Teach Students to Memorize Sets of Knowns

Dear colleague,

The term “sets of knowns” comes from our colleague Tammy Elser, who works as a professor and consultant in western Montana. Tammy has taught teachers for decades on Montana’s 1999 Indian Education for All (IEFA) Act, which requires state educators to incorporate Native American education across the curricula. Tammy likes to tell the story of one of the first things she does with teachers during an IEFA workshop: She asks them to fill out a blank map of Montana’s eight tribal nations, twelve tribes, and seven reservations.

This is an eye-opening experience for teachers, as many cannot complete the map to even 50 percent accuracy. Tammy then asks them to consider if it’s likely they’ll provide a quality Native American education for all if they cannot locate and name Montana’s main groups of indigenous peoples.

This can also be the case for our students. How do we expect them to create complex thoughts, experience intellectual breakthroughs, or even gain basic comprehension of course concepts if we’ve not gifted them with a chance to commit foundational knowledge to memory? What I recommend for remedying this is to first identify foundational sets of knowns for your subject area, then guide your students to memorize these over time.

Here are some examples of sets of knowns by content area:

• For writing, rules for comma usage in Doug Stark’s Mechanics Instruction That Sticks
• For world history, dates of significant events or geographic locations important to a given time period
• For U.S. history, questions from the U.S. citizenship test or dates and locations significant to U.S. history
• For a course in computer applications, keyboard shortcuts that make working on a computer more efficient

My old boss Anne Kostus used to call these kinds of things our “Jay Leno lists” as a reference to those old bits where Jay Leno would walk the streets of New York City asking random passersby questions about basic disciplinary knowledge.

So how do I teach my students to memorize sets of knowns? In my history classes, I want my students to memorize a handful of “must-know dates.” My ninth-grade AP world history students memorize about 120 of them; my ninth-grade general world history students learn about 70.

Here’s a sampling from our unit on Revolutions of the Long Nineteenth Century:

• 1776—American Declaration of Independence + Adam Smith writes Wealth of Nations
• 1791—Olympe de Gouges' Declaration of the Rights of Women
• 1804—Haitian Revolution
• 1815—Congress of Vienna (Europe’s “balance of power” established)
• 1848—Marx and Engles publish The Communist Manifesto
• 1839—First Opium War in China (sign of declining Qing dominance)
• 1861—End of serfdom in Russia
• 1863—Emancipation Proclamation in USA

Near the start of the school year, before I give my students their first list like this, I sometimes have them write a one-hundred-word quick warm-up on the following prompts:

• Are you the kind of person who can memorize a list of dates?
• How do you know?
• What kinds of things in your life do you memorize, and how do you do that?

We do some Pair-Share after kids have written for five minutes, and then I say, “Okay, get out a few sheets of blank scrap paper.” I then lead them in the following steps:

• Step One: “Write down the list on the projector screen in its entirety.” (I limit this initial list to five dates/events.) “In a minute, I’m going to have you write these from memory.” (Student scoffing ensues.)
• Step Two: “Cover up your list, and now write that list of dates from memory.” (I black out the projector at this point.) “Write down every fragment that you can remember—every bit of numbers, every bit of event description. It’s okay to be wrong—get as much down as you can.” (I give one to two minutes here, and I’m circulating the room to monitor how they’re doing.)
• Step Three: “Get out your initial list, the one we copied from the projector screen. Let’s call this List 1. I want you to use List 1 to correct List 2. Give yourself a score out of ten—one point for every correct date, and one point for every correct event description. And then I want you to make List 2 perfect, just like List 1. Cross things out, erase, use arrows, but make List 2 perfect. That’s important.”
• Step Four: “Cover up Lists 1 and 2 and, once again, write the list from memory.” (I again black out the screen.) “This will be List 3.”
• Step Five: “Okay. Get out Lists 1 and 2 and use them to correct List 3. Again, give yourself a score, and again, make List 3 perfect, like Lists 1 and 2. How many people improved their score from List 2 to List 3?” (At this point, almost all hands go up.)
• Step Six: “Okay, you get the idea. I want you to do it one more time, even if you just got a perfect score with List 3. Cover up Lists 1-3, and create a fourth and final list.”
• Step Seven: “Correct, score, and make List 4 perfect.”
• Step Eight: “Back in the warm-ups section of your notebooks, answer these questions afresh in writing:
  • Are you the kind of person who can memorize dates?
  • What do you do to memorize information like this?
  • How long does it take?
  • How hard is it?”

I typically end this with a chance for kids to share what they learned from the experience, and as they do this, I punctuate their remarks with my own comments and arguments on why memorizing dates—and memorization in general—matters.

So, what’s going on in this simple, fifteen-minute activity?

First of all, this date memorization stuff is one pillar of the year-long feast of knowledge we’re seeking to enjoy together. I want to help all my students learn as much as they can while they’re with me. Knowledge is inextricable from all the other things I want for them. It doesn’t matter that there’s Google—I want it in their brains, and I want to show them that there’s a lot of unadvertised joy in this old-fashioned idea of building knowledge. This is why knowledge is one of the six things I address in These 6 Things: How to Focus Your Teaching on What Matters Most.

Also, I’m adding bricks to the Five Key Beliefs I want all my kids to hold while they’re in my room.

• Credibility: The kids now know that I’m a teacher who can help them do things they didn’t think they could do, and I can do it fairly quickly. I do more than say, “Work harder, punk.” I teach them.
• Value: I’m planting seeds for why memorization matters. My arguments for the Value of memorization are one track toward helping them value this work.
• Effort: I’m showing the kids that rightly applied Effort can quickly make them more knowledgeable about history.
• Efficacy: By limiting the list to five dates and explicitly guiding them in the memorization process, I’m proving that success is possible.
• Belonging: Especially with the opening and closing writing exercises, I’m helping my kids to see themselves as the kinds of people who can do the work I’ll ask them to do.

Just Don’t Forget This

Memorizing sets of knowns is really only effective (and is so much easier) when the knowledge is meaningful. If your sets of knowns aren’t marinated in meaningful practice, then they won’t stick. (I unpack this cognitive science concept more deeply in the fully asynchronous Principles of Learning Course.) If I just have the kids memorize dates during one lesson and then never revisit them in subsequent lessons, readings, writings, or discussions, the dates won’t stick and they won’t matter.

Knowledge-building must be meaningful—toward this we must labor constantly.

Teaching right beside you,

DSJR

P.S. The above was excerpted from The Will to Learn, pp. 151-155; it is part of Strategy #5: A Feast of Knowledge (Or: Teach Stuff, Lots).