Patrice Bain: Teaching with “Power Tools”

Scott Wolla: Welcome to Teach Economics from the St. Louis Fed. In this episode, we’re joined by Patrice Bain.

Patrice is an award-winning teacher, a well-known speaker, and the author of several influential books, including Powerful Teaching, A Parent’s Guide to Powerful Teaching, and Powerful Classrooms. These books offer research-based tools and teaching strategies that have helped many educators.

We started our conversation by discussing how Patrice began writing about cognitive science and evidence-based teaching strategies.

Patrice Bain: It’s a bit of a long and winding road. I had been teaching. I taught middle school history. And I had been teaching for about 10 or 12 years. And I realized that some of my students did really well, but some didn’t. And I didn’t know why.

If I’m the teacher teaching, why did some kids really get it and some not? And there wasn’t really any place for me to go to find the answers. This was back in 2006, and I was even teaching adjunct at two local universities, and I still did not have this information. And I met two cognitive scientists, Doctor Henry Roediger and Doctor Mark McDaniel, and they were researching memory, and I was having a conversation with them.

And I realized memory has a lot to do with learning. And they came up with this fabulous idea because up until that time, the only research that had been done on learning was with college students at universities, in laboratories. And they had this novel idea: what if we researched how real kids learn in a real classroom? And so my classroom was the first in the United States where we conducted these studies on learning.

And it made me realize that through all the teacher ed programs and PD and everything, we’d all been taught how we teach, but we hadn’t been taught how we learn. And so this was a game changer. And so I worked with the cognitive scientists for many, many years, and then in 2019, decided to chronicle that journey. And that’s how the first book, Powerful Teaching, came about—how to incorporate the science of learning into teaching.

So your kids really remember the information.

Wolla: That’s really great. And I spent a lot of time in education courses over the course of my academic career. And, you know, it seems like most of that coursework was about teaching teachers how to teach. And there really wasn’t much time spent on how students learn, as you just described. How does that change the way you walk into the classroom once you understand how students learn?

Bain: It was such a total game changer for me. I started every first day saying, “I’m your teacher, and I’m going to teach you how to learn.” And what I found was so many students, especially struggling students, had internalized failure. And this was by the time they were 11 years old and would say things like, “I’m not smart.”

And that was always a dagger to my teacher heart. Because all it took was teaching them how to learn. And I always thought learning was kind of like an invitation to a party. And some kids just never got the invitation. And so once you teach all your students how to learn and the different strategies, every single one was successful.

And again, I taught in middle school, in a public school, a very small district. So I had every single student, regardless of ability levels, and every single one did well.

Wolla: That’s really amazing. Can you provide us a short description of how people learn?

Bain: Yes, I can. So there is a wonderful professor by the name of Daniel Willingham, who has written a fantastic book called Why Don’t Students Like School? It’s a fabulous book, but he has a phrase that I use so often, and it is: “Children are more alike than different in terms of how they think and learn.” And when I first read that, to me, it was so profound because it doesn’t matter if you are at a top elite school or you’re in a very disadvantaged area, if you speak English or not, if you’re in the United States or not—all children are more alike than different in terms of how they think and learn.

And so once you understand that and you understand how we learn, it just creates such a safe and learning atmosphere. So how do we learn? There are three basic steps. The first one is encoding. And encoding is where we get information into our students’ heads. And as teachers, we excel. I mean, think of all the ways that we get information.

It could be through lectures, it could be through video clips, it could be through reading. We have so many ways. So that first step is encoding. And the second step is storage. Often we put that information into our students’ heads and we think it’s stored there. But there’s a great quote from Powerful Teaching that says: “Too often we focus on putting information into our students’ heads. What if, instead, we concentrated on pulling that information out?” And that gets to the third step, which is retrieval—pulling information out. So the three steps are encoding (putting the information in), storage (but it doesn’t always stay there), unless you have the all-important retrieval—the third step.

Wolla: And why is retrieval so important?

Bain: Retrieval is how we know if we know it or not. You know, an example I like to give when I’m speaking is: draw a picture of the Apple logo. It’s an apple, right? You like Honeycrisp? Okay. How? Just draw a picture of an apple. We can all do that. How many times have we seen that Apple logo, yet can we actually draw it? Do we know? Is there a leaf? Which way does it face? Is it rounded on the bottom, not rounded?

