30 Ways To Teach More Effectively

How can you make your students learn quicker, gather actionable knowledge and increase retention time?

Here are 30 tips based on #ScienceOfLearning

1. Try to infuse social rejection. E.g make the students present something in front of the whole class, or publish something. Social rejection is felt the same way physical pain is and this is something students really want to avoid. (Matthew D. Liebermann)
2. Tap into the intrinsic motivation of students. People have an inherent tendency to seek out novelty and challenges, to extend and exercise one's capacities, to explore, and to learn. (Deci)
3. Be more mindful about teaching styles than classroom seating, research show where students sit doesn't really matter.
4. Encourage students to take notes using mindmaps. The combination of images, colours and a visual-spatial arrangement, is proven to significantly improve information recall. (Tony Buzan)

1. Get your students to set goals. "Students who set goals, make flexible plans to meet them and monitor their progress tend to learn more and do better in school than students who do not" (Schunk).
2. Make your students believe they have a growth mindset, believing it's possible to learn and develop instead of a fixed one, where one believes talent and intelligence are static. Students with a growth mindset focus more on learning and worry less about getting approval. (Carol Dweck)
3. Mix teaching styles - transmit the information visually, aurally. Make your students read and write or teach with kinesthetics in mind. There is no consistent research backing up that people learn best by one learning style applied. (VARK)
4. Apply the ADDIE framework when building effective training: Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation. (Florida State University)

9. Get your students to break up with their phones. Research suggests attention span is a lot shorter thanks to the mobile phone. (Catherine Price)

10. Connect performance to rewards - rewards big enough to make the effort worth it (Vroom's Expectancy Theory)

11. Use badges to motivate learning. Great for recognition, competition and assessment

12. Encourage students to do free time reading in a foreign language have a bigger vocabulary than the ones who don't.

13. Create a context for information through storytelling. Students cognitively retain it more completely and efficiently. (Uri Hassan)

14. Measure the effectiveness of the training, e.g by using the framework developed by (Kirkpatrick)

15. View knowledge as a tree. Make sure the base is solid and branches are steady for before adding on leaves. (Elon Musk)

16. Use the SUCCESS principle (Chip & Dan Heath) to make the information stick

• Simplicity: Highlight the single most important thing about the idea
• Unexpectedness: Make sure the idea is something out of the ordinary
• Concreteness: The idea should be understood the same way by everyone
• Credibility: Make the idea believable supported by statistics
• Emotional: Connect the idea with emotions
• Story: Add a plot to the idea to engrave it in people's mind

17. Don't stress about creating the perfect course. According to the 70 - 20 - 10 rule, only 10% of the learning occurs during formal training. Instead, find ways how students can learn better from job-related experiences and interactions with colleagues. (Lombardo, Michael and Eichinger)

18. Encourage students to set challenging and specific goals. (Locke)

19. Work somewhere where you are admired, get recognition, you get to do your job independently. OECD research says teachers are satisfied with their jobs and perform well thanks to these factors.

20. Get students to make errors early in the learning programme. "Errors enhance later memory for and generation of the correct responses, facilitate active learning, stimulate the learner to direct attention appropriately, and informs the teacher of where to focus teaching." (Metcalfe, 2017)

21. Add gamification using the Octalysis framework. (Yu-Kai Chou)

22. Make learning more active and participatory (Edgar Dale)

23. Add PACE to the learning setting. Performance and Pause, Authenticity, Constructiveness and Enthusiasm. (Wim Rombaut)

24. Keep an eye out for AlterEdu, a new assessment tool taking learning preferences, information processing mechanisms and application mechanisms into account. (Tanika Kenens)

25. Use the addictive (and conflicting) components in games when creating and delivering training. The story, uncertainty and control.

26. Use microlearning, it suits the modern learner (Deloitte)

27. Make lectures more interactive - many tips in Jan-Jaap In der Maur's blog here.

28. Use role-playing - this builds the confidence of the students and makes them better problem-solvers (Training Magazine)

29. Learn from teachers that are magical in their approach (Christopher Emdin)

30. Include novelty for better retention. (Dr Düzel)