Lee S. Shulman in his _Teaching as Community Property_ essays writes about the “amnesia” students face when learning new ideas. Students can float through an entire semester in a class, and then be polled at the end of a class and be able to recall 2% of what they have should have learned. Often this happens, Shulman says, because the knowledge or learning at hand is “kept private,” or never actively used. It is passively globbed onto sticky eyeballs and brains that do not have a chance to share the ideas with others, thereby creating a meaningful and lasting internalization of the information.
Basically, as a note to myself mostly, and as a note that I am quite aware of, I need to develop quality feedback loops of learning in the classroom that involve students testing each other on what they have learned. I want assignments that are group work, devised in a way that each person must pull their own weight. And I don’t want these assignments to be assignments, I want them to be routines.
Yes, notes!