And so you get all these various kinds of apples and often not the actual Apple logo. And why do I bring that up? Because just because we see something doesn’t mean we know it. So if we are teaching and we are providing slides and we are providing lectures and all this information—getting it into our students’ heads—just like that Apple logo, we don’t know it until we can retrieve it.

And that’s what separates learners from non-learners.

Wolla: So the people who listen to this podcast, many of whom teach at the high school level, at the college level—does it matter?

Bain: No.

Wolla: Okay.

Bain: No, we all think more alike than differently. Think and learn more alike than differently.

Wolla: Okay. That’s great. I’ve seen you present a few times. I’ve read many of your books. Along the way, you introduce four power tools, which are really useful. Can you talk a little bit about the power tools and why they’re important?

Bain: I can. These were four robustly researched principles that we worked on in my classroom. And in Powerful Teaching, we just call them power tools because they really are very powerful. So the first one is retrieval. Like I said, pulling information out. And we have done so many studies on the importance of retrieval. And sometimes people think that it’s simply a regurgitation of facts.

But that’s not always the case. And I will talk more about that later. But retrieval is pulling that information out. The second power tool is spacing. And that is spaced retrieval over time. The reason why that is important is because as soon as we’ve learned something, we forget it. Within 20 minutes, we are already forgetting what was learned.

So the way it works with learning to create optimal learning—what you want to do is, as you start to forget, you retrieve again. Perhaps the following day, and then maybe three days later, and then maybe a month later. Now, with retrieval—going back to that again—we found that doing something as simple as a quiz midway through the course of study—giving feedback—totally changed. Grades went from 80% to 94% simply by inserting a quiz with feedback. Giving the students a chance to retrieve was powerful.

We also did an end-of-the-year pop final because we were curious. After that first year—does it really work? I mean, we know it worked. We had chapter after chapter where we saw successful learning. But what about at the end of the year, if there was no way of knowing there’s going to be an exam, no way to study—what would happen?

And it did not go in the grade book. But we were just curious. And we found that on a semester final exam, if questions had been retrieved throughout the year, there was a 79% retention rate with no studying at all. That’s why we work so hard as teachers. We want our students to be able to use and remember this information, and that was through spacing retrieval.

Now a third one is metacognition. And metacognition I define as discriminating what you know from what you don’t. And so often, you know, we think we might know an answer to something, but perhaps we don’t. Or we get the student who comes in the day of the big exam and says, “I’m so ready for this test. I’m going to ace it.”

And they don’t. And, you know, they studied. But what happens is, the student never had a chance to test metacognition—whether they knew it or not—until that big test. So along with retrieval and spacing, you want to provide students opportunities to test their metacognition before that big test ever comes. So we have retrieval, and we have spacing, and we have metacognition.

And the last one is called interleaving. Interleaving is that powerful principle that really helps our students get to deep and critical thinking. And I define that as comparing and contrasting similar objects. So, Roediger and McDaniel, the cognitive scientists I work with, wrote another fabulous book called Make It Stick. And they talk about interleaving, and I’ll give a brief example, but it helps define it.

If you’re a baseball or a softball coach and you’re at practice, say the pitcher is throwing ten fastballs, ten slow balls, ten curveballs—the batter is always going to know exactly what’s coming. But if you instruct the pitcher to switch it up—do a slow ball, two curveballs, a fastball—so that the batter never knows what’s coming&mellip;

They have to take everything they know about hitting that ball from the time that ball leaves the pitcher’s hand in order to make a good hit. Why is that important? Because as teachers, we don’t want our students to automatically know what’s coming. We want them—think about what you teach in economics—we want them to take whatever they know about economics and put it all together in order to synthesize that information.

That’s interleaving. So those four power tools: retrieval, spacing, metacognition, and interleaving.

Wolla: We’re going to take a short break. When we come back, Patrice will share more insights on using power tools in education, the significance of mini-quizzes, and clear up some common misconceptions about teaching strategies and learning styles. Stay tuned!

[BREAK]

Before the break, Patrice spoke about she calls “power tools” that can be used in the classroom.

We’ll pick up the conversation with Patrice’s description for how these tools can be used in teaching.

Wolla: If I’m a teacher and I really want to use these teaching strategies this coming school year—or starting tomorrow—what do I need to know to actually walk into the classroom and start using this?

