Practice Makes Permanent

This summer I took at 10-week online course called Building Executive Functioning Skills offered by Marydee Sklar.  Have you ever been in a situation where you learned so much new and exciting information that you thought your head might explode?  Well, that was my experience this summer.  I consider myself an “old dog” who is definitely always on the lookout for “new tricks.”  This lifelong learning has helped me in countless ways and has kept me motivated and engaged during my last 45 years in education.  While the emphasis of the course was on how to help student build executive function skills, it also delved into the anatomy of the brain and how the brain learns best.  I was especially interested in how the brain retains information and how best to strengthen students’ working memory.  We learned that if teachers use both visualization and auditory methods to teach new material, the better students will remember the material.  Of course, adequate time rehearsing and practicing the materials will also better ensure that what is newly learned goes from working to long term memory.

At the same time, I was taking this class, I learned of Lynda Barry, a cartoonist and a professor at the University of Wisconsin.  I began reading Professor Barry’s books, What it is?  and Syllabus.  They are two of Barry’s published composition books that she creates to teach her classes.  They are filled with her questions, drawings, snippets of ideas and images.  I’ve been enthralled by them all summer.  Many of her lessons call for her students to memorize Emily Dickinson poems.  She is interested in how students go about memorizing the poems.  I decided to memorize one poem and think about the process.  I think I’m pretty good at memorization because I can readily make images to better understand or remember something.  I’m also a poet and have loved Emily Dickinson since I was a child.  I thought that memorizing an eight-line poem would be easy for me. This is the poem I endeavored to memorize:

This was my process for remembering the poem.  First, I read the whole poem out loud three times.  Then I practiced reciting just the first two lines without looking at the printed poem.  The words “cleaving, mind, brain” helped me to visualize the lines.  I remembered them right away.  The next two lines were also easy for me because I have background knowledge about sewing, which helped me remember “match it – seam by seam.”  Again, I could clearly see that image. 

Then, things got difficult.  I remembered the first four lines, then muddled the next three lines, then remembered, “like ball upon a floor,” very easily again.  Those first three lines of the second stanza were escaping me.  I botched them over and over again.  Then, I paused.  I thought about how I could get the words into my working memory.  I remembered that when I was a preschool teacher, I would teach the kids finger plays.  They loved them and learned them quickly.  I used to start each story time with one or two finger plays to gain the children’s attention.  Now, I thought that if I put actions to Emily’s poem, I would be able to pay closer attention and remember all her words.  I tried it.  It worked! Immediately, as I performed the actions, the words came to me.  They weren’t a muddle at all.  The actions kept the words in line and in mind. I happily chanted my new fingerplay over and over again, and laughed at my process.

This little experiment made me think about how children learn and how to strengthen working memory.  In the effort to teach well, we are providing children with countless amounts of information.  And the older students get, the more information we give them.  We give more and more information in more and more different ways.  We spend a lot of time imparting information, data, knowledge, and we spend less and less time allowing children to practice the new information.  As soon as we teach something, we are on to the next thing.  It’s not that teachers gain great pleasure frustrating children, it’s that there is a lot of emphasis on teachers to cover a lot of information, the curriculum if you will. In the last decade or so, teachers have been noticing that children’s working memories are on overdrive, and they are beginning to shut down.  So, my little experiment reminded me that maybe I should go back to my preschool roots and teach small snippets of information gradually and sequentially adding images, sounds, and motions like back when learning was new and fun.

When I return to school in just a couple of weeks, I plan to talk to my colleagues about what I’ve learned this summer.  I want to show them how to support students’ working memories by slowing down, providing lots of practice time, and showing children how to use images, sounds, and motions to help them remember.  I’m looking forward to experimenting and learning alongside my students.