What Teachers Can Learn from Make It Stick
You watch it happen every week: a class reviews a chapter, highlights the key terms, does a worksheet that walks through examples nearly identical to the ones on the test, and everyone seems to get it. Then the actual test arrives and half the room is lost. That gap is not a mystery and it is not always about effort — it's often because review activities that feel smooth for students are quietly building a shallow kind of familiarity rather than durable understanding, and the class period ends before anyone finds out the difference.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
Spot the classroom fluency trap
A quiet, on-task classroom reviewing notes looks like learning is happening, and a worksheet full of correctly matched vocabulary terms looks like mastery. Both can be fluency illusions: the terms are recognizable on the page in front of them, not retrievable from memory a week later without the page.
A teacher has students highlight key vocabulary and review it in pairs the day before a unit test; the room looks calm and confident, but on the test itself, students can't define the same terms without the word bank in front of them.
This week, replace one review-the-notes activity with a no-notes recall warm-up, and compare how many students can actually produce the answer versus just recognize it.
Build retrieval into the lesson itself, not just the test
Low-stakes quizzing throughout a unit — quick recall questions, a blank map to fill in from memory, a concept explained without notes — does more for long-term retention than another round of guided review, even though students often groan that it feels harder. The struggle to produce the answer is what builds the memory.
A teacher spends the last class before an exam doing a guided review packet where the answers are essentially given away one at a time, and students walk out feeling ready, only to underperform because they never had to produce anything from memory under exam-like conditions.
Add one ungraded retrieval quiz — five recall questions, no notes — at the start of class at least twice this week, even mid-unit.
Space topics across the term and interleave problem types
A unit taught in one dense block and then never revisited fades fast, while the same content touched again briefly weeks later sticks far longer. Similarly, a worksheet full of twenty of the same problem type teaches students to pattern-match rather than to actually decide which method applies — mixing problem types forces that decision every time, which is closer to what a real test, and real life, demands.
A math teacher blocks an entire week on one technique with twenty nearly identical practice problems, students breeze through it, and then can't tell which technique to use once it's mixed in with others on the cumulative exam.
On your next practice set, deliberately mix in two or three problem types from earlier units alongside the current one, instead of grouping by type.
Connect new material to what students already know
Material sticks best when students are asked to link it explicitly to something they already understand — a new formula to a real-world example they've lived through, a historical event to a pattern they've seen elsewhere — rather than receiving it as an isolated fact to memorize. When a student gets something wrong, treat the error as diagnostic information about their thinking, not just a mark to correct.
Interleaving problem types and spacing review both slow down how much new content you can cover in a given week, which can feel risky against a pacing guide. A practical compromise is to protect five to ten minutes per class for mixed, low-stakes retrieval rather than restructuring the whole calendar at once.
Name one thing, honestly
Which unit do your students consistently seem to "get" in class but struggle with weeks later, and what does your review of that unit actually look like?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
On your next practice set, deliberately mix in two or three problem types from earlier units alongside the current one, instead of grouping by type.