What I’m Reading: ‘How Learning Works’

As a rookie college professor, I have often been jealous of my secondary- and primary-school counterparts. From 2010 on, as I completed an M.F.A. in creative writing and two teaching fellowships, and held a host of trial-by-fire adjunct positions across New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, I put together a hodgepodge list of classroom what-to-dos. But I had no explanation for why I was doing the things on my list or how (if?) they would help students learn.

Enter How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching by Susan A. Ambrose et al., a text assigned at a course-design academy that I attended at Pennsylvania State University’s Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence. Research from hundreds of educational sources re-emerges in the authors’ conversational presentation of seven original principles that explain what supports and hinders learning. Plug-and-play-style research-based strategies to use in the classroom accompany each principle.

Reading the book empowered and overwhelmed me. As I begin my sixth academic year, I feel better equipped to stand in front of the classroom and even more humbled by the monumental task that awaits me now that I know a fraction of what the best elementary- and high-school teachers do: how learning works.

Keysha Whitaker is a lecturer in English at Pennsylvania State University-Berks, and host and executive producer of the podcast series Behind the Prose.