geralt / Pixabay

Transfer of Learning, or Learning Transfer, is an obviously critical part of what we teachers hope to accomplish – we want our students to apply what they are learning with us in new contexts.

I’ve written a lot about it in my books, have an extensive related “Best” list (see The Best Resources For Learning About The Concept Of “Transfer” — Help Me Find More_), have another “Best” list just focused on video examples of it (see The Best Movie Scenes, Stories, & Quotations About “Transfer Of Learning” – Help Me Find More! – unfortunately, some great older MacGyver clips have been removed from the Internet), and even created an animated video on the topic for Ed Week (that’s embedded at the bottom of this post).

I’ve begun a new and simple small way to make it more transparent to my students.

As regular readers know, I have my students do a Retrieval Practice Notebook activity as the warm-up to begin each class (see A NEW STRATEGY I’M USING TO PROMOTE RETRIEVAL PRACTICE IN CLASS (STUDENT HAND-OUT INCLUDED) ).

To ‘mix-it-up” a bit, I’ve now given them the option of doing a Transfer of Learning activity twice each week.

Here’s the hand-out explaining the process, and here are two video clips from Finding Nemo that I used to illustrate the concept:

In the first video, he learns what “swimming down” can do and, in the second, he uses that knowledge to save hundreds of other fish:

Let me know your ideas on how I can improve this practice!

Here’s my animated video on learning transfer: