Best Practices and Bad Habits (Part 2)
Transfer of learning appears to be a simple concept. What you learn in the family or learn in school can be applied in different situations outside of the family and the classroom. Learning Spanish, for example, helps later in learning Italian. Learning to get along with an older brother or sister helps in learning how to get along with others later in life. Learning math in middle school helps one in high school physics. It doesn’t always work that way, however.
In Part 1, I described how I taught a two-week unit on specific critical thinking skills useful to understand history and use in daily life in the early 1960s. My theory was that teaching these thinking skills directly one after the other at the very beginning of the semester would lead to students applying them when I