Is the Anti-Boring Toolkit Relevant for Younger Students?
Last week I received the following question by email:
I wanted to reach out and say that I really enjoy and admire your work. My background is in medicine and I’ve recently started a small EF coaching business focused primarily on younger kids (upper elementary through middle school).
I am taking a preventative and proactive approach to coaching by attempting to build better habits and strengthen pathways earlier on.
I am debating taking your course and was wondering whether you could shed more light as to whether I would be able to take the material and adapt it to a younger cohort of clients?
First of all, I LOVE this new coach’s desire to help younger students via a proactive and preventative approach to teaching academic skills. Wouldn’t it be incredible if every student learned about their brains, and had the tools to troubleshoot their own learning, habits, and routines from the earliest years?!
Next, this coach is definitely not the first to ask about using the Anti-Boring toolkit with younger students. I’ve been asked this question umpteen times before, so it’s time for me to answer it publicly!
The short version is -- YES!!! The Toolkit is absolutely adaptable to younger students.
In fact, when I originally designed the Anti-Boring mini-lectures, I created the video series intentionally for 6th grade and up. I had been a middle school teacher back in the day, and so it seemed right to talk directly to that age group.
However, I’ve gotten word through the years that many of the Anti-Boring Certified Coaches who have gone through my training use the mini-lectures with students who are much younger than 6th grade, with only slight adaptations. So let’s explore this topic in more detail.
Even Young Students Can Be Curriculum Designers
One of our fundamental beliefs in the Anti-Boring Learning Lab is that the tenets of good curriculum design are not just relevant for teachers! After all, what is studying if not the act of creating a curriculum to teach yourself information and skills?
And even younger students have to study! How else do they learn their spelling words or their multiplication tables?
This means even younger students deserve to understand (1) what the brain needs in order to learn effectively, and (2) how to design their own study tasks to use their brains most efficiently.
The Anti-Boring Toolkit puts students in the driver’s seat of their own learning by equipping students, and the educators who serve them, with the following:
A set of “mini-lecture” scripts that teach the science of how learning happens (it’s like an “owner’s manual for the brain)
A set of practical learning tools that help students put that science into action in the classroom and when they are doing homework and studying.
An example of one of the “mini-lectures” is what I call “the Anti-Boring Study Cycle,” in which I attempt to consolidate the most important actions the brain needs into a simple 3-step model.
The Anti-Boring Study Cycle
Although there are other “Study Cycles” out there in the world (just Google the phrase if you’d like to see other versions), my Anti-Boring Study Cycle is the simplest I’ve seen.
Sometimes simple means “watered down” or “less impactful,” but that’s not the case here. Instead, “simple” translates to “the least students need to know to get into effective action.”
I call my study cycle “anti-boring” because it focuses on teaching students how not to bore their brains when learning.
Of course, it’s lovely to have teachers who make learning engaging for their students, but not every teacher can entertain every student all the time.
The good news here is that, by learning the Anti-Boring Toolkit, students make learning anti-boring for themselves, no matter their learning circumstances. How?
By learning the “Study Cycle,” taught via a 10-minute mini-lecture educators can deliver to students of all ages.
The best way to learn the Study Cycle is to watch it being taught. To that end, check out our free Student Learning Mini-Course here. You’ll get to watch a video of me teaching the Study Cycle as well as a PDF of instructions to walk you through delivering the Study Cycle to your students.
You’ll notice, as you watch the video, that the Anti-Boring Study Cycle breaks learning down into three steps:
first exposure to new information and skills, which we call “encoding,”
quizzing yourself to see what stuck, in a process known as “retrieval”, and
encoding the information that didn’t stick by relearning it in new, and anti-boring, ways.
If these three steps feel too complex for younger students, they can be simplified in the following way:
first you have to try to put new information and skills “in” to your brain,
then you have to take it “out” to see what stuck and what didn’t,
the stuff that’s hard to remember, often needs to go “in” again, but in a new way.
When it’s taught well, even the youngest students understand this process, and can learn how to apply it to their learning and their lives.
How to Teach the Study Cycle to Younger Students
This brings up another point, though. What does it mean to teach the Study Cycle “well?”
If you watched the above video, you’ll also note that we use a white board and a very simple visual model to engrain the concepts into students’ brains.
The Anti-Boring Certified coaches who work with younger students also report teaching the Study Cycle in a variety of other ways:
gestures that show putting information into the brain and taking it out
drawing their own version of the Study Cycle after learning it
making models using clay and/or
creating a velcro version of the study cycle that visualizes information “sticking”
and more!
You might notice, as you read through this list, that any student would enjoy processing their learning in this way — not just younger students!
Sample Coaching Conversation
After coaches have used creative techniques to teach the three steps of the Study Cycle to students, they also make sure to practice using the Study Cycle to learn relevant material. It is this practice that truly helps students transform their own learning.
