How to study for an education degree: theorists, readings and lesson plans

If you're looking up how to study for an education degree, here's the short answer: you learn it by comparing theorists and then putting them to work. You'll read a lot about how people learn (Piaget, Vygotsky, Ausubel, Bruner, behaviorism), about schools as institutions and about how teaching actually happens, and almost everything you'll be graded on asks you to set those ideas side by side or apply them to a real lesson, a real school or a case.

What makes education tricky is that the concepts sound alike and the theorists keep quoting each other. Pedagogy and instruction, meaningful learning and discovery learning, curriculum and syllabus: read in one go they feel like synonyms, and the exam asks for exactly the difference. Lectures tend to be slide decks full of diagrams and comparison charts, the reading list is long, and grades come from essay exams, research papers, oral exams and assignments where you plan or analyze an actual lesson.

It's not my major: I study computer engineering. What follows comes from looking closely at how education is studied and assessed, and from what we know about how learning works. It overlaps a lot with how to study psychology, since the learning theories come from there and you read them the same way.

The learning theorists, in one chart with the same rows

The first stretch of the degree is packed with theories of learning, and each one comes with a name, a vocabulary and an idea of what the teacher is for. Studying them one loose note card at a time is how they end up blended together on the exam.

Build a single chart with one theorist per column and the same rows every time:

• What learning is, according to them.
• What the learner does. Receives, constructs, discovers, imitates.
• What the teacher does. Reinforces, presents, guides, sets up a puzzle.
• The signature concept. Stages for Piaget, the zone of proximal development for Vygotsky, meaningful learning and prior knowledge for Ausubel, discovery and scaffolding for Bruner, reinforcement for behaviorism.
• A classroom scene where you'd see that theory at work.
• The critique the other theorists make of it.

The chart forces you to say what each theorist would say about the same thing. A prompt like "compare Piaget's and Vygotsky's views on development" turns into reading two columns row by row and writing down where they agree and where they don't.

Terms that look alike, each with its difference

Beyond the theorists, the field has its own vocabulary, and it's easy to mix up. Make one card per term with three lines:

1. Your professor's definition, in your own words.
2. How it differs from the term it's most often confused with.
3. An example from a school you know. Yours, a sibling's, a class you sat through.

Pedagogy and instruction are the classic pair: pedagogy thinks about education as a whole, while instruction (what some programs call didactics) deals with how a specific thing gets taught. Curriculum and syllabus are another: the syllabus is the document, and the curriculum also includes what actually happens in the classroom, even the parts nobody wrote down. Every course draws these lines a little differently, so the first line of the card always carries your course's version.

One good example of your own beats three definitions. If, for "meaningful learning", you can describe a class where something new clicked because it hooked onto something you already knew, you've got it.

The readings: start with a question, finish with the book closed

In history of education, sociology of education or education policy, the reading list matters more than the slides. These are long chapters, sometimes photocopied, and it's easy to finish one with no idea what it said.

Before you start each reading, write down the question it answers. With that question at the top:

1. Read the introduction and the conclusion first. That's usually where the argument lives.
2. Read the rest looking for the reasons that hold the argument up, not every detail.
3. Close it and write five lines: what it claims, who it's arguing with, and one example.
4. Only then open it again to fix what you missed.

Step three is the one that matters. A large review of study techniques found that testing yourself and spreading study over time pay off far more than rereading or highlighting, and in a degree that's mostly reading, rereading is the everyday temptation. The same goes for sociology of education texts, which I go through in how to study sociology.

Plan a lesson with the theory next to it

The most distinctive assignments in the degree ask you to design or analyze a lesson: a lesson plan with objectives, activities and assessment, a write-up of a class you observed, a proposal for a school. That's where you can tell who memorized the theorists and who can use them.

A drill to get ready before the assignment arrives, half an hour once a week:

1. Pick a small topic from a school subject: photosynthesis, fractions, a war.
2. Write one objective in a single sentence, stating what students will be able to do by the end.
3. Design one activity and one way to check whether they learned it.
4. Pick a theorist from your chart and write five lines on why that activity makes sense from their point of view.
5. Now do it from another theorist's view. Would the activity change? How?

Every lesson plan you build is a case of your own for the exam. When a question asks for an example, you have one you actually made, and step five is exactly what comparison questions ask for.

Practicum and classroom observation

Many programs include fieldwork or a practicum where you go into a school or another setting, observe classes and keep a log. The common mistake is writing down everything that happens with no filter and then having no idea what to do with it.

What works is splitting the page into two columns from day one. In one, what you saw, without judgment: what the teacher said, what students did, how long each part took. In the other, which concept or theorist it makes you think of. At the end of each observation, one question the class left you with. When the report is due, the theory is already tied to what you saw, and you don't have to invent the connection at the last minute.

You're studying how people learn: use it on yourself

This degree has an advantage almost no other has: what you study tells you how to study. Ausubel says new things are learned by hooking onto what you already know, and Vygotsky says we learn with others. You can do both with your own studying.

• Start every topic with what you already know. Before reading, write two lines on what you associate with that theorist.
• Study in a group to explain, not to read together. Each person explains one theorist out loud and the others ask what the professor would ask. It pays off most for oral exams.
• Spread your studying out. A short weekly pass over your theorist chart beats a marathon at the end: spaced study is remembered better than crammed study.
• Practice essay answers. With past exams, write the answer without looking and then check it against your cards. It's the same practice I describe in how to study history, another field graded mostly in writing.

If you can explain it without looking, you really know it. If you can't, you know exactly which row of the chart to go back to.

Lecture slides, without losing the diagrams

Education slides tend to be diagrams, comparison charts and stray quotes from theorists. In class the professor explained what each arrow meant or why a quote was there; in the PDF you're left with the bare diagram.

For that part you can use Filmina, a web app that explains your lecture slides out loud, one at a time, pointing at the part it's talking about. It also reads each slide as an image, so it explains a diagram or a chart along with the text. If something doesn't click, you ask Mina, the chat that answers from your own material ("in this lecture, how is scaffolding different from the zone of proximal development?"), and then you can practice with questions built from that same lecture. It has limits: it needs an internet connection, the free plan caps your minutes, and with a scanned photocopy it has to recognize the text from the image, which can trip over small print. The theorist chart and the lesson plans are still yours to build.

Frequently asked questions

What do you study in an education degree?

Foundations of education, learning theories and educational psychology, teaching methods, history and sociology of education, education policy, curriculum design, assessment and research methods. Depending on the program, there's also a practicum or student teaching in schools or other settings.

Is an education degree hard?

There's no heavy math, but there's a lot of reading and many concepts sound alike. The hardest part is moving from repeating what a theorist says to using it to analyze or design a real lesson.

What is the difference between Piaget and Vygotsky?

Both think learners build their own knowledge. Piaget puts the weight on individual development through stages, while Vygotsky puts it on interaction with other people and culture, with the zone of proximal development as his central idea.

What is the difference between pedagogy and curriculum?

Pedagogy is about how teaching and learning happen: methods, the teacher's role, the relationship with students. Curriculum is about what gets taught: the content, its order and its goals, plus what students end up learning in practice.