Dr. Jensen's Method is an approach to turning around or accelerating any K-12 classroom in a few weeks.
To turn your system around, start with a decision: Students will learn and will retain what they learn. Commit yourself to their genuine, lasting knowledge. You'll maintain that intent better, however, if you first decide to make learning honest, and consider it even your moral obligation to tell parents the truth about what their children know.
You can begin on Monday by finding out. Administer a comprehensive test and then frequent tests-- pop quizzes and major examinations-- unscheduled, impromptu, and without forewarning while drawing on all prior material including the previous year's. Those results will reveal what students know. They lay down a marker, a message to all, that the system is done being satisfied with familiarity and commits to comprehensive, lasting knowledge. Students will know what they know and parents will have the truth.
That single change would quickly motivate fresh efforts. As an administrator or teacher, however, you might personally be willing to do that but foresee confusion and angst. Why? The unfortunate reason is that it may not be clear to you or them how to save knowledge. What do you do? In brief, you align instruction with children's innate tendencies.
By the early 1990s I'd been working with education for twenty years, had obtained advanced degrees, traveled about with a consulting team, and continually carried questions in my head. Then an experience broke open my understanding.
On a rainy Saturday afternoon in Seattle in the mid-90s, I was standing on the sidelines of a soccer game where my middle-school son was playing. I knew most of the boys on his team, was well-acquainted with their top-tier school, and saw the boys as collectively typical. In the classroom they were mostly grudging, bored, and minimally compliant. Yet here on a mucky playground in a light rain, they were dashing about, totally involved, enthusiastic, and connected while their energetic coach shouted from the sidelines, "Nicely done! Nicely done!"
A realization burst into my head, "It's not the boys, it's the conditions!" The boys weren't innately lazy, uninterested, resistant, or indifferent to learning--an accusation teachers often level: "These kids just don't want to learn." Instead, they responded to the conditions of their experience. The same boy checked out in the classroom was all-in on this muddy field.
Later that day I examined the features affecting them. Skill development, performance, scoring, peer approval, applause, group support, and clear direction from their coach drove their effort. Competence delights students, and they obtain it by prolonged practice that refines and deepens a pattern of behavior. Knowledge is skill with ideas and follows the same blueprint. Practice with knowledge develops it into a lifetime resource.
Much is understood about what comprises practice. Long before the Internet made searches easier, I uncovered a study that should be simple to replicate today. It posed the question, "What classroom activity produces the most learning?" Is it teacher lectures? Student discussion? Silent reading? Worksheets? Naps? What? It found that students spend 40-80% of their time in the effort to recall.
That criterion invites a peek into a classroom. Visit one, open the stopwatch feature on your phone, pick a student, and time their "effort to recall" during a school day or hour. They might answer a teacher's question, explain something, or write something from memory.
Your results will probably match the research finding that 80% of student comments in class are in 30 words or less. Your student will be lucky to spend even a single percent of their time in the effort to recall. The activity deepening learning will probably be completely missing, as it will from any homework assigned.
Another clue about practice comes from military training, which was part of my life. For generations, armies have trained new recruits in the skills of soldiering. They've found that for a given skill, spend 5% of the time explaining it, 10% demonstrating it, and 85% practicing it. In other words, once you know what you want to get better at, practice it, practice it, practice it. Repeatedly call up a model of effort from your mind and apply or express it.
A third reference is the familiar axiom, "To learn a subject, teach it." Everyone agrees it's true, but why?
In teaching a subject, you constantly exert the effort to recall. At first you gather details, express them, and link points. As you explain them repeatedly from different angles, the relationships between them become clearer, so that by aiding others' understanding, your own expands exponentially. Soon, details coalesce into a field that easily welcomes and incorporates more details. The mind readily thinks about what's already familiar to it.
Permanent knowledge of any kind tends to connect into a field. Adults usually develop just a few, like everything associated with family, or the field of job, or a personal bent like music, a sport, or a subject of interest. You can tell a field forms in your mind when one detail about a topic leads your mind spontaneously to more.
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