• Up front, explain to your students what transfer is and what its role is in their learning. We found students understand and find the ideas behind transfer accessible and acceptable. Explaining the psychology and purpose of transfer helped cue students into what we were actually asking them to do as learners.

• We provided lots of explanations and models in our teaching. Many of the models we provided stemmed from the adult interactions we had as we team taught. Frequently, we’d hold think-aloud process discussions in front of the class. It seemed to be a real kick for the 5th graders to watch how three or four adults work together and figure things out.

• We found that using a project-based approach to learning lends itself to teaching for transfer. By nature, project-based learning tends to draw on several disciplines and skills. Identifying and explaining the connections across the disciplines in a project-based context seemed to be easier for students than other instructional approaches.

• Our fifth graders tended to be transfer "huggers" rather than "bridgeres" when it came to making connections across the arts, at least at first. Students did not tend to make wonderfully insightful connections between the disciplines. So we often had to be careful to gear our instruction toward more “hugging” types of lessons.
See the "Teaching for Transfer Tip Sheet".

• We found that asking students to reason through the learning connections they made across the arts goes along way toward deepening their understanding overall. We found that students get pretty good at making connections, but we also found that often when asked to explain the connection, students’ understandings fell apart. One direct way to assess the depth of the connections kids make is just ask the kids to explain them.

Read about the project's success stories.

© Rochester Memorial Elementary School. Old Rochester Regional School Department. Rochester, MA 1999.
 

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