Bruce Wilkinson, 7 Laws of the Learner: law 4 Retention

The Law of
Retention
Pages 203-233
Thursday 4 November 2010

The essence of the Law of
Retention is in these three
words:
“master the minimum.”
The teacher should enable all
students to enjoy maximum
mastery of the irreducible
minimum

Most teachers teach at too slow a rate.
How can teachers increase their teaching rate?
Wilkinson goes back to the ﬂood and suggests that
when God wanted us to remember something he used
a picture - a rainbow.And there are other methods
God uses which we will learn.
This is not for every time you teach - only when you
have to teach facts or chunks of content.

Retention Mindset
This law looks at how to teach the student the most
information in the shortest amount of time with the
least effort (for the students that is) and for the
greatest retention. It deals with two primary issues of
the teaching-learning relationship.
Effectiveness - is the teacher teaching the right
material?
Efﬁciency - is the teacher teaching in the right
manner?

Deut 6:4-9 4 Hear, O Israel:The LORD our
God, the LORD is one. 5 Love the LORD your
God with all your heart and with all your soul
and with all your strength. 6These
commandments that I give you today are to be
on your hearts. 7Impress them on your
children.Talk about them when you sit at
home and when you walk along the road,
when you lie down and when you get up. 8Tie
them as symbols on your hands and bind them
on your foreheads. 9Write them on the
doorframes of your houses and on your gates.

Do you want to be a great
teacher - ﬁrstly then, love God,
this has a domino effect onto
other things. Secondly, the words
God speaks need to be in our
hearts - the subject is in us.
Then you are ready to get it into
your students hearts - and the
text tells us 4 ways to do that:

1. Teach - formal school-type
teaching
2. Talking - this is fluid, casual two-
way - this opens up difficulties etc.
3. Personal reminder -
nonverbal, maybe something you
wear, a sign which acts as
representation, a token, bowing your
head, fish symbol...
4. Public recognition - the
doorframe of your house, something
public, sign...
The most effective teachers use all 4
of these teaching levels

Retention Model
Teach (formal) Information
Talk (infomral) Incarnation
Personal Reminder Impress
Public Reminder Inﬂuence
Student
Love God
Words
In Heart
Teacher
Love God
(Who he is)
Words
In Heart
(what he
said)

There is a progression in the 4 approaches - moving
from interior to exterior of your life, from formal to
less formal.
Teach and talk are the tutor level - direct and verbal.
Personal and public reminders are testimony - indirect
and nonverbal.
The clear teaching of the Bible is that we are to “pass it
on” in such a way that children, students etc. come to
know and love the truth too

Retention Maxims
The law of retention presents
revolutionary principles and
methods to speed teach
facts.When applied it
achieves amazing results for
those who bravely move
beyond the way it has always
been done - to boldly go...
Here are the 7 principles:

Maxim 1: retention of facts by the
student is the teacher’s responsibility
Teachers have to accept their
responsibility to cause the student
to learn - not to “dump” material
on them. It is not enough that a
student copies down the material
you give and try to learn it later.
The teacher has to give 100% - and
so does the student! Student
success is the ultimate measure of
your teaching ability.

Maxim 2: retention of facts is effective
only after they are understood
It is not enough to present the
material just because it is
required - it needs to be
understood.
Is it right a student hires a
private tutor to help them
understand?
Students retain more
information if they understand it
- teachers are not the delivery
boy, they must help with
understanding.

Maxim 2: retention of facts is effective
only after they are understood
It is not enough to present the
material just because it is
required - it needs to be
understood.
Is it right a student hires a
private tutor to help them
understand?
Students retain more
information if they understand it
- teachers are not the delivery
boy, they must help with
understanding.
Understanding
must always
precede
memorisation

Maxim 3: retention increases as the
student recognises the content’s relevance
Learning goes down if the student
doesn’t think the material has any
relevance.
Irrelevance (lack of relevance)
produces apathy and frustration
Relevance develops motivation and
concentration - this is then focussed
through good delivery and content.

