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Beyond teaching methods, instructional techniques, or teaching “styles,” powerful teaching, which leads to long-term transformation and application of knowledge, requires attention to four essential elements.
While it remains true that effective learning is highly dependent on the teacher’s act (especially in the instructional context), it is also true that it is the student who is the agent of learning. Each of the four elements focuses more on the student’s learning than the teacher’s instructional act.
Effective teachers give attention to and know how to address attentional states. A fundamental educational axiom is that people don’t learn what they ignore. Just because students are seated facing you and looking at you does not mean they are paying attention. And if they have a laptop before them, the chances that they are not paying attention to you increase exponentially. Likely, you are competing against Facebook, Tinder, X (Formerly Twitter), YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, Reddit, and emails—all at once!
The students’ attention span is how much time they can focus and concentrate on a task, idea, object, or concept (or on you) before becoming distracted. In other words, how much time they pay attention to what you want them to learn. The average human attention span has shrunk to just 8.25 seconds — shorter than that of a goldfish.
Becoming skilled at holding students’ attention is critical to achieve powerful teaching. It requires being aware of the level of attention given to instruction (called “teacher with-it-ness”), knowing how to maintain attention, how to get attention back when it drifts, and how to keep 15 to 30 student brains at the same level of attention simultaneously!
Learning is retention over time, and learning that is retained over time is what is meaningful to the student (and not necessarily what you, as a teacher, think is important). Learning that is meaningful is one that meets a need—actual, perceived, physical, emotional, or existential. Teachers often fail to appreciate that what is being learned in the classroom is meaningful for most students only to the extent that it helps them pass the course or get a good grade on a test. After that need is met, most of what students “learned” is not retained.
To achieve powerful teaching that leads to retention of learning, teachers must first help students appreciate why what they are about to learn is meaningful to them. This leads to the next element for powerful teaching: learner motivation.
The third essential element for powerful teaching is addressing students’ motivation for learning. This is directly related to the previous element, meaningful education. A common failure in teaching is spending insufficient time at the beginning of a learning unit (a course or a lesson) focusing on student motivation.
Too many assume students are motivated to learn what will be presented just because they show up. To engage in powerful teaching, instructors spend what may seem an inordinate amount of time framing for students why what they are about to learn is meaningful to them.
To foster a motivation for learning, teachers need to identify and illustrate for students why the information, concept, or skills they are about to learn is meaningful: what problem it solves, what need it addresses (actual or perceived, current or existential). One rule of thumb is that in a course, the entire first session should be devoted to addressing student motivation for learning, reinforcing that motivation throughout the course of study.
Many teachers strive to focus on the application of learning. But the concept of transference of learning goes beyond application. Remember that for most students, applying what they are learning is to pass the test or the course! Learning is retention over time. It is the transference of learning from the context in which they are learning (typically a classroom) to the context in which the learning needs to be applied (in the real-world context).
An educational axiom we often cannot realize is that to be effective, “learning must be acquired in the context it will be used.” Most teachers teach in a classroom and school context, teaching information or skills they expect to apply in a different context; a powerful liability to the transference of learning.
Remember that for students, the uncritical assumption about “application” is that what they are learning is to be applied to the test for the course—the context in which they are learning the information and skill. Most will find it challenging to transfer learning to another context because they have not retained the learning–they’ve already applied it to the need: to pass the course!
Do you want to provide powerful teaching for your students? Then focus on the four elements of powerful learning: attention, retention, motivation, and transference of knowledge.
~Israel Galindo is Associate Dean for Lifelong Learning. He directs the Pastoral Excellence Program of the Center for Lifelong Learning.
