Being able to watch a graduate student in a course on teaching methods hold up a trading card and talk seriously about Vygotsky is almost calming. The card has a name, a short bio, and an idea that was quoted. The back of it has a list of important contributions to learning theory instead of batting averages, making it look a bit like a baseball card. It’s not normal. It also seems to be working.
Theory trading cards, which can be real or digital cards that summarize the ideas and frameworks of major educational theorists, are starting to show up in programs across the country that prepare people to become teachers. The idea hasn’t been accepted by everyone yet, and it’s not a big national project. However, the slow spread of this view points to something important that needs to be noticed.
It is notoriously hard to get students to understand theory. Any education professor will tell you that one of the hardest parts of the job is getting a 22-year-old college student to understand the ideas of Dewey, Piaget, Bloom, or Freire and then use those ideas in a real classroom. The ideas aren’t really hard. They are, however, vague enough that it’s easy to remember them, but also easy to forget when a student teacher is in front of thirty kids.
It looks like cards help make those ideas real, at least in some ways. University research has shown that abstract ideas tend to settle differently when students can hold something, sort it, compare it, and then come back to it. Sticker cards were used to teach the periodic table in one study, and the level of student engagement surprised even the researchers. Students finished their work early and worked together without being told to. There is no magic in the mechanism. It’s more like what elementary school teachers have known for a long time: manipulatives, which are real things you can touch and move, make ideas that aren’t visible clear.
It’s important to note that this isn’t a new tendency in education in general. Teachers in grades K–12 have been known to use trading cards as teaching aids for many years, in history classes, science units, and even reading programs. A PBS report from earlier this year showed that elementary school students were interested in reading by giving them cards to collect. Now, the question is whether that same instinct can make its way up to higher education, and more specifically, to the training of teachers.
It makes sense in a very nice way. If people who train teachers want future teachers to believe in active learning, working together, and getting students involved, wouldn’t it be best to teach them that way? In a team-based quiz, you can give someone a card and ask them to defend a theorist’s position. This is different from what you can do with a lecture slide. It makes you invest a little while. What does the student have in their hand? There is some competition. People are responsible to each other.
Adam Epstein, a law professor at Central Michigan University, wrote about a similar idea many years ago in his book called “The Trading Card Effect.” In it, he talks about how using sports cards as rewards during end-of-semester quizzes can help keep students’ attention and help them learn during a time of the school year when attendance and focus tend to drop. His results were simple but consistent: students did respond. The action—something real and theirs—was more important than he thought.
It’s still not clear if theory trading cards can bring the same energy to the specific and hard work of preparing teachers. The anecdotal evidence is a good sign. The research base is still getting caught up. It’s hard not to notice, though, that the teachers who are most interested in this method are usually the ones who really believe that what you teach is one and the same thing. In this way, it’s not a gimmick to use an active, collectible, discussion-driven tool to teach theories about active, collectible, discussion-driven learning. It could be the point.
