Rewired Learning Blog

The New "New" Four Day School Week

    This week is graduation testing in Georgia. For those not familiar with graduation testing…they are simply tests given in 11^th grade that you must pass in order to graduate. There are four tests given (language arts, math, social studies and science) and passing each one is required for graduating high school in Georgia. The tests themselves are not the subject of this but more the time away from classes.

    I have already shown my agreement for many of the ideas written in John Medina’s book Brain Rules, but I want to take one of those ideas a bit further. He writes that repetition is key for learning. Revisiting old material and multiple shorter classes in the day are a few of his ideas to increase learning in the school atmosphere.

    The testing this week makes me think of the frequent breaks we have from class time. The calendar I have is speckled with little colorful squares highlighting days off, breaks and teacher work days. If you add in all days for graduation testing, state course testing, checkpoint tests and midterms/finals, I can make my own visual depiction of a grocery store earring tree.

    As a parent, I see that routine is very important in managing people for performance. Variations and differences in routine are important to keep motivation and interest, but these should be breaks and asides. Schools, and I’m talking about many throughout the nation, are in this frequent “break in routine” philosophy. It actually becomes a small running joke amongst students and teachers that there are so few five day work weeks in the spring.

 

 

    Imagine going to work and being assigned a different task. Not a harder task, but a not quite related task. Think if you worked as a car mechanic and one day you are asked to run the cash register. Not really a bad thing, it is nice to have an occasional interesting day and a break in routine, but that is a break, not a constant habit. The four day “work week” is becoming normal with all the testing and materials on which students need to be checked. The car mechanic example is not bad, but in learning, where repetition is key to memory and understanding, breaks are not beneficial. I have no hard evidence to back this up (since this is mostly an opinion blog), but when 20% of the year is not part of the “regular” learning routine…it becomes another type of routine…one with less instruction.

I like the educational model of the four day work week, and recently many districts are changing to this model to save money. I believe four days can work when done right, but we have to eliminate the average of one school day a week not used for education.

Memory while moving: Showing students repetition is needed

As an AP Psychology teacher, I am allowed room to experiment with certain class tasks that in themselves are also part of the curriculum. It happens now that I am in the memory part of the year and my class is getting into small groups and exploring the school with a map and writing questions on what they see. They will trace their route on the map with a highlighter and compose questions like: Is there an exit sign at the end of the hall? What color is the cafeteria door? When I get this info from them I'll give them their own questions back tomorrow and see how much they remember and the reasons they forgot.

After the discussion I'll ask, "If you have to walk or drive by something everyday does it mean that you will remember it?" I'm sure that most will say no because there was no effort in remembering the color to the cafeteria door. It takes active and effortful encoding of material (whether words, phrases or things seen) to properly remember them. The point I am trying to get across to the students is that repetition and effortful studying is key to doing well in the class, not reading something once, taking a few notes, while listening to music and calling that studying. It is easy to tell some one to study, but showing them the results of what repetition does is different. It is quite a bit more interesting and active to remember things while getting out of class and doing something out of the box than plain repetition of facts that a student might turn off to upon first hearing.

Making PowerPoint more effective

    Thinking about what I have mentioned concerning the use of powerpoints, I have created one about making them better, and shared it on SlideShare as well. The seven tips, as you can page through below, are fairly straighforward and to the point. It does mean more work, but the result is a more attentive audience and with more attention comes more retention of the material.

Making Excellent PowerPoints

View more presentations from Chris Jocham.

What makes your heart race? Coke, Pepsi or the War of 1812

    Boring is bad. Marketers have known this for years. If it wasn’t, then every TV commercial would just be a picture of a product with someone telling you about the product in the background. Unfortunately that is what most PowerPoint presentations do in the classroom.

 

    Soaring mountains, white water rafting, fast cars and the ever present sultry female, inspire some type of emotion that we can link to a product. They get us excited in some way. I can’t, easily, justify placing a bikini model in my PowerPoint for my classes to stimulate emotion, but I can use other things. Delta waves are large and slow brainwaves. In my PowerPoint, before I mentioned them I showed a picture of a Delta luggage terminal, Delta Burke and an actual geographical delta. All of which are large and slow (apologies to Mrs.Burke and Delta airlines but the purpose of emotion and laughter was achieved). Compare that to the plain description and a picture of a brain wave. This is much more exciting and apt to be remembered.

    Brian Steinberg wrote an article for the Boston Globe concerning the new research of body reactions in tandem with advertising:

“Advertisers really want to see you sweat. Or smile. Or bat an eyelash. Or anything, it seems, that might demonstrate a new commercial or program has enough of an effect on you to prompt a physical reaction”

If you smile at the presentation of a product, you might want to buy it. If you smile at the presentation of a fact or concept, you should be more able to remember it. Do you remember the day, date or place you first learned of the Civil War? Do remember the day your whole class laughed at something. We remember the exciting and not the mundane. Work is currently underway to measure emotions and physical reactions during commercials. If we can take that same research and “borrow” it for education, we might get some interesting results.