The second section of James Lang’s Small Teaching concerns “Understanding,” and “will give you a set of small teaching tools for creating classroom or online experiences that deepen student understanding, improve the ability of your students to analyze and improve their own learning, and become mindful practitioners of a range of cognitive skills.”

The first of the three chapters in this section is called “Connecting,” and its focus is helping students make connections among the major themes and ideas of the course work. It also plays on the reality that when we learn, the neurons in our brain are literally making new connections, so our primary goal is always to help students make connections. Lang points out that you cannot make connections for the students – at least not the ones in their brains. Hence, simply informing them of connections in the material we present is not helpful; helping them to see the connections for themselves is helpful. By way of example, he cites an experiment in which students were given, prior to class, either a full set of notes on the day’s topic or a partial set consisting of “headings and titles of definitions and concepts, which required students to add information to complete the notes.” (Cornelius & Owen-DeSchryver, 2008) The outcome? Students in the two groups did equally well initially, but on the final exam the group given partial notes outperformed the group given complete notes, particularly on the conceptual questions. Lang points out that the partial notes gave students a framework which encouraged them to make the connections themselves, and this is why their conceptual understanding was stronger. This notion – providing a framework which the students complete with their own connections – is one of Lang’s five suggestions for small teaching in this area. The others are: solicit students’ prior knowledge of the material at the outset (which will inform your decisions about what to present and how to present it), have students create concept maps to answer questions or solve problems, offer examples from everyday life (or have students do so when they can), and use the Minute Thesis. This is an exercise of Lang’s devising in which the instructor lists important items from the material (he is an English professor, so his are works they have read and themes they have encountered) and asks a student to circle two that are connected; he then has the whole class conjure up the thesis for a paper on the connection between the circles items and uses the students’ theses as fodder for a conversation.