Developing skills toward mastery

What you can do in the classroom	Examples
Expose and reinforce component skills	Enlist the help of someone outside your discipline to decompose a complex task. This can help to reveal your blind spots. – those things you may have skipped over assuming that students will ”just know.” Diagnose weak or missing component skills and provide isolated practice for them. This will focus student energies on those parts of a task that most need additional attention.
Build fluency and facilitate integration of skills	Assign exercises that are specifically designed to increase students’ efficiency and automaticity. Be explicit about the level of fluency you expect students to achieve (e.g., “Practice these sorts of problems until you can complete one question in about 10 minutes.”).
Facilitate transfer of skills	Discuss conditions of applicability (e.g., when an equation is relevant, in what situations a concept applies, when a technique can be used). Help students connect what they’ve learned to other contexts. Be explicit when moving from one context to another; don’t assume that students will just see how something translates.

Adapted from How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching (2010, Ambrose et al.)

Download a pdf of all 7 principles, including ideas for classroom implementation.