“Small Teaching” for Large Impact: Easy-to-Use Strategies for Busy Instructors

University educators working in a time of austerity rarely have the time for introducing wholesale revisions to their courses—but any educator can implement what James Lang famously calls “small teaching” strategies: low- to no-preparation interventions designed to help students process information, actively engage with course content, and learn more deeply. Lang’s instant classic, Small Teaching. Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning (2016 and 2021) distils key insights from the science of human learning to help educators design and deliver better learning experiences for their students.

The first part of Lang’s book focuses on supporting students in building disciplinary knowledge: an important goal in content-heavy introductory courses, where success or failure may determine a student’s entire academic trajectory. Since many students do not know how to achieve deep, long-lasting learning (hint: not by cramming the night before the test), modelling effective learning strategies in class can help dispel myths and increase metacognitive self-awareness (along with test scores). Here are some key insights from Lang’s overview:

Prediction

Engaging in prediction activities primes the brain to receive new information—and can be a fun and energizing way to open a class module or session. Before introducing a new theory or concept, pause and invite students to make predictions. What might be the meaning of this unfamiliar term? What’s going on in this image or diagram? What can we assume about the content of this article/book/chapter based on its title? What might scholar X be likely to argue about this phenomenon? How do you think scholar Y might react to scholar X’s theory? Is model A or model B more likely to account for the effect we are observing? And so on. Asking students to commit to a response (via an electronic polling system, show-of-hands, or simply writing down their predictions) can help ensure that all class members participate in and benefit from the boost in attention and cognitive engagement.

Retrieval practice

In spite of abundant evidence demonstrating the effectiveness of retrieval, many students still believe that re-reading their textbook or notes is the most effective way to study. While some students might be familiar with at-home retrieval strategies (from digital quizzing applications or old-school index card sets), not every student will take the time to put them into practice, no matter the professor’s exhortations. By adding in-class retrieval practice opportunities, we can help all students experience the power of this evidence-supported approach. Frequent low-stakes assessments, whether graded or ungraded, individual or group-based, can help students strengthen their knowledge base in our disciplines—and learn to learn better in all of their courses.

Interleaving

Novice learners often experience new content as isolated segments (chapter one, chapter two, chapter three, etc.), easily forgotten once an assessment is completed and a new segment introduced. We can help students consolidate and integrate knowledge through interleaving old and new material throughout the course (or an entire course of study). Interleaving activates cognitive powers by requiring students to retrieve recently acquired knowledge and to transfer it into new contexts. We can incorporate interleaving into our courses by regularly referring to already learned material, asking students to draw connections between old and new content, and offering cumulative assessments. Keeping an archive (digital or physical) of previously "covered" course concepts, problems, or quiz questions, and drawing from it regularly in subsequent classes, can be an easy way to make sure interleaving becomes a structural component of the class.

By adding evidence-informed “small teaching” strategies to our teaching toolkit, we can not only help students learn better in our own classes but also model effective learning techniques they can take with them into other learning contexts. By making predicting, retrieving, and interleaving routine elements of our courses—and overtly signaling their use—we can help build positive cognitive habits and support the broader goal of metacognitive equity for every student.