EF: Please tell us about your journey as a learner and what that teaches you about learning.
SS: In thinking about my own journey as a learner, I struggle to find just one story that represents my experiences. Instead, several memories come to mind—kind of like a movie—of different times when I felt really proud of myself as a learner, or embarrassed, or mad. It’s always these intense emotions. One salient thing that sticks with me as I think through these emotions is that as a child, I thought that getting something right was magical, as opposed to something that I had control over. As a young learner, I was definitely a people-pleaser. I just wanted my teachers to like me and to be a good girl. I would get a good grade or a smiley face on my paper, and I often didn’t know the inputs I had to put in to get that output. I just thought of it as magic. As a result, I would be superstitious and try to do whatever I could, such as wear specific clothes. However, I got really lucky over my learning journey because a few teachers took the time to disabuse me of those notions and teach me how to learn.
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One example is the idea of simple learning practice, being able to repeat back what I’d just learned. I would close the chapter I finished reading in a science or social studies text and say back what I think happened in that reading. Let’s say someone is teaching me a math concept. Can I now change up the numbers and do it again? Those sorts of prompts and tips got me through my learning journey. At some point—and for me, that point was college—I finally understood that learning was less about luck and more about whether I could master a topic by reaching a deep understanding, ensuring I understood the topic by repeating back what I’d learned and moving forward from there.
EF: I appreciate hearing that story. So tell us from your experience at Zearn. From the data you all look at, and from your experience across education, what do you feel that we can really anchor to as we prepare to support the learning needs of students that have had interrupted schooling?
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SS: The most difficult year of American education will be next year, not this year. And this year was already very challenging. We actually learned many of the answers to supporting the learning needs of our students a long time ago, and they’re sitting deep in the research base. I’ll just give you a couple examples—though there’s certainly more than two. We’ll stick with math because that’s an area in which I have deeper knowledge.
We know that kids are more successful in learning, enjoying, and retaining content over long periods of time when they experience concepts in new contexts. Mathematics, which is conceptual, makes more sense when presented as an idea versus a series of procedures or a trick. How I remember math as a child, and how math is often taught, is that you flip the page to the next chapter and see a brand new thing that you are going to learn. By contrast, when math is presented as a slow progression of a few big ideas, we see that children learn it better and enjoy it more. They are also able to then show that understanding in new contexts and over a longer period of time.
As we think about how we approach math at any time—and certainly within the constraints of the coming year—there’s no room for math by card tricks. We really have to teach the few deep ideas of math. This is the type of takeaway we learned and articulated in the 1990s when America did really poorly on the TIMSS exam relative to other countries. Those studies were conducted by famous researchers like Jim Stigler, and then synthesized by Tom Loveless at Brookings, and their findings are just as important next year as they’ve been over the last 20 or 30 years.
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