Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning by Pooja K. Agarwal and Patrice M. Bain

I had been following @PoojaAgarwal on Twitter for some time before this book’s publication, was familiar with her site www.retrievalpractice.org, and had also heard her on an episode of Bonni Stachowiak’s Teaching in Higher-Ed podcast but I just got around to reading Powerful Teaching, released in June of 2019.

The book focuses on 4 main “power tools” for improving student performance: retrieval practice, spacing, interleaving, and feedback (which focuses on metacognition). The target audience for the book is teachers (obviously) and this means there is an emphasis on activities, exercises, and tips for using these tools in the classroom, both for younger students (Bain teaches sixth-grade history) and in higher-education (Agarwal teaches undergraduate and graduate psychology courses). Agarwal and Bain were able to combine discussion of research on these tools with a wide variety of practical applications admirably and the result is a persuasive argument for the effectiveness of the tools as well as a straight-forward guide to using them.

I’ll start with my criticisms of the book, which are minor and more related to style or presentation than the actual content or strategies. The use of “I” felt a bit clunky at times when switching between Patrice and Pooja (“I” followed by the first name in parentheses then continuous use until the next switch – though “we” was also used at times). “I” allowed for mostly first-person narration for how the tools are used but also meant there were times I wasn’t always keeping track of who the “I” was and only realized when it switched or third person was used to refer to the other author. This didn’t hinder the usefulness of the content, but it diminished the feeling of the writing having a clear voice or style throughout.

Another minor criticism is the overuse of “power” in descriptors for the main ideas (“power tools”, “powerful strategies”, “power ups”, “powerful learning”, etc.). While certainly fitting with the book’s title this eventually felt a bit uninspired. To be fair, many of these strategies are aimed at being applied to younger students and as a result, the use of simple but …ahem... powerful names might be a useful habit to carry over when communicating these ideas to younger audiences.

On a similarly trivial note, I felt that the illustrations and figures left a bit to be desired, like the one below that seems better-suited to a sketch mocking the use of cogs in corporate presentation graphics. I’m not really sure what this figure is meant to represent or how it helps to explain any of the concepts.

Of course, these kinds of criticisms are more reflective of my own personal pet peeves than the quality of the book and certainly shouldn’t stop anyone from reading it, so let’s move on to the good stuff (which is abundant). I’d say my views on learning are in strong agreement with those of the authors, such as our shared frustration with the neurobabble, neuromyths, and unfounded claims of “brain-based learning” creeping into education (and into many other places – follow @neurobollocks for updates on the latest brain-based stupidity).

I’ve been familiar with the effectiveness of retrieval practice and spacing for several years and have made an effort to read the research and apply the ideas in my own classroom (see my relevant TEDx talk here). While I was already familiar with many of the studies and theories described in the book, some of the practical applications and classroom strategies were new to me and I’m looking forward to implementing them in my own teaching.

I was glad to see the emphasis on reducing the stakes whenever possible in order to increase student engagement and decrease student anxiety. The authors point out that reducing the costs of mistakes can encourage students to take risks. This can help ensure all students participate without fear of embarrassment and recognize that making mistakes can be useful. I start all my classes with a no-stakes 5 question quiz on prior material and frequently remind students it’s better to make mistakes now (when it doesn’t count) than on the real exam.

After reading, one thing I’m planning to incorporate more often is metacognition by asking students to reflect on their own learning. This is something that is easy to immediately add to activities I already do by asking students to do things like rate how sure they are of the answers, make note of which concepts they found challenging, or explain why they think they remembered or forgot certain information.

I also appreciated the focus on making the time for using these tools, even if that means you need to cut back on covering some content. Simply put, more content that isn’t remembered isn’t better. This matches my own teaching experience when it comes to focusing on the most important principles (and why I created my guide and YouTube series for intro psych students – it’s just not practical to cover all the content contained in a 900-page textbook, especially in a single semester). Students often need help knowing what the most essential concepts are and then they need to engage with those concepts frequently. Using tools like retrieval practice can serve both to emphasize those key ideas and to ensure long-term retention of them.

A related notion to making time for these strategies is that they take effort and learners need to bear the responsibility of learning; teachers can’t do it for them. Plans to improve education are often directed solely at teachers instead of shifting that responsibility (and later, that credit) to students. While teachers have to plan to incorporate these strategies into their classrooms, students have to do the hard work (with its desirable difficulties) in order to earn that feeling of accomplishment and achievement that all students deserve to experience.

If you’re a teacher (at any level) who isn’t familiar with the 4 main strategies covered (retrieval, spacing, interleaving, & feedback) then I’d say this book is a must-read. If you’re already familiar with these ideas, I still offer a strong recommendation to read it; you’ll find clearly-articulated support for techniques you may already be using, as well as a number of new ways to incorporate these strategies in your classroom.

There’s often a great deal wrong with the educational theories that get pushed into the mainstream and (rather fortunately) most of these fads fizzle out, so it’s refreshing to see a book for teachers that focuses on explaining and applying cognitive science research rather than just propagating the latest intuitions of one supposed-guru or another. I appreciate the work and effort that Agarwal and Bain have put into applying and promoting these strategies, and that makes this one of the rare “education” books I can actually recommend teachers take the time to read.

Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning – Pooja K. Agarwal & Patrice M. Bain (Amazon link)