Welcome to Edgy Tips, a side project of the Cult of Pedagogy podcast where I share one quick idea to make your teaching better.

This is Jennifer Gonzalez and I am your host.

This Edgy Tip is sponsored by Pear Deck.

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Today's Edgy Tip is Add Novelty to Boost Learning.

There's a scene in the movie Dead Poet Society. If you've never seen it, just know that it's a classic teaching movie and you absolutely should.

Where Robin Williams' character, Mr. Keating, has his students line up on a soccer field and take turns reciting lines from Walt Whitman's poem A Song of Joyce.

It's one of many times in the movie when Keating does something in the classroom that might be written off as mere eccentricity, like standing on desks or tearing pages out of books.

But looking at it from a pedagogical standpoint, what he's doing is using novelty as an instructional device.

And it's backed by solid research. Any time you add some kind of novelty to a learning experience, some new or different ingredient, then what's expected, you are making it more likely that your students will remember the thing they were supposed to learn from that lesson, even if the novel ingredient has nothing to do with the learning target.

Here's a simple explanation of how this works in the brain.

The hippocampus is the part of your brain responsible for learning and memory. When you encounter some kind of novel stimulus, dopamine is released in the hippocampus, which helps make that part of the brain more plastic and ready to form new synapses.

And if you go to the written version of this edu-tip, there's a list of some research that backs this up.

So this is just another thing you can add to your bag of tricks if it isn't there already. If you want a boost learning in a lesson, add a little bit of novelty to make it memorable.

Here are a couple of ways you can change things up to add novelty. One category is location.

Stand in a different part of your classroom. On top of a chair, have students come out into the hallway, hold a lesson in the cafeteria, out on the playground, under a tree, change the lighting in your classroom, move all the desks to the perimeter, something different about the location.

You could change the messenger, have a student deliver part of your lesson, invite a guest speaker, ask another teacher to join your class for a brief demonstration, or put students into pairs or groups for part of the lesson.

This last one isn't all that novel of an idea, but the experience of working on a lesson with a peer can still offer more novelty than all teacher-directed instruction.

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