Maxim 4: retention requires the teacher to
focus on the facts that are most important
Not all facts are created equal.
If you teach for memorisation you
have to take responsibility for
saying which part is most
important. Sift the information for
them.
Wilkinson suggests that God does
this in the Bible, heavy content
covering some events and others
are simply skipped over.

The more important a fact - the more attention (time)
it should get.
In business this is reﬂected in the Pareto Principle:The
80:20 principle
80% of a companies proﬁts usually come from about
20% of its products.
80% of a companies business comes from 20% of its
clients
20% of people in a church give 80% of the money
80% of your effort produces 20% of your results

In a class 20% of your content
carries 80% of the real beneﬁt to
the student. Identify that and change
priorities to reﬂect it.
If 80% of your time is spent on 20%
of what you desire to see achieved -
what a waste!
Teachers should identify the facts
required by a student in order to
“know” the subject.This is called
the Irreducible Minimum and should
be understood and mastered by all
students - it would then guarantee
all students success.

In a class 20% of your content
carries 80% of the real beneﬁt to
the student. Identify that and change
priorities to reﬂect it.
If 80% of your time is spent on 20%
of what you desire to see achieved -
what a waste!
Teachers should identify the facts
required by a student in order to
“know” the subject.This is called
the Irreducible Minimum and should
be understood and mastered by all
students - it would then guarantee
all students success.
The average
student panics
before a test
worried about
what a teacher
might ask - and the
teacher acts as if
making the student
guess is important.

Maxim 5: retention arranges the
facts so they are easy to memorise
Do you give your students a big
sack full of information and expect
them to sort through it for
themselves?
What you need to do is effectively
download all the data from you to
the student without any loss of
data.

You can’t just place a book on a students head and say
“memorise” and it is done.The material needs to be
“formatted” for the mind to retain it.
In fact God created our minds with just a few ways to
receive and retain information easily. In the next section
we shall learn 7 primary ways to “reformat” material.
Teachers need to make material easier to memorise -
so they remove the problems and prepare the way for
the students.
Teachers make learning the information as efﬁcient and
easy as possible for the student.

Which is better for a
student?
Give them eggs, ﬂour, butter
etc. and tell them to make it
for themselves?
Give them the cake and tell
them to enjoy eating it?
Both have the same
ingredients - but which will
be enjoyed and digested
more readily?
Why do we act as if
making learning difﬁcult
is to be admired?

Which is better for a
student?
Give them eggs, ﬂour, butter
etc. and tell them to make it
for themselves?
Give them the cake and tell
them to enjoy eating it?
Both have the same
ingredients - but which will
be enjoyed and digested
more readily?

Maxim 6: retention strengthens long
term memory through regular review
God made us with short term and
long term memory capabilities.
What sort of things do you use
short term memory for?
Cramming the night before an exam
retains info for a short while - but
what if the exam is postponed
for a week?
Material needs to be in long term
memory for students to really
“know” it.

Most students do not know
material a month after they study it.
Wilkinson suggests the only way to
get info into long term memory is
to review it. Review and review the
material with the students until they
get it - this then places it in long
term memory.
Covering the material only gets it
into short term memory.
You have to get the core material
into the LTM of all students.

Maxim 7: retention minimises time for
memorisation to maximise time for
application
Whilst it is good to be able
to teach more in less time
- the ideal is to be able to
apply that material into the
life of the students - how
they use it.
If content is of no use why
teach it?

Format content for ease of
understanding and memorisation -
then apply it, show how valuable and
useful it is.The more relevant
material is the more motivated
students will be to learn it.
The law of retention strives to help
teachers to teach more in less time
- to be more effective in teaching
content.This then leaves more time
for application.

Discussion Questions
1. Many teachers tell students of
their poor study habits and lack of
competence.Yet a teacher causes
students to learn.
Shouldn’t the teacher be the one
being corrected?
2. If you have to cram the night
before an exam have you been truly
taught?
3. Is it wrong for a student to ask,
“Do we really need to know this?”

Bruce Wilkinson, 7 Laws of the Learner: law 4 Retention

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Bruce Wilkinson, 7 Laws of the Learner: law 4 Retention