Bain: I think the most important thing is—step one is understanding how we learn. Just knowing those three steps in encoding, storage, and retrieval—and those four power tools—it is so easy to feel totally overwhelmed with teaching these days and think, “My plate is already so crowded, I cannot add one more thing.” However, using these principles can actually take things off of that plate.

One of the great benefits of retrieval is that it should be low stakes or no stakes, and it doesn’t have to be this big production. So an easy thing to do is: instead of starting your class by saying, “Okay class, yesterday we talked about&mellip;”—because you’re encoding—simply switch it to, “Okay class, what did we talk about yesterday?”

Give a pause. Let them do a turn and talk. Do a group share and then call on people. Cold call, because everyone will have an answer. And within 90 seconds of this, you have a room rich with retrieval and your students are ready to dive in. Simple. But you are getting retrieval going.

Another thing is attention grabbers. Instead of saying—however you grab the attention of your students—you might want to just call out something retrieval. You know, throughout, ask a question about a definition and have a group response. You are not only getting your students’ attention, but you’re having them retrieve at the same time.

So a lot of these will not add to your plate but will really help. And you will also find that as you do these throughout the course of study, you don’t have to spend days before an exam studying. You don’t have to spend a week before semester exams or AP exams because the students already know it.

Wolla: That’s really appealing. I mean, it sounds like those types of strategies, as you said, like you don’t necessarily add to what a teacher has to correct. It’s not about, like, writing a formal quiz and then correcting 150 quizzes at night. It sounds like it’s just part of the instruction that you do every day, right?

Bain: And talking about quizzes—I would have a quiz every day. I call them mini quizzes because they were short—five questions on little recycled two-by-three-inch pieces of paper. Totally non-intimidating. But I would take whatever we talked about the day before—might have been homework—and I would cut them up, little slips of paper, put them in a basket, and simply draw out five.

And so what I’m doing—the students are retrieving, I’m spacing out the information, they’re checking their metacognition. And I could also put some interleaving in there. And what would have taken me hours of grading—I had 180 students every day—instead of grading all those papers at night, it turned into a 15-minute analysis. If I had to give points, maybe five—but often low stakes.

And that was another quick way to set the stage for what we learned yesterday, diving right into what we’re going to do today.

Wolla: So tell me a little bit about the interleaving piece. Like, I can see how what you were just describing is retrieval practice and the spacing and metacognition. But I’m curious about how you ensure that you’re interleaving the content.

Bain: I did it through the use of essential questions. And I want to put a plug out for Fed resources right now, because they are excellent. And I know I have seen Fed resources where there’s a sheet that comes along that will have the big idea. It will have whether you got it or not. And so if you can imagine this resource—the big idea are your interleaving questions, your vocabulary or whatever you’re asking.

Are you retrieval and spacing? And if you—the column “was got it”—checks for metacognition. So these fabulous Fed resources totally incorporate the four power tools. It’s done right there for you.

Wolla: So, I know you talk to a lot of teachers, as you do your speaking engagements and related to your book. For someone new to all of this information, how much different is this than, like, the standard pedagogy that the students—teacher candidates—you know, people coming out of college with a bachelor’s degree in education walk into their classroom with?

How different is this from the training that they get normally?

Bain: This takes it a step farther and really increases learning. However, what a lot of teachers may not realize is that they’re doing a lot of this already. They didn’t have a name for it, or maybe they don’t understand how intentional it could or should be.

So, for example, is there a teacher anywhere that doesn’t review? We all do.

However, making it that simple step—going from review to retrieving—just making sure a strategy is used that incorporates the retrieval. Making sure that you space out that important information. We can’t space out everything—we’d never get ahead. But I always called it my big-ticket items. So you know what they need to know for an exam, what they need to know for the next course, the next semester.

Those are the items that you want to space out and retrieve. And so just making sure that you are intentional when you do this—I think most teachers will see, “I really do this, but I can improve on how I do it by being more intentional and having learning more effective.”

Wolla: Okay. Yeah, I like that intentional piece. What are some of the biggest misconceptions people have about these teaching strategies?

Bain: One is that it’s time-consuming. I think that is the biggest. Like I mentioned earlier, “I just don’t have time to add one more thing.” They are not time-consuming. You will find that you will really be saving time by having increased learning happening.

