Making Learning Visible: Reflections from the CCBE's First Learning Lab

Our inaugural session focused on working memory and long-term retention in boys. We began with a simple experiment, attempting to recall information we had just read, but we left with a deeper understanding of how learning actually happens. This spring, we moved beyond theory, bringing the science of memory into our classrooms to see what happens when we turn the "illusion of learning" into real, lasting knowledge.

Both students and teachers often conflate immediate comprehension with long-term mastery. Recognition is relatively easy. With the information in front of us, we can follow it, understand it, and often feel a false sense of confidence that we know it. Recall asks for something different, demanding the retrieval of information without support, and that effort can feel challenging. For many of our students, this becomes reason enough to keep notes, study guides, or examples close at hand.

Yet, as Barbara Oakley and her colleagues explain in Uncommon Sense Teaching, this “desirable difficulty” is not a sign that learning hasn’t happened; in fact, it is an essential part of the process. The effort involved in retrieving information strengthens memory, helping move knowledge from short-term to long-term memory and making it more accessible in the future.

Unlike traditional professional learning, the Learning Lab model asked faculty to take this knowledge back to their classrooms and incorporate one small, intentional retrieval strategy into their teaching. The goal was not to evaluate the strategy itself, but simply to observe what happened when retrieval was used intentionally. A few weeks later, we reconvened to share our observations. Across divisions and disciplines, teachers reported that intentional retrieval had made learning more visible.

Several teachers used the Brain Dump strategy, and both teachers and students were surprised by what they knew. Adding an element of competition further pushed students to dig deeper and build off each other's knowledge. Similarly, discussions following retrieval activities were richer, and partner quizzing was more effective because students had more to work with and could easily identify their knowledge gaps. In addition, when the science of memory was explained to students before using retrieval activities, students became more engaged because they understood the purpose and the 'why' behind what, from their perspective, would have otherwise been simple, perhaps unnecessary tasks.

Intentional use of retrieval in the classroom didn’t just reveal what the students did know; it, more importantly, highlighted what they didn’t. In addition, the use of retrieval before an assessment revealed gaps in understanding that would otherwise have remained hidden, prompting teachers to intentionally build retrieval into future unit and lesson plans. Retrieval revealed that concepts assumed to be secure and firmly embedded in long-term memory often were not. Just because the material had been covered thoroughly and explained clearly in multiple ways did not mean that long-term memories had been formed. Having already experienced the illusion of learning themselves in the first phase of the Learning Lab, teachers were now seeing the same phenomenon in their classrooms: what felt learned wasn't always learned.

While the focus of the Learning Lab pilot was retrieval practice, the most powerful outcome may have been the professional learning model itself. While the commitment was modest, requiring two early-morning sessions and a period of classroom experimentation, the return was significant. Participants valued the small-group, cross-divisional, and cross-disciplinary opportunity to explore an idea, test it in practice, and learn from one another's experiences. Taking new learning back to the classroom immediately, in a small and practical way, was refreshing. It brought a renewed sense of curiosity to teachers' practice, and the reflective conversations in the final session created opportunities for learning that felt relevant, collaborative, and directly connected to classroom realities.

The pilot began with a simple challenge: write down ten things you remember. It ended with a more important question: How can we create learning experiences that students and teachers can still retrieve long after the lesson is over?