Clearly, that is something really useful to my life. While there are lots of principles from the book I'll be implementing, I've been focusing on one strategy that they say is very clearly tied to moving information from short to long term memory: retrieval practice.
The concept, in its most basic form, is self-quizzing. The way most people study is they go over a list of topics, and run through them once or twice. Maybe you make flashcards. And as soon as you've gotten them right at least once, you figure out know them and move on.
But that's not knowledge. That's the illusion of mastery.
So how do you know if you really know something? By simulating testing conditions and forcing yourself to work harder to pull the information from memory. Practically, that means closing the book or the laptop and going back through the concept and asking yourself questions to test understanding instead of basic recall.
That is such a powerful concept that I decided I was going to implement it immediately with my 6th graders.
The problem that immediately surfaced is that I run a student-centred PBL constructivist classroom. There isn't direct instruction. There isn't lots of factual information.
Or so I thought.