A science teacher in Hai Phong had one working microscope and thirty-two students. The usual arrangement was a queue: each student looked for thirty seconds while the others waited.
She changed one thing. Instead of looking and moving on, each student had to describe aloud what they saw while the next person listened. The listener then looked and said whether the description matched.
The change cost nothing and the lesson took the same forty minutes. What improved was what the class remembered a week later. Describing something forces you to turn a picture into words, and turning a picture into words requires deciding what matters in it. A student who says only that the cells look like bricks has noticed one thing. A student who has to convince a listener notices three.
The listening half matters too. A person waiting their turn with nothing to do forgets the lesson has started. A person waiting to check somebody else's description is already thinking about what to look for.
The teacher was careful about what she claimed. She had no control group and one term of results. But the idea behind it is well established: explaining something to another person is one of the most reliable ways of finding out whether you understood it, and it costs nothing but the decision to do it.
Vocabulary in this text
- queue /ˈkju/ — a line of people waiting
- instead of /ˌɪnˈstɛd ˈʌv/ — in place of something else
- describe /dɪskɹˈaɪb/ — to say what someone or something is like
- minutes /ˈmɪnəts/ — the written record of what a meeting decided
- improve /ˌɪmpɹˈuv/ — to become better
- require /ɹˌiˈkwaɪɚ/ — to need something
- cell /ˈsɛl/ — the smallest unit of a living thing
- brick /bɹˈɪk/ — a block of baked clay used for building
- notice /ˈnoʊtəs/ — to see or become aware of something
- forget /fɚɡˈɛt/ — to be unable to remember