Teaching for Transfer: When Learning Survives a Change in Context

Summary for Educators

Based on Brett Benson

“Teaching for Transfer, Not Just Recall: Teaching Students to See the Underlying Patterns Beneath What They’ve Learned”

SoL in the Wild | September 5, 2026 (SoL in the Wild)

Benson, a seventh-grade World Studies teacher, describes how redesigning one assessment changed the way he thought about an entire unit: instead of asking whether students could remember what he taught, he wanted to know whether they could use what they learned when the situation changed.

Read the original article

🔵 THE BIG IDEA

Much of what schools call learning may actually be successful remembering. Students study the Sahara, take a test about the Sahara, and demonstrate that they remember facts about the Sahara. But what happens when they encounter a desert they have never studied?

Benson argues that transfer—not recall alone—is a more demanding test of understanding. His students still acquire factual knowledge; transfer cannot happen without something to transfer. But instruction deliberately progresses from knowledge acquisition to recognizing underlying relationships and finally applying those relationships in unfamiliar settings. (SoL in the Wild)

The crucial shift is from teaching students merely to recognize familiar examples to helping them identify what Benson calls “deep structure patterns”—relationships that remain constant even when the surface details change. Students therefore learn not only what happened but why a particular response makes sense.

That is knowledge capable of traveling.

🔵 KEY TAKEAWAYS FOR EDUCATORS

• Teach knowledge first—but don't stop there. Transfer is not an alternative to content knowledge. Students need facts, vocabulary, examples, and background knowledge before they can reason effectively about unfamiliar situations. (SoL in the Wild)

• Make the underlying patterns visible. Benson explicitly teaches students to recognize relationships between environmental constraints and human responses rather than simply memorizing individual examples.

• Practice transfer before assessing it. An unfamiliar situation should not first appear on the test. Students need guided opportunities to apply familiar principles to unfamiliar examples while teachers can still model, question, clarify, and provide feedback. (SoL in the Wild)

• Teach students to reject plausible wrong answers. Benson intentionally introduces examples that look as though they fit a pattern but do not. Genuine understanding includes knowing when a principle does not apply. (SoL in the Wild)

• Model the thinking—not merely the solution. Teachers should think aloud through unfamiliar problems, including false starts, reconsideration, and rejected possibilities. Students see how expert reasoning actually develops.

• Audit assessments for disguised recall. Ask of every important question: Could a student answer this correctly through memorization without understanding why? If so, consider redesigning it. (SoL in the Wild)

◻️ WHY IT MATTERS

Transfer is one of education's ultimate goals. We do not teach mathematical reasoning so students can solve only problems identical to those on yesterday's worksheet. We do not teach persuasive writing so students can construct an argument only about topics already discussed in class. And we do not teach history or science merely so students can reproduce information on an exam.

We want students to recognize when something they already know can help them understand something they have never encountered before.

Benson's experience also highlights an important curriculum-design principle: if we want students to transfer learning, transfer must be taught—not simply demanded.

His redesign worked backward from the desired performance. Once he decided what students should independently be able to do, he discovered gaps in both his instruction and assessment. (SoL in the Wild)

🟢 LEADERSHIP ACTION STEPS

✓ Examine assessments with teachers and identify the proportion devoted to recall, explanation, application, and transfer.

✓ Ask PLCs to identify the “deep structures” or enduring principles students should recognize beneath individual lessons and examples.

✓ Encourage teachers to introduce unfamiliar examples during instruction rather than saving novelty for the test.

✓ Model transfer during professional learning: demonstrate how an instructional principle learned in one classroom, grade, or subject might apply in another.

✓ Look for evidence during classroom observations that students are being asked not only “What do you know?” but also “Where else might this apply—and why?”

✓ Protect foundational knowledge. Avoid turning “higher-order thinking” into knowledge-free problem solving. Students need a substantial knowledge base from which transfer can occur.

🟡 LEADER REFLECTION

If students perform well when the questions look like what they practiced—but struggle when the context changes—how much have they actually learned?

What would happen if every PLC took one upcoming assessment and asked:

“Which questions tell us what students remember—and which tell us what students can actually do with what they know?”

That distinction could change not only the assessment, but everything that happens before it.

Original Article

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Prepared with the assistance of AI software OpenAI. (2026). ChatGPT (5.2) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com