Repetition in Learning is the Key to Success

Have you ever caught yourself asking to have something repeated because you “spaced” the first, maybe even the second time you heard it? I know I have. We don’t mean to do these things, but sometimes we just aren’t engaged. Or we have too many other things on our minds. Students are no different. They all have a ton of things zooming through their minds at any given moment. Some may seem more trivial than others, but they exist nonetheless. For this and many other reasons, repetition is the key to success in the classroom of life.

When teachers are teaching, we can forget that students need to hear the same information several times for it to truly sink in. Even more than that, they need to work with and internalize that information to deeply grasp it. One of my recent reading comprehension lessons, Hunting, incorporates this repetition concept.

Psychologists have explained the importance of taking conscious thought and turning it into subconscious behavior for ages. For example, when were children reading Green Eggs and Ham for the hundredth time, we became so familiar with those core words that we mastered them. The same theory needs to be applied to SEL in the classroom. Social-emotional learning (SEL) is a growing field, most certainly. Yet, it is the opinion of this author that how we approach teaching SEL is vital to its success.

We need to understand that quality over quantity and employing repetition are how students will be reached. SEL is such a vast space that it is easy to get lost trying to teach all the things. As a teacher and trained adolescent developmental counselor, I truly believe that focusing on the five core aspects of SEL, then repeating and having students work with those, is how they’ll master it.

Sadly, teachers are intensely pressured to fit a hundred hours of curriculum into 30 hours. And we wonder why students struggle… Without getting off on a tangent, narrowing our teaching focus to the essentials (from which all other learning stems) and repeating it until students actually reach mastery is how a strong educational foundation will be laid.

That being said, something as simple as a daily reading comprehension activity makes a huge difference. Daily equals repetition. Comprehension equals internalization. It’s as simple as that. Don’t we all tout the importance of reading 15 minutes a day? Why not learn at the same time?

Enjoy the school year!