Another is that retrieval, again, is simply—like I said earlier—regurgitation of facts. You’re simply retelling. That’s not quite right, because retrieval is really bringing forth that information. There’s a great term called schema. And what we want to do as teachers is provide the schema or the avenues. So when something about econ is in our students’ long-term memory, we know we can bring up what they know, add this new information, and it’s going to go right to the schema in their long-term memory.

Adding this new to the old. And what happens? You keep building on that and building on that.

Wolla: As far as the misconceptions people bring—do you ever have people that say, like, “You know, I learned a lot about learning styles when I was going through my college education,” or “Maybe my students—maybe quizzing or retrieval isn’t their learning style.” Like, do you ever see that or have those conversations with people?

Bain: Oh, Scott, I’m so glad you brought this up. Oh. Learning styles are a thorn in my side. There is absolutely no research at all that says learning styles are effective.

Yet if you go to major universities and you look at college classes and you put in a Google search for learning styles, so many will still pop up. But it is indeed a learning myth—along with “we only use 10% of our brain,” or “we are right-brained or left-brained.” There are hundreds of research papers that have dispelled these learning myths.

Wolla: So in your conversations with teachers or students—for instance, my experience with this is more often with my own children, who I will ask the night before a quiz to hand me their study guide, and I’ll have them retrieve.

Bain: Yes.

Wolla: And they’ll say something like, “Well, you know, I’d rather watch a video because I’m a visual learner,” right?

Bain: Well, let me comment a little bit more. We all have preferences. I recently had to get a new vehicle, and I would much rather watch a video than go through that huge manual of what is where. I don’t like to do that. But it doesn’t mean I wouldn’t learn as well. So we have preferences, but it doesn’t mean that’s our style.

So, several studies have been conducted that would have students identify their learning style, and then they would be taught according to that learning style—but others as well—and then they would be tested. And there was no correlation between what they said their learning style was and how well they did on the test.

In fact, oftentimes it was auditory or kinesthetic or something else where they did better. So the danger with learning styles is pegging a student. What we want to do—and I think most teachers do this—you have a variety. You have your visual activities and your auditory and your kinesthetic. You have all of these available because we learn best by having diversity available to us.

A variety. Let’s just not peg students so they think they have a particular style, because it discredits them from other avenues which are also successful for them.

Wolla: Right. Oh, that’s really helpful. Do you have any last words of advice for educators?

Bain: I would encourage—highly encourage—teachers to really take a bit of a dive into the science of learning, because it is a game changer. When students know how to learn—if you can teach them that in your class—that is a lifelong skill that they will have.

One other quick study I want to bring up. We had asked 1,500 high school students if using retrieval made them more or less anxious for big semester exams, and only 6% answered yes. So 94% of students—it helped reduce any stress or anxiety. And why? Because they were so ready. This is what we want. We want our students to learn. We want them to retain the information.

We don’t want them stressed out. We know how to help them learn, how to reduce anxiety, and have that information stick.

Wolla: That’s—this is really interesting. Okay. I hear more and more about test anxiety. I have in recent years. But what you’re basically saying is by giving people more opportunities to retrieve—which is a form of quizzing—you’re actually reducing test anxiety.

Bain: Absolutely. Yes. And especially when it’s low stakes. No stakes. Students in my class learned that when they made errors, it wasn’t an example where you wanted the floor to open up and you fall in and it closes over you because you’re so embarrassed. But instead, errors reflected roadmaps. It’s like, “Oh, okay, that’s not it. I’m going to go that direction.”

It gives students—it gives them opportunities to know where to study. So you don’t get that student who comes in and says, “I studied so hard,” and they don’t do well because they’ve had the opportunity through metacognition to determine what they know and what they don’t, and to focus on what they don’t know.

Wolla: That’s really great. Patrice, I want to thank you so much for spending time with me today. And I know that teachers are going to learn a lot and be better equipped to go into the classroom because of this conversation. So thank you for your contribution to economic education.

Bain: Thank you. It’s been a delight to be here. Thank you, Scott.

Wolla: I hope you enjoyed listening to my conversation with Patrice Bain. If you like this show, please subscribe anywhere you get podcasts. And be sure to leave us a review. Each one really helps! I’m Scott Wolla, and from the St. Louis Fed, you’ve been listening to Teach Economics.