Sitting in Centennial Hall for this year’s Gwinn Lecture series, upper school students heard Dr. Pooja Agarwal and her advice to “Study Smarter, Not Harder.”
Students often feel overwhelmed by the intensity of their classes along with the overall high school experience, so the event aimed to help them find their way through the difficulties that come with this time in their lives.
However, there’s always room to grow in teaching, too—and it seems Dr. Agarwal is helping improve many teachers’ teaching styles.
According to an email from Science Department Chair Dr. Daniel Goduti, “Dr. Agarwal is a professor at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts” who “researches how people learn.”
During the address students learned about “retrieval practices,” among other study strategies. This idea came up time and time again during the lecture as Dr. Agarwal argued how important these practices are for student success.
“Even while she and I were walking around the school, [students] stopped her to talk about it.”
dr. daniel goduti
Students seemed to be impacted by Dr. Agarwal’s message. “I had a few students come in and ask about whether they can contact Dr. Agarwal to do research,” Dr. Goduti said.
Fifth Former Henry Galia found the lecture to be worthwhile. He thinks that “for some kids, it was really helpful.”
Galia thought that one particular point that Dr. Agarwal made resonated with him. He explained that he is usually “a crammer, and it does work,” but he agrees with Dr. Agarwal that “when you space things you tend to get the best results with long-term memory.”
However, Galia doesn’t completely understand the concept of retrieval. He thinks it’s difficult to “remember the stuff.” However, he does agree that perhaps retrieval is tied into the idea behind “studying it a couple times,” then “teach it to other people,” which is a form of retrieval.
“Even while she and I were walking around the school, [students] stopped her to talk about it,” Dr. Goduti said.
During spring, students spend their time writing their “self-reflective comments,” so it seems the Gwinn Lecture came at a perfect time.
“In some of my students’ self-reflective comments, they sort of talked about how they were going to try some of these things that she did,” Dr. Goduti said.
While Dr. Goduti mentioned that no one said “that changed my life,” he did say, “there’s a little bit of hubbub around it.”
Galia explained that he is incorporating these strategies into his life. He revealed that while he isn’t a procrastinator, he doesn’t always space things out. Fifth Formers write their research paper this time of year, and Galia said that he has been putting this practice of spacing into play, which has resulted in less stress.
Faculty members also learned from the lecture.
“It’s a little bigger narrative present in the fact that the faculty had a book club for her book leading up to it,” Dr. Goduti said. He explained that this book club began in “about the beginning of January” and consisted of “folks in all three divisions.”
Per Dr. Goduti, the faculty had “been reading her books and had a couple of meetings where we’ve been sort of talking about the different practices.”
“There was a lot of excitement to hear her talk,” he said.
While Dr. Agarwal spoke to students about study practices, her message to faculty was more geared toward teaching.
“There are practices that you can do in your classroom and ways to make the classroom teaching work,” Dr. Goduti explained.
Ultimately, teachers are putting Dr. Agarwal’s concepts into practice. According to Dr. Goduti, teachers across all three divisions are “using brain dumps…and doing sort of quick recall tasks.”
Galia noted that he has noticed two teachers who have incorporated these strategies into their assignments. Both teachers assigned a video to watch and then had students answer questions based on the material they retrieved.