Small Teaching. James M. Lang
might have a big end goal in mind, but if you want to achieve it, you have to launch your efforts with practical and manageable strategies. In early January of 2021, one of those articles pointed me to the work of BJ Fogg, the director of the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University. In his book Tiny Habits: The Small Changes that Change Everything (2020), Fogg argues that we are most likely to affect real change in our lives when we start with the smallest possible increments we can imagine—if we want to begin developing our upper body strength, for example, we might begin with the plan of doing just two push-ups per day while we are waiting for our coffee to brew. Because that seems like such a small and manageable thing to do, we start the habit, and the habit can then expand until we reach our larger objectives. Our new habits are most likely to stick, Fogg argues, if we can pin them to existing behaviors or moments in our routines (i.e., I always do the push-ups while my tea is steeping) and celebrate our achievements each time we complete the desired behavior (even by just pausing for a moment to congratulate ourselves on another day of doing our push-ups). After I read Fogg's book I was so inspired that I immediately found my wife and pronounced that I had just read something really interesting, and had a great idea about how we could keep our New Year's resolutions and change our lives in the new year. She pointed out that she hadn't made any New Year's resolutions, gave me a nod and a smile, and went back to her book.
Although my non-tiny life resolutions typically don't gain much purchase in my life in the long term, every few years I manage to accomplish one very large task: turning an idea into a book. I don't have a perfect track record on that score either, of course. I make plenty of resolutions to start books that I never finish. But once in a while a big idea emerges that inspires me enough to sit down and start chipping away. In January of 2014, with my failed New Year's resolutions probably fresh in my mind, I wrote the following words in my journal:
Had a good idea for a book project today for Jossey-Bass: the Five-Minute Intervention, or Teaching on the Edges … it's about making brief interventions in a traditional class in order to maximize learning. So faculty don't have to start from scratch in re-thinking their teaching. Grounded in good cognitive theory, they can make 5–15 minute interventions that allow students to engage with the course and increase their learning potential.
That brief entry was the seed that blossomed into Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning, first published in the spring of 2016 and now appearing in this second edition. I'm not sure any other book of mine has hewn so closely to its original conception from start to finish. The words above describe with perfect accuracy the book that eventually emerged, and still capture exactly what I hope this book can do for its readers: use research from the learning sciences to offer faculty small, practical changes they can make to their courses in order to improve their students’ learning.
The warm reception that this idea received has been one of the greatest surprises of my life. The book has sold more copies than all of my other books combined and seems to find new audiences every semester. I've received hundreds of invitations to give lectures or workshops on the book's ideas to faculty on college and university campuses around the globe. I wrote a multi-part series for the Chronicle of Higher Education on small teaching approaches, and those columns have been the most widely-read articles I have ever written. One of those columns in particular, which focused on how to teach effectively in the first five minutes of class, has proven especially popular. I still see it regularly make the rounds on social media, as someone new discovers the unlocked potential of those crucial opening minutes of the class period. In the fall of 2019 we published a sequel, Small Teaching Online, largely the work of faculty development expert Flower Darby, whose many years of researching and practicing online teaching enabled her to apply the small teaching approach to online courses. As this second edition was heading into production, we were finalizing plans for the third iteration in the series, Small Teaching for elementary and middle-school educators.
The small teaching approach was always designed to have two very different appeals to instructors and institutions. First, I wanted to offer pathways to the improvement of teaching and learning that were manageable for faculty, most of whom already have more work than they can handle in their professional and personal lives: teaching multiple classes, serving on committees, doing research in their disciplines, commuting to multiple campuses as adjuncts, raising children, caring for parents, advocating for social justice, surviving a pandemic, and more. As much as they might want to take deep dives into the literature on teaching and learning, they just don't have the time or energy to do so. I tried to make sure all of the techniques in the book were ones that faculty could put into practice without an excessive amount of new preparation or evaluation time. My hope was that faculty members who read Small Teaching or attended one of my workshops three days before the semester starts would still be able to squeeze one or two new teaching strategies into their courses that very semester. But even further, I hoped that faculty members who encountered the ideas from the book in the fifth or even tenth week of the semester could still find something new to try with their students before the course ended.
Second, I hoped that these easy-to-apply teaching strategies could have a powerful positive impact on student learning, performance, and retention. Over the course of my own teaching career I have seen how small changes I have made to my own courses could be transformative—could, for example, revitalize a course that had grown stale or change entirely the extent to which students were engaged with the course material. The connection notebooks that you will read about in Chapter Four are the best recent example of that in my own teaching. Using those notebooks, which take very little class time to complete and which require minimal grading from me, has transformed the literature survey courses I teach every year. Through the vehicle of those notebooks, students are able to create much deeper and more meaningful connections between their lives and 19th-century British poems they read for the course. They cite those connection notebooks frequently on our course evaluation forms as one of the aspects of the course that was most helpful to their learning.
To ensure that the small teaching strategies I recommended could have such a positive impact, they had to align with a principle or theory I had encountered in the research on teaching and learning in higher education. Those principles became the foundations for the chapters, enabling me to recommend small teaching changes in a systematic way. One of the major reasons that I wanted to produce a second edition of the book has been that my thinking about those principles has shifted over the last five years. This helps explain the most substantive change you will find in the book: the complete overhaul and re-framing of two chapters, one from Part Two and one from Part Three.
The first edition of the book contained a chapter on “Self-Explaining,” which presents research supporting the idea that asking students to talk or write about their learning while they are completing a learning task can deepen their understanding. During the workshops and lectures I gave on the different principles of the book over the last five years, I noticed that this chapter resonated especially with faculty who teach students in more individualized, skill-based settings, such as performing arts or clinical practice in medicine. Faculty outside of those settings had more trouble considering how to incorporate self-explanation in their classrooms. As I reflected on the act of self-explanation, and what made it useful, it occurred to me that self-explanation could be considered as one strain of the more general act of explanation, and that in fact two of the models in the chapter moved out of the realm of self-explanation and into this more general territory. Thus, the chapter formerly known as “Self-Explaining” has now been expanded into “Explaining,” and presents models for asking students to explain their learning aloud, either to themselves or to their peers or even to audiences outside of the classroom. The three chapters of Part Two now offer a very logical progression of teaching strategies. Learning deepens when students connect course content to their lives outside of the classroom, practice applying their new knowledge and skills in different contexts, and then explain their understanding to someone else. This last activity, of course, is another way of describing what we do as teachers,