How People Learn: Turning Theory into Practical Tips for Teachers

Many years ago, I did a teaching degree. I also took a number of certifications as a youth sport coach. Through all of it the topic of how we learn was barely covered. The entire focus was on how to teach or how to coach as if knowing anything about the people we taught was not important at worst and secondary at best. It’s only been in the last few years as I transitioned from teacher/coach to instructional designer that the ‘learning’ finally got put into ‘teaching and learning’.

I’m not a neuroscientist, cognitive psychologist or educational psychologist, so I’m no recognized expert in learning. I’m just really interested in understanding how people learn and how that knowledge can be used to improve instruction. I’ve got a simple model that could be applied to any learner at any age to help promote learning. But let’s start with what the model is grounded in, the basic processes involved in memory, along with a tip for instructors on how to use that memory process in their instruction.

Attention — What gets paid attention to has the best chance of being remembered/learned. Unfortunately, there’s way too much in the environment to pay attention to.

Tip: Guide it (to what’s important to know).

Encoding — Like the Library of Congress system is used for organizing books, encoding is how we try to make sure that what we’re learning can be remembered.

Tip: Dual code it. Words and images work better at creating pieces of information that are memorable compared to images alone or text alone)

Storage — Information moves from our sensory memory to our working memory and eventually gets encoded in our long-term memory.

Tip: Don’t overload it. While long-term memory is quite possibly unlimited, working memory is quite limited. It’s important to manage the amount of information presented to learners as well as the complexity of that information.

Retrieval — Is the ability to get the right information out of long-term memory at the right time. An opposite of retrieval would be forgetting.

Tip: Test it. There is no better a technique for strengthening what we know then testing ourselves to see what we can remember about what we’ve been taught. Forgetting a little bit is good. The struggle we face when trying to remember what we’ve been taught actually reinforces the connections in our memory that represent that piece of information.

And here’s my simple little model…

Gathering — Attention to information, deciding what’s important.

Reflection — Combining old with the new. New ideas are usually abstract to us. Finding ways to take the abstract new idea and represent it along side an existing concrete idea we have already stored in memory helps unravel the complexity of the new idea. We need to find ways to say this new thing is ‘like’ this other thing that we already know.

Creating — Finding a connection that personalizes or makes the information meaningful.

Retrieving — Rehearsal or practice of information that has been committed to memory.

As an instructor, you could use this model like a cycle to teach one idea/item or concept. You could also use it multiple times to teach multiple ideas/items or concepts. One cycle could last an entire lesson or class or there might be multiple cycles within the same time frame. This would allow you to either drill down deeper into a single topic (what I’m calling vertical learning) or explore a wider range of topics more superficially (what I’m calling horizontal learning).