think we can all relate to teaching a class something and the next time you return to it (like the VERY NEXT DAY next day), the class is looking at you like, “What are you talking about?” So, the question is, how can I teach my class something that they will remember and then apply One thing we have to remember is that learning is not linear. A teacher can teach something and kids will forget it or not know how to apply it yet. Shanna reminds readers that teachers should expect many stops and starts from students in their learning. 

 

This means that a child will learn something and then seem to forget it.  

 Below are the stickiness principles:

 • In order for teaching to stick, children have to be ready to learn. 
 

 • Children learn best when they are engaged and active participants. 
 

 • Children need something to remind them of what they learned. Children benefit from the physical representation of the new learning.  

• Repetition is an important ingredient to reaching students because they learn through repetition and they love it. 
 

 

So now the question is how can we bring these four principles together for remote learning?  Over the next few weeks, I’ll explore each principle in depth and think about the implications for remote learning.  

 

Ironically, I just found out that I will be teaching in a classroom, so not only be talking about this in theory, but I will be using these principles in my classroom and truly putting them to the test!  

Have a terrific week!