Here’s a sample coaching conversation that shows one way I might practice applying the Study Cycle to a third grader’s spelling words.
For example, a coach might ask a student, “What’s something that you’re having trouble memorizing right now?”
Let’s say that the students complains about memorizing their spelling words, including the word “scratch.”
After learning the Study Cycle, a follow-up coaching session might sound like this:
Coach: What’s something you’re having trouble memorizing right now?
3rd Grader: I keep on messing up spelling words. On the quiz today I spelled “scratch” wrong, and I just can’t remember how to get it right.
Coach: Nice work noticing your mistakes! The best way to learn is to make lots of mistakes, and then learn how to correct them. You know the Study Cycle I just taught you?
3rd Grader: (Nods their head)
Coach: What’s the first step in learning, according to the Study Cycle?
3rd Grader: You’ve got to put stuff into your brain.
Coach: Right! And how did your teacher originally teach you about spelling the word “scratch”? How did they help you put it into your brain the first time?
3rd Grader: They put the word on a spelling list, and we had to copy it down from the board onto our list.
Coach: Great! But sometimes when we try to put things into our brain, it doesn’t stick the first time. That’s totally normal. According to the Study Cycle, what’s the next thing we need to do to learn anything?
3rd Grader: We’ve got to get it out of our brain.
Coach: Excellent memory. Yes! We need to try to get it out. I know that when you took the quiz earlier today, you got it wrong. But let’s try again without looking at the correct spelling first. Try spelling the word “scratch” on this white board. It’s totally fine if you get it wrong, but just try.
3rd Grader: (writes the word “scrach” on the white board)
Coach: Now let’s compare the word you wrote to the way it’s spelled on your list. What do you notice?
3rd Grader: I did it wrong. I left out the “t.”
Coach: True! So now what does the Study Cycle tell us to do next?
3rd Grader: I need to put it back in my brain in a new way.
Coach: You got it! Do you have any ideas of how you could do that?
3rd Grader: Maybe I could draw a silly picture of the word “scratch” with a humungous T hanging over it, kind of like an umbrella.
Coach: Great! Give that a try on this white board!
As our scene goes on, the student practices drawing the picture of the word with a big “umbrella” as a “T”. Perhaps the coach also tries to draw the word in a silly way, and they compare their pictures. The two of them might move on to explore creative ways to spell other words with which the student struggles, and at the end of the session they might practice retrieving the spelling one more time to see if any of them stuck more after learning it “in a new way.”
Notice in this sample coaching conversation how the student was able to apply the Study Cycle to a real-life learning situation — even though they were only 9 years old.
I’ve found that students are hungry to understand themselves as humans, no matter their age. I strongly encourage all elementary school educators to practice teaching the Study Cycle to your kiddos, and see how it transforms their ability to “think about their own thinking” and then take action accordingly.
Other Mini-Lectures That Can Be Adapted for Younger Students
The Study Cycle is just the first of about seven mini-lectures that break down the science-of-learning for students. The other lectures include:
Neural pathways
The study senses (an alternative to “learning styles”)
Note-taking
Quizzable study tools
Backwards planning
Working memory
The forgetting curve
And more
Each of these mini-lectures can absolutely be adapted for a younger audience. Not all elementary age students will need or want to learn each of these ideas. However, that’s true for older students, as well.
In the Anti-Boring Learning Lab, we train coaches how to roll out the mini-lectures on a “need to know” basis. Rather than teach students all the content up front, we wait until a student has a specific challenge, and then teach the student the least they need to know to address that challenge head on.
I call this the “toolbox” approach. Each educator equips themselves with a toolbox overflowing with strategies, and then practices their ability to choose the right tool to address that student’s challenge. In coaching, we can’t quite anticipate when the student is going to need what tool — but we collect the tools and learn to keep them in our back pocket so we can pull them out just in time.
An academic coach for younger students is going to have a similar toolbox as coaches for older students. However, the way you present the tool will be tweaked to match the student’s developmental level.
I encourage the teachers, tutors and coaches who learn the Anti-Boring Toolkit to personalize each of the tools you teach. This personalization can include simplifying them for a younger audience. But it also can include changing the imagery to better match the cultural or class background of your students, the region in which you live, or your own personality or presentation style.
Opportunities to Collaborate with Other Elementary Educators
Soon in the Anti-Boring Learning Lab, we will be adding interest groups that our members can join. One of these interest groups will be elementary educators.
I’m excited about the collaborations that will occur when educators come together to share their experiments with each other.
If you are curious about joining the Anti-Boring Learning Lab, jump over to this page to find out more. We’d love to have you learn the Anti-Boring Toolkit, and then collaborate with other like-minded educators about how to tweak the tools to share them with your preferred audience, including (but not limited to) elementary students.