since a student with a fixed mindset might fear that their limited intellectual capacity means they don't belong in their college or even high school classrooms. But Chapter Seven, re-christened from “Growing” to “Belonging,” now includes other strategies to promote belonging, all of them built upon the theoretical foundation of an asset-based approach to teaching. Too often we view our students through a deficit lens, seeing what they lack and trying to fill it up with our teaching. But, of course, students bring an incredible array of assets into our classrooms, from their knowledge and skills to their diverse life experiences and cultural capital. The 2020 global pandemic brought to the fore the importance of creating a sense of community in our classrooms, and I believe that teaching strategies that help students feel like they belong in our classrooms provide the most effective route to the cultivation of such community.
The major revisions of these two chapters are the most substantial changes you will find in the book. But you'll find plenty of other changes along the way, including a slight re-ordering of the book's chapters, an expansion of the book's research foundation, and the addition of many new small teaching strategies. Chapter Nine, which has been re-named from “Expanding” to “Learning,” provides you with an updated set of resources to continue your own growth as a teacher. I hope that these resources will enable and inspire you to move beyond the models of the book and develop your own small teaching strategies, ones that work for your specific teaching context and your unique communities of students.
I considered one final change to the book that I ultimately did not adopt. The concept of small teaching, as I explain in the introduction, was first suggested to me by watching two versions of an American sport: professional baseball and amateur softball. For this edition, I thought long and hard about coming up with an alternative way to explain the concept of small teaching for two reasons. First, the book has reached a global audience, and an analogy from an American sport might not resonate with international readers unfamiliar with baseball. This problem was brought to the fore for me as I was speaking with one of the book's translators, who was struggling to find the right way to express the concept for a translated edition. Second, many academics have little interest in sports, and might find the parallels between teaching and baseball less than compelling. I'm not the most passionate sports fan in the world, but I do enjoy watching big games in a few sports and am happy to chat about them with friends and colleagues. One of my friends on the faculty, by contrast, rolls her eyes and heads back to her office anytime the subject of what she calls “sportsball” gets raised in a hallway conversation.
While I don't want to exclude readers like her from connecting with the original conception of small teaching, it can't be denied that observing my daughter's softball games in the summer of 2014, and then watching the World Series games in the fall of 2014 was what helped to transform my journal entry from January 2014 into a fully conceived book. Both experiences demonstrated to me that small changes could have a big impact, and inspired me to see the book through to completion. Thus, you'll still find in the introduction the same explanation of the concept of small teaching that you found in the original, even with its descriptions of “sportsball” games which may have long since faded from memory (unless, of course, you are a fan of the Kansas City Royals). Readers of the first edition might notice, however, that the opening story of the “Prediction” chapter has been changed, and no longer describes the “learning” impact of informal wagering on sports games. I thought the story of my wife's remote kindergarten class introduced the concept of that chapter just as effectively and placed it more squarely within a teaching and learning context.
From my journal entry through the first edition and into this second edition, the core conviction of this book remains the same: we can improve teaching and learning by attending to the small, everyday decisions we make as we design our courses, engage in classroom practice, and communicate with students. I have seen the power of this approach to transform the lives of both teachers and students, and invite you to join me in the work.
Introduction Small Teaching
“Much of what we've been doing as teachers and students isn't serving us well, but some comparatively simple changes could make a big difference.” (p. 9)
Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning
In October 2014, fans of Major League Baseball relished the sight of the plucky Kansas City Royals fighting their way to the final game of the World Series. What captured the attention of so many baseball enthusiasts was that the key to the Royals' success throughout the season had been an old-fashioned approach to the sport called small ball. Rather than relying on muscle-bound sluggers hitting grand slams, the Royals instead utilized the simple, incremental strategies that enable baseball teams to move runners from one base to the next and keep the other team from scoring: bunting, stealing bases, hitting sacrifice fly balls, and playing solid defense. These unglamorous achievements on the field don't win baseball players the accolades that they might earn from smashing game-winning home runs, but teams who play small ball in concerted and effective ways don't need those kinds of dramatic heroics. Indeed, some baseball analysts pointed to the success of the Royals, who achieved their victories on a relatively small budget, as evidence of the future of baseball. “The Royals have found a winning formula,” wrote Sean Gregory, the baseball columnist for Time magazine. “These days, if you swing for the fences, you're more likely than ever to strike out. So just put the ball in play…and take your chances with your legs. Steal bases to eke out those diminishing runs. Small-ball is cheap and effective. This is where the game is headed” (Gregory 2014b). As the article notes, the wonderful feature of small ball is that it's both effective and inexpensive—and hence available to everyone. Even teams that spend money on those high-profile sluggers can still play small ball—as was evidenced in the final game of the World Series, in which the bigger-budget San Francisco Giants snatched victory from the Royals by beating them at their own game and scoring two of their three runs on unglamorous sacrifice fly balls (Gregory 2014a).
My own acquaintance with small ball comes from a less dramatic story than the one the Kansas City Royals engineered in fall 2014. I have five children and live in a New England city where love for baseball runs deep. For 15 years I sat on uncomfortable metal benches for 2 months every late spring and watched my children play various levels of softball and baseball in our city leagues. The particular league to which my children belonged was a long-standing one; many of the coaches played in the league when they were children. These coaches frequently took the games quite seriously, perhaps in an effort to recapture the glory of their childhood playing days. As a result, they scouted and selected the best players every year who were coming up from the younger leagues and thus left newer or inexperienced coaches to draft their teams from a much depleted talent pool. Yet, despite the advantages that these more aggressive coaches gained in recruiting the top players, they didn't always win. In little league as in the major leagues, the coaches who seemed to have the greatest success were the ones who focused their attention—and the attention of their players—on mastering all of the small elements of the game. Small-ball coaches would signal their base runners to steal when the fielders were haphazardly tossing the ball around the infield, or they would ensure that someone was always backing up a throw to first base in case the first-base person dropped the ball. Since nobody was bashing home runs out of the park on a softball team of 8-year-olds, small ball represented the only guaranteed strategy for long-term success in these youth leagues.
The idea for this book began to percolate at the end of one of those long softball seasons, as I was preparing for a round of fall visits to other college campuses in support of my previous book, Cheating Lessons, which was focused on how we can reduce cheating and promote academic integrity in higher education. When I first began giving presentations on this topic, I relished the chance to speak to my fellow college and university teachers about major transformations they could make to their courses. Unfortunately, I was usually making such visits during the middle of a semester, which meant that workshop
