Uncommon Sense Teaching: Practical Insights in Brain Science to Help Students Learn

I’ll admit it: I was procrastinating reading Uncommon Sense Teaching: Practical Insights in Brain Science to Help Students Learn. I wanted to read it and had committed to writing this review, but I could never seem to find the time in my workday to just sit down and read. Finally, I decided to read for half an hour first thing every morning with my coffee, before—gasp!—even checking my email. Not only did that work to combat the procrastination, it ironically led me to discover that my new morning routine was in line with the authors’ tips for how to help students stop procrastinating (the “Pomodoro technique”): developing a habit of separating tasks into manageable chunks and setting aside short bursts of time to complete the chunks with no distractions, followed by rest to let the learning sink in. And thus, coffee in hand, my review began to take shape. In Uncommon Sense Teaching, Barb Oakley and colleagues (2021) use brain science principles to explain why the evidence-based teaching strategies used by the best teachers are so effective. The pedagogical approaches themselves—notably active learning, collaborative learning, peer instruction, and instructor presence—may not be new to readers who are well versed in the scholarship of teaching and learning, but what makes this book invaluable is the way the authors describe the science of how our brains work when learning. The authors then relate the science to practical strategies that instructors at any level can use to harness that brain function in their teaching to help students master a subject. In this way, the book complements ideas from the excellent 2010 text How Learning Works by Susan Ambrose and others. Engaging, too, is the authors’ combination of neuroscience research with personal anecdotes from years of teaching experience. Two of the book’s authors, Barbara Oakley and Terrence Sejnowski, are the creators of the massive open online course “Learning How to Learn,” which is rated 4.8 stars out of 5 according to almost 75,000 reviews. The third, Beth Rogowski, is both an education professor and a neuroscience researcher. Together, the authors put their substantial combined expertise to use in Uncommon Sense Teaching with treatment of timely topics that include student motivation, knowledge retention, and inclusive teaching. Perhaps most instructional for these times is the chapter on online teaching, which offers concrete tips for delivering an effective and engaging online course using both synchronous and asynchronous learning, something that all of us could have desperately used during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and will likely continue to need in the future. The target audience for this book leans more toward K–12 education than higher education, but college and university instructors can still glean useful teaching and course design strategies. Although it does not have a geography education focus, the material in Oakley and colleagues’ book is applicable to any discipline and will be appreciated by both physical and human geography instructors. There is perhaps an overreliance on detailed analogies to get points across; I tired quickly of the repeated reference to the working memory “octopus” with its anthropomorphized brain counterparts. Outweighing the book’s weaknesses are its many strengths, which include the reiterated emphasis of the “learn it–link it” model to explain how students learn in different contexts; the “now you try” tips that help the reader put each chapter’s concepts into practice (incidentally, also following the learn it–link it model, but for the reader); and the key ideas summarized at the end of each chapter that act as quick reference guides. The overall flow of the book is captivating, and the sheer amount of useful information begets many dog-eared pages and margin notes, if (like me) you’re that sort of reader. Experienced instructors will find themselves with several “aha” moments as they read, either in recognizing why what they do works or why it does not. Inexperienced instructors will gain a wealth of information about how their students learn and how they can best facilitate that learning. If done well, teaching can be both a science and an art. Uncommon sense teaching gives us the knowledge and tools to achieve both.