“Small Teaching” Strategies to Improve Student Learning
Little Pedagogical Changes that Make a Big Impact
What are small changes you can make to your teaching methods in ways that help improve student learning? Below you will find some tips put together by the faculty who participated in a Faculty Learning Community dedicated to exploring the pedagogical strategies outlined in James Lang’s Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning (2nd ed., 2021).
The following “small teaching” tips are laid out in two parts: (1) considerations for when you put together your syllabus, and (2) considerations for how to approach the first 5–10 minutes of class; and under each of these sections, there are sub-sections addressing the themes of Knowledge, Understanding, and Inspiration.
Faculty Learning Community (Spring 2025): Carl Rice (Greek and Roman Studies; Medieval and Renaissance Studies), Dianne Pater (Biology; Environmental Studies), Liz Carter (Chinese and Japanese; Media Studies), Rachel Wise (Art), and Rebecca Pollet (Biochemistry; Chemistry); facilitated by Alexia Ferracuti, Director of Inclusive Pedagogy.
“Small Teaching” Considerations for the Syllabus
Knowledge
- Fill out the course schedule section of your syllabus with as much detail as possible, such as short sentences and phrases that describe the main topic of each day or focus of each unit. Refer back to this during class regularly and use it as a prompt to have students recall what they previously learned in the course.
Understanding
- Make a list of the cognitive skills necessary to complete your assignments or exams, and then plan for practice sessions of these key skills. Put these practice sessions in the syllabus calendar.
Inspiration
- Normalize help-seeking behaviors by emphasizing that the best students ask for help—that indeed, these habits are what make for the best students—and also clear the pathways to resources and options that can help them.
- Warm up the language in your syllabus in ways that make you feel like you are collaborating with your students on a shared challenge rather than coming down with the rules they must follow. Once you’ve drafted your syllabus, ask yourself, where do you see cold language that might seem off-putting to students? Where can you make the tone warmer, and even change your policies to be more flexible? If a student were to read the syllabus, how approachable would you seem to them, and how willing would they think you are to help them when needed?
- Provide information about the structure of the class in multiple modes. You can consider adding a video where you go over the relevant information or an FAQ with frequently asked questions.
- Edit your syllabus language to focus on promises that address what students can hope to gain from the course rather than expectations or dry descriptions of course materials.
“Small Teaching” Considerations for the First 5–10 Minutes of Class
Knowledge
- Before beginning your lesson, ask students to make a prediction related to the material you will cover in that lesson. Alternatively, ask students to start class with a practice problem that you will then solve over the course of the lesson. Either of these prediction-based activities will activate and apply their previous knowledge while revealing the gaps in their current knowledge. By engaging students in the problem-solving enterprise, they may also develop a deeper investment in the problems at hand. It can be particularly useful to use anonymous polling options to collect these answers to lower the concern students will feel about the high likelihood of incorrect answers.
- Before beginning a new topic, have students individually or collectively do a knowledge dump where they tell you everything they know, or think they know, about the topic. Research shows that even if they don’t use this knowledge, an activity like this can prepare them for deeper learning. Recalling and collecting what they already know (or think they know) activates useful prior knowledge, even as it highlights places for intervention and correction. You can ask for a few responses and then transition into your introduction of the topic.
- Begin a new lesson by asking the students to summarize the important points from the previous class session or the rest of the unit. Asking students to do this kind of retrieval practice better activates the knowledge than you sharing it. At a cognitive level, the act of retrieving knowledge also strengthens the recall process in general, which in turn corresponds to better learning overall and to improved student performance on assessment activities.
- Open your class session with a practice problem or question that requires students to draw on and to apply knowledge from earlier in the course. Known as “interleaving,” doing so emphasizes that this prior material remains important and may allow you to draw connections between the previous skills and the new content.
Understanding
- Have students bring a “connection notebook” and ask them to write one paragraph about how the day’s course material connects to last week’s, or connect the day’s course material to a current political or cultural event, or even how today’s class connects to something they have learned or discussed in another class.
- Ask students to write a “minute thesis”: on the board, make a list of themes and a list of objects of study in your class. Then, have students draw connections between both lists. Finally, have students spend 1 minute creating a thesis that explains the connections they’ve made.
Inspiration
- Specifically at the beginning of the semester, ask students about the assets they bring to the course, including academic strengths and talents, experiences or cultural backgrounds that give them a unique perspective, or even just general topics of which they are proud.
- Open class by eliciting student emotions—give them something to wonder about, tell them a story, present them with a shocking fact or statistic—so as to capture their attention and prepare their brains for learning.
- Get to class early so that you can get to know more about students, their lives, and interests, thus creating a positive social atmosphere in the room.
- During the first 5–10 minutes of a class, you can take the opportunity to spotlight a student who has done a particularly good job on something, or who has been an active participant either in class or in online discussion. Especially for low-stakes activities, the recognition emphasizes to students the value of their work.
- Tie in your assignments or activities for the day back to the syllabus or the major themes of the course. By helping students see the connections, they will be more likely to think about how what they learn fits into everything else they have learned and make connections.
Further Support
To request a one-on-one consultation about how you might implement “small teaching” strategies in your classroom (or to discuss any aspect related to teaching), or to learn more about joining a Faculty Learning Community (FLC), email Alexia Ferracuti, Director of Inclusive Pedagogy at (aferracuti@vassar.edu).
References
Lang, J. M. (2021). Small teaching: Everyday lessons from the science of learning (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.